[Archived] Football Manager Live

[Guest Kamy100]

For the last couple of weeks I have been taking part in the BETA for Football Manager Live.

For those of you who don't know about this, it is SI Games new project which is basically a footbal MMO.

The game is completely online and you play against other people from around the world. At the start of the game you have to set up a brand new club. You get to choose all aspects of the club from name, badge to stadium name etc. When you start off for the first time, you're given £500k. You pick the players that are available and once you've reserved them and paid the fees for them, that's it, they're yours (and you're left with around £10k if you picked a decent team). But in the middle of a season, say Joe Bloggs isn't attached to a club and you want him, offering him a contract starts a bidding war. You offer whatever wage you feel is the most you can offer, and then other clubs have 24hrs to better that. At the end of that period, the club that's offered the most wins him, and must then pay the acquisition fee.

Transfer values for contracted players aren't as high as the real-world values would be - £3m-£5m is only usually paid for the very best players. I'm led to believe £11m is the record so far, for a 29-year-old Wayne Rooney, but this was an absolute one-off. Wages are also less than real-world values - the average wage for a real Tranmere player is about £2,000 a week, I have a couple of Brazilians who could play for a bottom-half Premier League/top-half Championship side on £1,250-£1,500.

But again, there is another difference - wages aren't paid "per week", they're paid per real-time day. In FML, it's common to equate one day to about a week of "real time" - it's not an exact science, purposefully so because different people play for different lengths of time, and because in different FAs (see below) some seasons last longer than others. In the FA I play in, one league season lasts for twenty days. In another, two whole seasons are played out in the same time-frame. So you could say that one day of my season would be about two weeks of a real year (making a season ten months long), whereas in the other FA one day would be about four weeks of a real year.

So features like wages, ages and injuries are moulded around these new timescales - for example, players all age by one year after each season finishes, and a player of mine who has recently torn his hamstring will be unavailable for selection for about five days. When you can play 3-4 games in a day or more, that's a lot of games to wait for his recovery.

When you start the game, there's several gameworlds to choose from. At the moment there are six, although this will probably change once the game is released. Each gameworld is seperate from the others, meaning that each world has its own Rooney, without duplicate. Once you join a gameworld and you set up your club, you must choose an FA to join. All of the FAs are for different amounts of playtime - there are FAs for occasional players, regular players and "I have quit my job to play this game" players. Each have schedule guidelines, which are when most players are online, and each have seperate league structures, competitions and rules.

Once you have selected your FA, I went to Casual Football Association because matches are played 6pm-11pm which suits me and the structure is very similar to the English Leagues structure. After this you start to play games, you are contacted by other managers to arrange times or often games are played because 2 of you just happen to be online at the sametime which happens quite a lot. Fixture lists of a sort are generated - matches have a "to be played by" date, and after this date the person who has been online more often (or requested the other person to play more often) is given "AI rights". This means that when you're ready to play the game, you can request to play the club and they will be managed by the AI. This doesn't really represent an advantage or a disadvantage, because the AI can only tell the players what to do like a human player can.

At the end of the league season (which normally takes 9-12 days) you are given money for the position you finished in and promotion/relegation sorted out. Then it is the madness of pre-season when you get involved in bidding auctions for players and there is banter between the managers using the chat functions as everyone gears up for a new season.

The biggest compliment I can pay this that it has managed to get me off playing GTA and when you have played this you won't want to go back to FM2008. A friend of mine summed up his experience of this game as

"If you're a realism nut like myself, the game will be disheartening at first. To start a squad based in England and have a starting lineup containing an American, an Italian, a Brazilian and even a Peruvian, is disappointing. And when you find yourself looking for things that aren't there - training regimes, board requests, backroom staff to do the dirty work for you - you find yourself in unfamiliar territory. But as time goes on you realise that these things have been done for a reason, and when you first experience the beauty of the game - when you get an achievement for beating a team over one hundred ranks above you, with a fantastic early cross headed over a flapping keeper and into the net by a striker you struggled to afford by selling that really promising centre-back that you really didn't want to let go - you will forget all about it. And all about your real-life job and family, in-fact.

Even at this beta stage it's become clear to me that I will find it extremely hard to go back to an AI-driven game. Bartering with real people, scouting real clubs to get an idea in your head how to play against them, reading about your team in the newspaper - it's just a totally different world.

Already there are famous and infamous managers (and players too), who are discussed all day long. Some managers can't take a loss, some are convinced that those little dots for referees are totally against them. Some managers are out there snapping up every player that they can, filling their squads with man after man, while the managers at the bottom cry about how unfair it is that they're not leaving players for the rest of us. I mean, does it get any more realistic than that, honestly?

The effort that goes into beating the big boys, and the joy of success (and the pain of defeat) that you feel as a result, is multiplied greatly from previous FM games simply because it's another human being you're inflicting your pain onto, and because you're not able to quit the game after a bad result and play it again (don't lie - I know you've done it). And what sets it apart from the other online football management games is its depth. You will not find another game like this, with real players, a realistic tactical system complete with the most realistic match engine, a complex financial system, and the feeling of being a part of something that's constantly moving and evolving."

Knowing that this is just a beta, and having read about the possibility of several more features being added before the game's release this summer, it's safe to say that this will cause even more divorces, break-ups and college drop-outs than any previous FM. God bless you, SI. You must be really proud of yourselves.

[Mc Love]

Really not sure of what to make of this game yet. Its a great idea/concept and one that i was totally for when it was announced that it was coming out.

Then FM08 came out and i was totally let down, and before you say it, i know that they are two different games. Still i wonder what this will be like?

[Guest Kamy100]

I think everyone will get to test this out soon enough. SI are due to release this by the end of the summer and you'll get a chance to try before you buy!!

[Anti-Dingle-Brigade]

Would the flaw not be that the first people on would just snag Rooney and co. and everybody else would be left with the crap players?

[rebelmswar]

Would the flaw not be that the first people on would just snag Rooney and co. and everybody else would be left with the crap players?

They may do it like a draft.

[Guest Kamy100]

Would the flaw not be that the first people on would just snag Rooney and co. and everybody else would be left with the crap players?

The way it is structured makes it very difficult to sign a lot of star players, most teams have one or maximum two of the really great players (ie Ronaldo, Kaka, Messi etc.) the rest of the teams are made of much smaller name players. It has to explain but it works really well, I was just playing a friendly against one of the big boys (team ranked in the top 10) I am ranked 250 anyhow managed to hold out for a draw, great felling because I used the strengths of my team and defensive nouse to keep him at bay.