Not a whole lot to say in a preamble for this week. Hoddle, my game world has just finished season six, so I’m preoccupied in getting stuff sorted in good time. For now, I’ll leave you with my fave five ideas threads from the official forums in the last week. Enjoy!

Organising Bookmarks

Original post by Phil Macklam

This was mentioned a while back. Bookmarks are a great way of using singular clicks to get to a destination. You can add a new bookmark by going to the “pages” tab and then “adding bookmark”. As long as you have the bookmarks bar activated you can then see a list of all your bookmarks and can use the F-keys as a further shortcut. There is however only one current way of organising bookmarks, which is deleting them and reassigning them in order.

Phil is speaking for everyone “I would like to be able to drag and drop them to any order I wish to make things tidier and logical across the bottom of my screen.”

Loans

Original post by Nutisbak2

Some more loan thoughts following on from a recent article that covered players training with owning club, must play X times, wage % dependent on performance. There is also a thread on the forums about an option to limit a player from playing against the loaning team.

The loan criticms start typically with “currently I’m listing the players I want to loan on the transfers list because I am so fed up with loaning people and those players not being played” and “On the loans list you have no control on who loans your player”.

The suggestions are to be less restrictive “if people want to pay 100% of the wages for your player then they should be able to” on players that you want to loan but more restrictive in other areas “I do not believe that you should be able to loan out first team players”, which I think would be good for the loan market.

AI youth teams

Original post by Jonas Christensen

Scoring on his debut SIG forum post, this view is shared by many youth managers. More politically titled CPU Teams have the range 1 star rep to 20 star rep and is great to practice against. The issue is that some youth-biased teams would like a range of CPU teams of youth players for testing.

The instruction or advice passed back is “play a lower rep team”. Although this may work, it’s not the same. I’m not really a youth manager but I understand the points made here. It would be nice if each CPU team had different squads like we have. Maybe one for each age group. Maybe when you challenge the CPU team it auto-identifies which squad you’re using and then matches your squads age group? This would also pave the way for youth missions.

I can see a situation where I miss wage auctions and I lose too many of my squad, then having my income capped by the 16 player minimum rule. I can’t bid for anyone because bank vetos. There is no way around this as the bank cannot assume that you will win the wage or transfer auction. Besides coding around the trial system, you’re option is loans. FMLife is not the best.

The idea here is to “have an instant buy option on Free Agents that have been on the list for more than two weeks in [mature] Gameworlds”. This would actually make a massive change to auction tactics. For starters, some may choose to wait until the last minute and attempt to sign someone one second into the players third week. But at least wages are kept low and it’s a risk.

Idea – to help people want to join Existing GW’s

Original post by Little Badger

A few really good thoughts in here about what might appeal to a new GW member. The one that really sticks out to me is the pausing of ageing while the player is locked. I remember that some players used to be locked for two months… so that is two years of FML life wasted.

For gameworld longevity I think this would be a welcome addition. I think I’d also like to see something similar regarding players that are of a high quality but are on the Free Agent list. Maybe even CIFA players could age at a slower rate, although this was met with sharp tongues when I suggested this in the beta forum.

Once again feel free to add your comments below. I’m off to Hoddle now to square away things for season seven!

Written By Rik Stewart A long-standing beta tester for FM Live, Rik is a moderator on GW Hoddle and responsible for their game world blog at hoddlelegends.blogspot.com.

How Does Football Manager Live Compare To Other MMOs? (Part 2)

On The Forums: v1.FREE

On The Forums: If You Can Have One Feature

FML v1.4 Beta Discussion