They Said It Never Happens In Real Life

I know this game is more static than real life and poor settings are not always easily repaired within a match, but was the outside area corner routine really that unrealistic. You all seemed to think so. I disagree, and so does a certain mister Arjen Robben.



Yes, this post is all about shameless gloating and telling you I was right. It isn't unrealistic at all and it can be done. Ha!

How To Do An Outside Area Corner Properly

Love it or hate it, until they code this corner out of existence, it's here to stay because of it's tremendous effectiveness. As I promised yesterday, I would details my settings and those of others on how to use the corner.

As you will have deduced by now, there are more ways to actually set up this set piece routine. The first one I will mention is one I plucked off the beta forums, mentioned first by Paul Collyer himself.

Two players - Near post flick
Two players - Challenge Keeper
Two players - Wait on the Far Post
Two players - Lurk (one of them is corner taker)
Two players - Stay Back

Corners are set to penalty area.

That's just one setup, and in my opinion the most basic one which is easy to defend with just zonal marking. There's a number of variations to this setup flying around, including my own, which looks more like this.

Three players - Stay Back

One player - Designated corner taker

One player - Lurk

One player - Short option

One player - Challenge Keeper

One player - Attack Far Post

One player - Attack Near Post

One player - Wait at Far Post

Corner distribution is again set to Penalty Area.

The concept of the changes is provide some form of automated cover in case an opponent tries to mark out your lurker. Often, the markers will choose to follow the players attacking the posts, so the runners are providing some distraction inside the box. The short option player seems to guarantee a better distribution of the corner somehow. I have not quite figured out how and why, but the delivery seems to be far more accurate with this guy standing around.

Exploit Or Evolution?

Those of you who are active in the beta worlds have surely seen, experienced or even used this specific corner setup.

The corner swings out to the edge of the box, where a seemingly unmarked player gets a free crack at goal, more often than not resulting in a goal.

Now, the fact of the matter is that the default corner defence many teams are using is completely inept at defending these kind of corners. As one might expect, there is an outcry on the beta forums to have this kind of corner banned/binned.

My ideas regarding the matter are bit more controversial. Bug or not, loophole or not, it's tactical ingenuity by the managers who come up with this. They are thinking outside the box in an effort to create new opportunities for themselves. Do we really want to punish people for being creative by taking away every new option they find?

Making good tactics which people cannot counter immediately is an exploit? Making people actually think about their tactics and not just going with some default system is an exploit?Surely people can ask in the Tactics Chat or on the forum how to combat this specific setup if they're too lazy to use their own mind or simply lack the know-how regarding the FML engine?

When a setup can be countered with new default settings (and this setup CAN be countered with relative ease), does this not make it just another valid choice by the manager to use it and defend against it? Not every unusual and unorthodox piece of gameplay should be branded as an exploit just because people can't figure out how to counter it in under a minute.

If you want to talk proper exploits, take the old "Challenge Goalkeeper" setup of the 1.3 engine. It's much harder to mount an effective defence against these type of corners. It didn't matter how good your set piece defence was, if the opposing team had someone who was better in the air (someone like Neretljak, Zigic or Onyewu), they would score anyway, regardless of how your defence was setup.

Loophole or not, the "Outside Area" setup adds some extra depth to the tactical aspect of FML and its set pieces. It's no longer "lump the ball into the box and hope someone manages to head it in" combined with buying some header beast like Neretljak, Zigic or Onyewu to ram the ball home. A bit of variation is not that bad...

Also, in due time, when people get acquinted with this corner strategy, they will setup their defence to counter it and it will die out anyway. It's now only effective against teams who refuse to tinker with their set piece instructions, most people who want to take the effort to counter it have managed to do so (at least, the ones I am playing...).

We shouldn't have to cater for the people who are too lazy or too casual to change things around, as this is punishing the actually active managers who try to find new ways to score goals by being creative with the options the game is giving them.

People who cannot counter this setup immediately cry "exploit" but is it really that or is it just some form of evolution? Fourty years ago, the off-side trap was starting to be developed. Teams had to re-invent their ideas about attacking. Exploit or good tactics?

Total Football as played by Ajax, The Netherlands, Bayern Munich and the German national team of '74 (yes, they played their own form of total football...) was a completely new concept with players moving all over the pitch and switching positions, making the game a lot faster. Teams had to re-invent their tactics to cope with this. Exploit or good tactics?

I know this game is more static than real life and poor settings are not always easily repaired within a match, but is it really a serious bug that cannot be countered or is it a new step in the evolution of set pieces within FMLive?

PS. for those of you interested in the actual setup both offensively and defensively, keep watching this blog the next few days

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.

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.