A few ideas for FTG: World - Stat Obfuscation, Traits, New Skill and Selling Players

[Automated_Sinbot]

I have a few thoughts on potential improvements which I think could be made for FTG: World, based on things I think would improve the game, while fitting into the existing mechanics and spirit of the current game.

Stat Obfuscation and Scouting
This is a fairly substantial change. Something I think makes the current game a bit too easy, is that you are given perfect information regarding the stats of each player. What I would like to see is a mechanic which obscures the stats for players you don't manage so you don't know for sure what the specifics for every player is. For example, if an opposing LF in an upcoming match has stats of 72/23/18/40, with a Rainbow Feint skill of 2 you know exactly what you are dealing with, and can easily work on countering it. However, as a rough example, if all you knew about the player is they are an LF with the stats 60-80/20-40/0-20/20-40 with an unknown level 2 skill, it makes it far harder to know for sure what the best counter is, and you need to take more risks in your formation.

This example also applies to scouted players, as this stat obfuscation may make the difference of knowing if he's the right player, verses the uncertainty of them being a bit of a dud for your club.

I think that for players you don't manage, it should be much harder to know for sure what their exact stats/potential/skill are. The ability to assess the stats/skills of other players could be tied in to your scouting level, where the higher level of scouts you have, the more precise the information you get on players you don't manage. There could also be other means of discovering more unknown information about a player, such as but not limited to:

- Learning a player's unknown skill once they use it in a match against you.
- Spending glory to send your scouts to learn more information about a player.
- Having a player in the personal/expanded scouting list.
- That player being 'known' in the media, e.g. appearing in Team of the Week/Season, in one the top 5 of the league's players, being one of the transfer period's top transfers etc.
- Being provided more information about a player if another club is offering to loan them to you.

I think something like this would be a fun, due to the added risk involved in all aspects of the game, while also expanding out the use of the scouting team. If implemented, this should be able to be disabled at the start of a new game though, similar to the Reputation mechanic, given how much of a change it is.

Player Traits
I know that you are interested in a player's nationality providing traits, but I think it would be fun to include a chance of having a single trait for each player which could be positive/negative or even neutral. These should be fairly minor for the most part though, such as better/worse skill potential, more/less likely to get injured, faster/slower xp gain etc. These should be independent of the current skill trees though.

New Skill: Free Kicks
I think that there could be a learnable skill for free kicks. It should be pretty simple though, something like a set increase to ACC/PAS per level of Free Kick skill, similar to the stat increase of the Header skill. This could also apply to penalties, where having this skill also improves your penalty accuracy.

Changes to Selling Players
I actually don't mind how selling players is currently implemented, but there are a couple of changes that could be made.

I think selling players is a bit too simple at the moment, as you just sell the player, and three clubs offer to buy them at various prices. I think that instead, there should be a bit more of a choice regarding how to sell them, which ties into a player's interest from other clubs. If you want to try and sell a player, I think making an offer should cost Glory, and you get the option to offer them at either 100%/75%/50% or 125% of their base value. Depending on if a player's interest from other clubs is high/medium/low, it will influence how likely other teams will be to send through an offer the next week.

For example, a high interest player worth 1,000,000 is very likely to get three different offers from different clubs if you try to sell them at 100% their base value, but may only get one offer (or even none) if you offered them at 125%. On the other hand, a medium interest player worth 500,000 may struggle to get an offer for 100%, and has almost no shot at 125%, but has a higher chance at getting offers at 75% or 50%.

I do think the way that other clubs offer players to you should be mostly unchanged though. Though I would also change one thing for this.

If a club is sending you an offer for a player, and you ask for more, I wish you were able to still receive offers for other players from other clubs in subsequent weeks. I think that you shouldn't receive more than one new offer a week, but you should be able to still receive new offers if another offer has been stalled for more money.

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There are probably more, but these are the main suggestions I can think of. I avoided topics like player happiness and stuff like that, as having to micromanage individual players needs would probably just be pointless busywork and not that interesting. I find the team management aspect of this game fun, and interested to hear your thoughts.

[_K_o_S_]

Thanks for the detailed description of your ideas. That is very helpful. Below, I'll write my thoughts on them.

> Stat Obfuscation and Scouting

There are two ways of thinking about it:
1) Hiding the tactics so it is harder to play against an opponent
In this case, we have to hide formation because hiding attributes/skills is not as important. But if we hide the tactics, the main feature of FTG gets broken. I suppose that as a result, players will use some averagely universal formations, and at the start of the match, as soon as they see the opponent's formation and footballers, the player will fit the formation to the opponent. It will be far from how it works in real football. Therefore, we are not going to do that. At least, while we don't understand how to make this feature to be really fun.

2) Scouting info
That's something I wish to implement for a long time. However, the problem with it is that we would have to save a lot of additional info in an already data-heavy save file. We would have to save the attributes/skills known to the player from the time he saw/scouted the interesting footballer for the last time.

An additional problem is that this feature can make it more complicated to scout the footballers. I don't have yet a clear picture of how to make this feature to fit the game and already existing mechanics. So taking into account also issue 1 (additional saving data), we postponed this feature to when we clearly see how to implement it.

> Player Traits
That is something we internally want to implement for a long time. The problem with it is that it is very complicated set of mechanics (if done right). Also, our GUI didn't allow to do that.

In FTGW, we rewrite some important part of the GUI engine so such mechanics are allowed to implement in the future. So, after release of FTGW, when we are sure all mechanics works fine and the GUI works without problems, we will start thinking about such mechanics like traits that can use the updated GUI engine.

> New Skill: Free Kicks
It's quite a popular request from the players. Currently, I don't think it makes sense to implement though. In the current match mechanic, free kick are quite easy to score either with high ACC AM or with the combination of Pass + Shoot or Cross.

I think that at some point in the future, we will make a global revision of the match mechanics and will change the ones where we see the players want some changes.

Currently, we can't do that because, for us, the football cultures is a so big thing, so we are afraid to touch all other match mechanics. The football cultures will affect a lot of tactics in unexpected ways.

> Changes to Selling Players
In general, I like the idea of trying to get a better price for paying the Glory.

However, currently, I like how selling footballers work. I wanted it to be crystal clear, easy to use and provide interesting choices. It works as expected.

I'm all for giving interesting choices but currently I don't see that exchanging Glory for Money though selling your footballer is good for balance and for the game in general.

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Thanks again for so detailed description. I really appreciate it when players give well thought out and described ideas (like yours).

[Andrei Baciu]

Originally posted by _K_o_S_:

If we hide the tactics, the main feature of FTG gets broken. I suppose that as a result, players will use some averagely universal formations, and at the start of the match, as soon as they see the opponent's formation and footballers, the player will fit the formation to the opponent. It will be far from how it works in real football. Therefore, we are not going to do that. At least, while we don't understand how to make this feature to be really fun.

Give 2 possible formations as default (50% to guess it right) or pay a fair amount of glory (around 1 premier league game win average) to be 100% sure.

You can change tactics anyway at halftime.