(12/18 Note: Sports Interactive have examined the match engine code and not found any egregious errors, while also pointing out a flaw in the testing methodology. There is further testing to be done with updated methodology. Give them serious credit for the speed with which they’ve looked into this!)

The response to the last article, where I determined that it’s likely that the Decisions attribute is bugged and behaves the opposite of the expected behavior, has been immediate and passionate on both the FM Subreddit and in the Discord. The most common response was that the information is interesting, but not definitive because the testing of the one stat in a vacuum takes out too many variables. That’s certainly possible, so a new set of tests has been devised and executed, and the results should put this one to bed.

(more…)

My sincere thanks to those of you that have contributed data over at Bearpuncher Labs for Major League Statistics! We’ve got 23 full submissions at this point, which is plenty to do some preliminary research. To reiterate, the workshop file provides a league in Bermuda where each team is identically staffed; all players have 10 in all stats, except for their “Team stat” which is set to 20. There are 36 teams for each of the 36 visible attributes a player possesses.

I took a sneaky peek at the submitted data, and the average league table was something I wanted to check up on. The results give us some food for thought.

(more…)

With every release of Football Manager, there’s work to be done for folks like me that like to deconstruct the game, and attempt to really make sense of the big spreadsheet that FM can feel like at times. With the Editor available, I got right to work and I have Read more…