Going Old Skool; WW-Formation Remixed

Lately, I've been feeling a bit silly. I was in the mood to experiment, so I figured I might as well go totally old skool and revamp an old tactic into something new for usage within Altobelli. The concept of that is not entirely new, as we did this before in Miller under the inspiring leadership of Richard Claydon, who is known to most under his forum-guise as WWFan.

I've opted for the re-creation of the classic WW formation, but with a twist. The WW was a development of the WM created by the Hungarian coach Marton Bukovi, who turned the 3-2-5 WM, as designed by Herbert Chapman, upside down. The lack of an effective centre-forward in his team necessitated moving this player back to midfield to create a playmaker, with a midfielder instructed to focus on defence. This created a 3-2-1-4 which morphed into a 3-2-3-2 when the team lost possession, and was described by some as a kind of genetic link between the WM and the 4-2-4. This formation was successfully used by fellow countryman Gusztav Sebes in the Hungarian national team of the early 1950s.

That's pretty much what it looks like. I'm still tweaking the player roles and team instructions, but the basic formation gets you the same effects as the basic 4-6-0. You're flooding the centre of midfield with players and ensuring a lot of high-paced short passing. It's generally enough to drive most opponents mad. I'll get back to this with more detailed stuff as soon as I have more.

Youth Development; An Exploit

I've seen people talk about this on the forums and naturally, it wasn't long before some of our more cheeky managers had a chat with us regarding the possibilities in Altobelli. I'm talking about Senior ranked competitions, set up as private competitions which only allow U17 teams to enter.

This is, in my eyes, an exploit because the system is designed so that players ratings are an indication that you are playing them at a level that they can cope with. The higher level means better progression but only if they perform well. By limiting the quality of the opposition and thus ensuring decent ratings, people are exploiting the youth development system.

Don't get me wrong here, there is absolutely nothing wrong with a manager playing their entire youth team in a Senior Ranked competition, as long as other managers are allowed to use their Senior teams in these competitions as well.

In most cases, a youth team entering the fray against senior teams will lose and get bad average ratings so there is no gain and no exploit. If the Youth players are good enough to play well against Seniors (like Arsenal's youths in for example the Carling Cup) then that is fine, but by limiting entries into private competitions to U17's alone, people have found and are exploiting a backdoor of the system.

The issue here is not Youth teams playing in Senior competitions versus senior opponents, but Youth teams getting a good rating in a Senior rank comp because they ONLY play other youth teams. If you are intent on fielding Youth teams in a private competition versus other Youth teams, make the competition reflect the strength of its members by setting it to U21 or U19. These competitions should be YOUTH competitions, not SENIOR ones.

I mentioned this earlier but this acceleration of youth players attributes (and the fact they are playing in "senior" games) clearly affects their Acquisition Fees and as a result their Market Values as well. If their stats go up faster due to them performing well in "senior" games, their ACQ and MV are bound to follow.

It's a way to make youth trading an even more lucrative business. So far, we've already seen multi-million offers for youths and with this stat boosting going on, the prices for youths will become more inflated. This could literally kill off the whole economy.

Imagine if you will the following situation. Spanish midfield maestro Jose Manuel Jurado happens to be one of my players. Valued at 1.4 million, on a 20k a day wage and at only 24, he's a talented and world class midfielder. However, when I see 16 and 17 year olds with an MV of 400k exchange hands for over nearly 2 million, why would I settle for anything less than such a sum for Jurado?

He's obviously five times the player these newgens are, as he is much older, can be fitted into first team instantly and generally has the same wages as these super newgens. If a 400k player can go for 2 million, thus five times his MV, why should I settle for anything under 10 million for Jurado?

Just hypothetically speaking ofcourse. There is no way on this planet that I am selling Jurado, especially not with these inflated prices. Either way, it shows the long term difficulties this exploit might bring.

I've strayed a bit off-topic though and I would like to get back to the original exploit. When I first noticed these competitions popping up, I immediately edited or removed them entirely, whilst asking for an official stance on this subject. Well, I got my official stance for now. Allow me quote a mailing I sent out in Altobelli after receiving word on our official stance.

