FM18 Labs: The Final Decisions Results

(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.

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FM18 Labs: We Need To Talk About Decisions

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.

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How Do Our Youth Facilities Impact The Development Of Young Players?

In the La Masia series I wrote last year, the importance of upgrading your youth facilities was discussed. While we all realise the importance of a quality coaching staff in speeding up the development of our players and there have been previous experiments regarding the effects of tutoring, no-one has looked into the facilities.

I am curious as to the effectiveness of these facilities. Upgrading them is often an expensive and time-consuming affair, so is upgrading them worth the hassle or would you be better off focussing your time, energy and financial resources on other areas?

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Mentoring; The Effects On Development

Tutoring your players to help their development is starting to become common practice in FM. After all, it works in real life as well and with FM17 being a pretty accurate simulation, it will work in the game. Think Ibrahimovic helping out Rashford, Henry and Bergkamp trying to tutor Anelka, Rijkaard helping out the entire Ajax ’95 team. The question remains; how effective exactly is this tutoring? That’s what this article is trying to find out.

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