working on managersim
The game has a unique history and preserving the traditional game matters
It is sometimes confusing and hard to understand how managersim works. We do get requests that are great to include but maybe not suitable to the game as it is. Sometimes it is the technical aspect not being there. Sometimes the fact that it would require a very big effort to make something that in the bigger picture would give very little or change too much and make the game shapeshift into something else. Balancing this is a great fun and responsible task at the same time. We will do our best to keep managersim as much as it used to be, while fixing obvious errors in logic and improve things sometimes more subtle than others.
Realism vs unrealistic fun
Realism is fun in a way but too much realism could also take away the fun factor in games. Football Manager-series are way too realistic and the player entity there has about 250 attributes, while in older games there was just one for skill, one for form and one for morale. Players value was based on the skill most often. Back then it was more about the magic though. Not knowing the whole picture added its "magic" and you were free to interpret freely in your own mind what something was/is/could be.
In Managersim, we talk alot about realism or having too much or too litle of it. One big discussion about realism is also the economy in the game. Some say there is way too much money, usually the big clubs or those sligthly bellow the big clubs. The small clubs complain about them not having a chance to compete at the same terms as the bigger clubs. Money is too little for them, tasks impossible. And that's just it, isn't it?
The big clubs have money, the numbers are perhaps something like in real life or not, but that is not the point. The point is to have an economy where everything is in coherence with the rest of the game world. If the big clubs have too much money, then the small clubs definitelly have too much money. In that part of the game, we prefere to move away from the realism a bit and make it more fun instead. It's no big deal, as long as it can get more fun.
Some managers think that the wages are too high, while income is too low. That is not the general concensus but a personal opinion. The game world economy is the big picture that matters, not a single clubs hardship to survive. That adds realism enough.
The Youth Academy is another interesting subject. Who should produce the best youth players and why?
The Champions League winner of each season has an improved chance of producing a bit better youth players. That has been so for quite a while now. The new development now also gives a random chace to those who work hardest* with their youth academy.
So investment vs output can never be about just money put in the academy, it is simply more complicated than so.
*hardest doesn't necessarily mean putting in the most amount of money. It is more about working with Youth academy and building a tradition of producing players.
Player market is another area where we need to keep the traditional, while improving ways of moving players around. Some say that it should be easier to move players around, as long as someone is paying, they should always want to move. Removing that is removing personality from players, then it is no longer a management simulaion but more of an arcade game. We have to refrain from removing such features. That is the backbone of such games, it keeping them makes sense. When computer controlled teams try buying your players and your players refuse, it may be frustrating but that's an excellent feature. They are more like football players with own will. They refuse, it's your job as manager to handle the situation.
An Unified transferlist is a great idea but bad for managersim, as then it changes things too much. Then you wouldn't need the scouts really. Another example that doesn't work for our game, even if the idea is a good one. One other reason is there are lots of players in eqch country, especially the free players so rendering a list of several thousand players (a global list) would be totally useless.
What we could do here is actually make the lists smaller so you have use for the scouts. Also being able to see the lists of the countries in which you have sent scouts to would also make more sense. The assistant button could be available for all managers one day but then perhaps only to scout/research players in countries where you have sent scouts to. That is more retro and more fun, making scouting a bit harder.
Number of active managers, is a concern to many managers. We can't do much about that, the game when growing naturally by people testing and getting emotionally invested in the game are more likely to stick around, while new users just testing things, when they see there is no short path to success - they will get bored and leave. They can't buy success with coins, it's not their game, it never was. This is chess, people interested in playing ludo will not find chess fun. That's our reality.
More interactivity can't harm the game. Things like managers being informed/aware who is interested in certain player of theirs and he can message the involved clubs if he has certain plans for the player. Game notifying more when staff and players are about to move on, more interactivity between club and manager, staff and manager and most important between managers.
We also have to consider if we should remove the transferlists altogether. So scouts and personel will have bigger impact, and managers will need to get more interactive talking to each other about possible transfers or loans. Maybe clubs could have networks where they can loan players from each other quicker. We just have to look at the bigger picture so we can keep paining on this masterpiece, using the same palette.