If it's a senior ranked competition then any team can play in that providing it's not been set to stat pad. If we have proof that it was set for this reason then action can be taken - if we don't have proof but when checking results we see it has happened then we send a written warning saying don't do it again.

It's a grey area with many different parts to it, but playing youths in senior games is not against the rules.

There is a discussion going on about these competitions, as technically they are exploiting the game engine, but until there is no official ruling in place, we have to wait and allow these competitions.

So here's to hoping there's a speedy resolution, either SI coding something new or creating a rule which shows what we are and what we aren't allowed to do.

Combatting A 4-6-0 Formation

As a manager who actually used the dreaded 4-6-0, I also know how to counter it. It really isn't that dangerous as people seem to think and countering it doesn't take that much effort. I usually do the following things when I play against a 4-6-0 formation.

1. Employ a defensive midfielder

I mean a real defensive midfielder, a link between the midfield and defence. This guy is going to man-mark the opposing main AMC and play him out of the match. Or try to anyway. He's supposed to disrupt the attacking build-up from the opposition.

2. Remove all closing down from the centre-backs

The centre-backs are often drawn out of position because they close down an opposing midfielder, leaving the defence prone to a through-ball through the centre. Just have the defenders stand off, the opposing players will run at them and are usually easily muscled off the ball in such cases.

3. Push up the defensive line

Limit the time and space for their AMC's to move in. Basically make it harder for these guys to play their beloved counter-play by either catching them off-side or limiting their passing options by clogging up the centre of the pitch.

4. Harass their defence

When the centre of the pitch is congested, these AMC's rely on a a proper build-up from the back. When you pressure their defenders and mostly their wingbacks into lumping the ball forward, your defenders usually beat their AMC's in the air and win the ball back for you.

Now please note that these tips are not a sure-fire way to beat a 4-6-0. You obviously need a decent tactic of your own and the right players to execute it, but it should help you to get an edge over the opposition. I actually win 80%of my encounters with a 4-6-0 these days.

I Love 1.3

Having been a long term beta tester of FM Live, I've had some time to work with the wizard and the whole system of in-game shouting it brings along. Now initially, I shared your sentiments. I felt that the wizard was unnatural and made FM too easy with all its preset modes. In a way, I even considered they were dumbing the game down for people who didn’t understand the sliders.

After my initial skeptical reaction, I realized I was there to beta test though and I gave the system a chance. It has to be said, it took me a while to get used to it. You have to let go of the slider mentality and various other ideas you’ve been accustomed to using whilst playing FM.

This takes effort, especially when you’re a long-term fan of the series. Once you manage to let go of your old mindset and embrace the new one, you will never want to go back… I’ve always found that the old FM slider-based tactics were understandable but not intuitive. I knew how to set the thing to achieve what I wanted to see, but my intuition always said it should be different.

The wizard offers a more intuitive style of play. It’s not just the creator which does this, but also the system of in-game shouts. No need to tweak sliders, just use the shout that’s available and the game does that for you. It creates more dynamic and intuitive play, in which you don’t have to pause the game for five to ten minutes to think which slider you have to move to where to get the desired effect.

I really think that the shouts like I have seen them in the 1.3 version of FM Live could make the whole game of FM a far better game than it is now, because it actually allows you to translate your real-life views on football to a match without the understanding of theories and translating your ideas into a slider-based approach.

And for those who can’t miss their beloved sliders, you can always overrule the wizard and open the sliders up to manually adjust certain settings, so you really get the best of both worlds. You get a new and intuitive style of play but when needed, you can return to the old-school style to adjust things.

And They Say We Never Do Anything...

Some people I talk to in the Live GameWorlds always wonder what it is we do in the Beta Worlds. They presume I am just in there to learn more about 1.3 so I can rule the Live GameWorld as soon as the new update comes out. That's a nice bonus, but our main objective in Beta is to find bugs and exploits in the new 1.3 patch.

