Football Manager 2013: New Features Requests
It’s July now and we already start to think about Football Manager 2013, even though we’ll still have a fair amount of time to play FM 2012. And even though Football Manager 2012 was an almost flawless game, there are a lot of improvements that can come with Football Manager 2013, features that we’d like to see and request for the developers. And even though this list below won’t make too much of a difference, I will write it anyway and I want you to feel free to contribute: a list of new Football Manager 2013 features requested by the fans!
So let’s see what new goodies I would like to see implemented in Football Manager 2013:
I will start with the match engine in Football Manager 2013, since I think that here a lot of work has to be invested:
- I want the players to no longer get hit by balls passed to other players when they’re in the way. Although this does happen sometimes in real life, it happens too often in Football Manager and takes away from realism.
- I want the players to REACT based on the position of the ball and not on their instructions. Many times I saw my winger running away from the ball to reach his position on the field, leaving the ball to the opposition or to a player coming from a greater distance. This problem is, in my opinion, one of the biggest in Football Manager and I really hope it will be fixed in FM2013
- Somehow cut the delay when a player is booked (and he has to slowly walk towards the referee) or when a corner is taken or physio comes to see an injured player.
- Reduce the importance pace / acceleration have in the game. It is true that fast players in real life too are better than slower ones, but to have a fast monkey better than Beckham (in his good ol’ days) is not good.
- Shot accuracy fixed. I can’t imagine how Messi would miss in real life 3 out of 5 chances when he’s alone in front of goal, but in Football Manager that usually happens. I really want Football Manager 2013 to fix this problem!
Other features that I would love to see implemented in Football Manager 2013:
- Dynamic club evolution. I can’t stand my club that plays in the top division for 6 years now to have the same rivals from the lowest division. Also, tweak a little bit how things are evolving – take Viitorul Constanta team managed by Johnny on Football Manager Stories, where he’s winning the Romanian Top League for several seasons now and always gets out of the group stages in Champions League, but the club’s reputation is still national.
- Stop keeping Potential Ability so important in the game. A player with top potential ability will perform better than one with lower skills and it doesn’t seem to matter too much what his CURRENT level is. See the story of my custom Toppotential Lowratings player who is now a key player at Real Madrid in my game, despite having some pretty crappy skills.
- Tweak the contract demands asked by players who want to leave a team and want to go to your team, or for players who are forced out: they should or could accept wage cuts in order to get more first team football or simply to leave a club where they’re not wanted.
- Make player/manager relations more powerful and base actions on this (eg. managers who get to hate a specific player will stop playing him just because they don’t get along or players refuse to play or pay bad just to be placed on a transfer list)
- Scouting must be tweaked. Right now, no matter what skill a scout has, they all seem to give you the same results on players and predict their current and potential ability. So this makes no sense in doing your best to have the best scouts, right? Fix this!
- More interaction with the team and board demands. Make some boards want you to play an attacking style of footbal, make other directors ask you to play or keep a specific player – all these things that happen in real life and are not that fun, but have to be dealt with.
- Introduce a feature like board meetings, similar to staff meetings. There you can discuss with the board about the future of the club (building new stadiums, improving training center and so on)
- Change the media interaction completely (or even remove it). I don’t really have a coherent idea on how to fix the media interactions in Football Manager 2013, but this feature seems to be vastly useless right now…
What about you? What new features you’d like the upcoming Football Manager 2013 to have?
Oh my, you’ve only scratched the surface of the little niggles in the match engine. You’ve touched on a couple of my pet peeves, one being players suddenly running away from the ball, or suddenly moving like they’re in quicksand, allowing an opposition player to get there. The unrealistic thing of the ball bouncing off players is poor. It’s amazing just how many times a player in the area is looking in the wrong direction. However poor someones concentration, it almost never happens in real-life.
Further to your comment on the bookings, if a player who was injured needs to be booked or talked to by the referee, he leaves the pitch and the game waits for him to come back on before this happens. In a really bad case I had to wait about 5 minutes for an injured player to be sent off. Thankfully it’s rare, but seriously frustrating, as it can appear like the game is stuck.
Here’s a few more:
There is still the occasional completely erroneous offside call being made. While the assistants do sometimes make errors, a few of the ones that come up are way beyond human error. This particular happens when your teams passes with a fairly high tempo.
Throw-ins after putting the ball out for a player to be treated are terrible. The team putting the ball back in, quite often put far too much pressure on the team, winning it back, when it just wouldn’t happen in real life.
When a preference is set in the set pieces setup, it is ignored. Some of the throw-ins are put to places where there are none of that player’s team mates even close by.
Direct free kicks you already know are awful. It doesn’t seem to matter how good the attributes are for a player, as doesn’t seem to stand much more chance of scoring. In-direct free kicks are also a bit strange at times, the free kick taker preferences sometimes ignored for kicks either side of the area. The free kick attribute also doesn’t seem to make the delivery any better than someone with it really low.
The amount of shirt-pulling feels a bit excessive. Erroneous fouls when a player runs into someone who has already played the ball away happens too much.
Players sometimes inexplicably run a ball out when dribbling without any pressure seems to happen too much. When chasing a ball the opposition has hit players will far too often touch the ball for no sensible reason at all just before it crosses the line.
Players seem to try to play the ball off another for a throw-in with a soft pass/shot far too often, with the other player moving out of the way. In real life they usually thump the ball.
If a player becomes nervous, it often appears to cause the whole team to start playing badly, with poor first touch and their finishing often becomes appalling. Sometimes everyone starts just smashing long clearances, even if they’ve been playing well up until the player became nervous. When this happens, it becomes infectious. Making substitutions will usually get the team playing much better, but it doesn’t feel right that one player can cause this.
When we’re denied a goal through a dubious decision we quite rightly get upset, sometimes causing us to lose concentration at the back, which is annoying, but fair enough. However, when it happens to the AI team, they don’t seem to get angry in the same way, no matter how good or bad a team is.
Far too often, if a player is keeping the ball but not actually moving, he will be stupidly tackled from behind, almost every time committing a foul.
These are some really good suggestions, Ziggy! I indeed forgot completely about the direct free kicks and throw ins, they were initially on my list – but you tend to forget things when you have a mental list
But really if they would fix all these problems that you have outlined in your comment, Football Manager 2013 would indeed look amazing!