Today's blog covers a nifty but serious bug we found out and had fixed. Since the coding has already changed, I can pretty safely mention it now. There's no longer any risk of people exploiting it and it provides a nice insight into what Beta Testers do (or should be doing anyway...).

In one of the latest builds, SI included the AI teams. Basically, these are bot teams. When there are no human opponents available, you can challenge a bot team, which is always available and will never reject a challenge. This way, you can keep the players fit, try out tactics, give trial players a go and more.

The matches you play don't count towards a players history and injuries don't stick, so they turned out to be ideal sparring partners. Later on, we discovered we could add them to the line-up of our friendly competitions as well. This was pretty nice, as you could add a few weak AI teams to the line-up to ensure everyone got a few easy wins.

This led me to experiment. If I could add them into a normal friendly, what would happen if I would add them into the line-up of a DYM? Would they pay their entry fee like the other teams? Would I be able to make a profit really easy this way?

It turns out I was... With some tweaking, I could make competitions with a 50k entry fee and after playing one match, I could earn upto 250k. That's 200k profit for twenty minutes of work. Ten minutes for setting up the competition, ten minutes for manually playing the game. Not a bad deal eh? Basically free money, as no-one got hurt.

Naturally, I didn't milk this exploit. I ran a few competitions and logged them all with the other moderators, so they could keep an eye on me in case I did decide to milk this little trick. After logging it with the other moderators in the GameWorld, I logged this with the development team.

With the whole logging post, you provide as much details as possible. For instance, how did I find this loophole, which different styles of competitions worked, how bad was the maximum damage it could do, would it be a lucrative exploit, how hard would it be to police this exploit and more things.

It turned out it was a pretty difficult exploit to police, as the Miller GameWorld has over 20 pages of friendly competitions and even when you filter out the free ones, you have 3 pages of money competitions left. Checking all of these competitions for the presence of AI teams is a pretty arduous task, especially in the larger competitions.

Anyway, after two days of policing the friendly competitions, the coding was changed so it's now impossible to start a competition for money when there are AI teams in the line-up. A pretty nice idea basically, you can still spend 10 minutes to set the whole thing up, but you just can't start it anymore.

So yeah, that's the kind of stuff we do in Beta Testing. Remember this next time you slag anyone off for doing testing work. We are helping the development team to make a better game, because I couldn't even begin to imagine the carnage of what would happen if an exploit like this ever came out in a live world.

Class Forum Post

I stumbled across a lovely post on the forums right here. This post should be taken with a grain of salt, but it does show the trouble we have in the new GameWorld of Altobelli. It's not my text, but I do realise many of the issues, as we have some real people complaining about them.

1 - I don't win every game

Im seriously getting annoyed with this, personally I feel my team isn't the best team in the league but really I should be winning all my games. I hate it when we batter a team with long shots and none of them go in, I mean why does the opponents goal keeper suddenly become good, doesn't he know how good my team are???? He should roll over as soon as we shoot! Damn him! Also isn't annoying when the opponent scores? I mean come on my defence is rock solid and I spent ages tinkering with it only to have someone break through and score a goal! He only had chance! OMG!!!111 this never happens in real life.

2 - The transfer markets screwed

Whats going on with the transfer market, we spent the first 3 seasons buying and selling players like there is no tomorrow and now no one is buying, they all want to just better their squads??? Whats up with that? I was quite happy at the start, I managed to get 4 quality players (shame I had to bump their wages so high to get em) but couldnt afford them and had to release them. Now I look in the free agents and theres loads of quality players but with ridiculous wages??? I mean come on why do people ruin the best players by paying them high wages and making them impossible for anyone to afford? I did it for mine but surely not everyone is as stupid as me????

3 - Youth Squads

I wanted to start a youth squad (in the 7th seasons) and i'll be damned all the best players as gone?? How selfish is everyone that they took all the best players?? And when I check the daily influx of new youngsters they arnt all 5 star potential?? OMG SI!!!11 WTF! I finally got a squad together and suffered bad flaw in the ME (see point 1)

4 - Everyone is leaving/the GW is dying

So this guy joined our GW and he was a total noob, but I noticed he had a few quality players, knowing he was a noobie I decided to talk him into taking a few of my crap youngsters off me (I told him they were 5 star potential) in trade for his quality players. While I was chatting to him I also suggested a few DYM comps I was running at the time cause I know easy cash when I saw some. So he found out about this youngsters and was pretty ****ed, I told him to go **** himself and that he shouldn't be so stupid!! He told a mod but I knew they were powerless to stop me ha ha.
So anyway, why are all the teams leaving my GW?? Its stupid!

So what did I do after all this? Of course I did what any normal person would do, I Jumped GW to a newer one.

I quickly got my team together, played a nice 4-6-0 formation and got 2 DC with damn good Jumping/heading. First game I had was against another newbie, we start the game he says "GL have fun" this really ****ed me off! But with my experiance I managed to beat him 4-0 with one of my DC getting a hat trick. He said my formation and tactics were cheating but I explained him they weren't, I pointed him in the direction of a jounalists artical about 4-6-0 and said this proves its not a ME flaw. He soon shut up!

I know unless you sort out all these problems i'm gonna have to jump GW again and again just get some satiffaction from this game!

Come on SI sort it out, its your game and your the one thats made all these mistakes NOT ME!!

So yeah, a good post. The guy was obviously not serious in the issues he raised, as he was obviously taking the piss. He does mention a few serious points though, as these are the main complaints we have been dealing with in-game.

A Change In Strategy

We discussed the hyper inflation within the GameWorld before in an earlier post. To summarize it, wages will explode even further, leading to even more inflation. Your money becomes worthless. The few remaining players on normal wages will be highly sought after because now everyone will try to slash their wages.

This means that the end-of-contract wage auctions are even more critical these days. Players with normal wages will be attracting lots of interest and the desperate managers after them are willing to pay a high wage to get them because of their normal wages. You have to admire the absurdity of that. They are willing to pay a wage five times higher than the current one, because it would still be lower than the wages of some of the players in their team.

Either way, since you can only protect five players with senior contract locks, this means there's roughly six to ten others running around you cannot protect. So basically anyone outside your 5 senior locks and your youth locks goes to a wage auction 24 hours before the end of their contract. This means the highest bidder wins the player, and as compensation you receive their Acquisition Fee (AF) - which is somewhat below the market rate you could get for the player by selling him.

Wage auctions are a thing you want to prevent. You don't want your player to go into a wage auction, because this will most likely drive his price up. To prevent this from happening, you forge an alliance to circumvent this whole problem. There are other managers out there with a similar problem to your own. Their squads might get ravaged by the wage auctions as well. Use that knowledge.

Offer these managers a sort of partnership. Swap players. For example, you could swap your centre-back with an expiring contract for theirs, who is in a similar situation, possibly with some money to make up for the difference in Market Value. This way, both of you keep a good defender on decent wages, without the hassle of a wage auction.

A Throw-In Tip

I received a little in-game message through the mailing lists which I think everyone who reads this blog might appreciate. I'm not going to hog the credit on this one, so honourable mentions for Rui Pintos Xutos and Diogo Martins for their initiative of sharing this.

It's basically a sort of Rory Delap style of tactic, where you have one long throw cannon and a lot of movement around the box. Works a treat if you have the players for it.

Anyway, under Team Instructions, put Throw Ins on Long for both the right and the left side. The individual instructions (based on a 4-5-1, alter according to your own formation...) look like this...

WBR - Default in both

DC - Stay Back in both

DC - Stay Back in both

WBR - Default in both

DM - Go Forward in both

MRC - Right near post Left go forward

MLC - Left near post right go forwrd

AMR - Go forward both

AML - Go forward both

SC - Go forward

If it all works, it looks a little something like this.

As you can see, this leads to one player being isolated in the box, with plenty of time to control the ball and get a good shot or header off.