Miscellaneous instances of Managing the Foot to Ball

[Syt]

From reddit:



(For those not familiar with Swiss football clubs: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSC_Young_Boys)

[Norgy]

Heh, I found that I can load an FM24 save and continue in FM26. That, at least, is a nice touch.

The Lyn of Oslo adventure continues with a very hot AMD card. 

[Syt]

FM26 received its last patch last month. So I thought I'd give it a try. I promised myself I'd deal with the menus and work my way through. Clicked my way through all the screens, trying to make the best of it.

But I ended up - again - mostly annoyed. Stuff that should be one click (looking at your club staff) takes two clicks (Staff overview pop-up => Staff). There's still no scaling of the menus. Playing 1080p and 2160p looks the same as it will automatically adjust to your screen (well, 1080p looks slightly blurrier on my 4k screen). Generally a good UI practice, but it also means I gain nothing from playing in higher resolution. You can pick text size, but it doesn't do much.

There's still a lot of wasted empty space in boxes. Sometimes it will cut off text with an ellipsis, even though there would be plenty of space for a line break. Where you do or don't get tool tips feels a bit random. And they're missing IMO in some areas. E.g. if you look at a player pop up profile it may tell you that they have 3 skill attributes. Which ones? No tooltip, so you have to click his profile.

Player's happiness is affected by 2 positive and 1 negative thing in their profile page. What are they? Click the panel and get sent to the list of all players and their happiness (you're going to the top of the list, of course, not to the line of the player you've come from) or a separate tab. No tooltip. Same with the tile that shows Positive and Negative player traits. It will show you two traits and "+1 more" or "+ 4 more" or however many they have in total. Gotta click to go to separate report to see details. No tooltips, no scrolling.

Clicking through the various tiles for finances seems to follow no strong logical structure. Weirdly, the best overview seems to be "Wages", not "Overview" or "Summary".

One of the more baffling things is that if you filter your squad list, the filter also applies to the player list in the Squad Overview screen. I was wondering why I was only seeing 5 players - I still had a filter on. Can you change the filter from the Squad Overview? Nope! Gotta go to the squad list again and reset filters to show all players on Overview again.

When you hover over a player's icon, you get an abbreviated version of their profile (like in FM24 and before) as a pop up. Though if you want to quickly assess if they're good in their role - better go to their profile. Because while the pop up says that "green" is a Key attribute and "blue" is a preferred attribute, it doesn't actually highlight any abilities. You also can't select any roles from the pop up, so unless you know which of 20+ attributes is relevant for the dozens different positions and playstyle, you're SOL. Same if you want to compare two players. It will compare their attributes. Which ones are relevant for the role you compare them on? Better learn those by heart!

Meanwhile, there's no customization options - no re-arranging of tiles, no option to select what tile shows what, no resizing, nothing.

I think I have a decently strong tolerance for bad interfaces (I play Paradox games FFS), but much of this feels so badly thought out and amateurish I find it completely saps my will to play the game. There's by now a few skins for it, but none of them seem to deal with any of the underlying issues.

FM24 and before were not exactly UI masterclasses, but it mostly made sense, you could scale the UI, you had at least some customization options, and skins further improved on some of the options. I hope FM27 will handle this a lot better.

[Syt]

Just to illustrate, the player profile screen FM26 (top) vs. FM24 (bottom, using SAS24 skin).





With the skin (which FM26 doesn't support nowhere near to the extent as the previous games) I have all key info on this screen. Most tiles have a selection of items you can display in them to tailor it to your preferences. And I can do pretty much everything I need from this screen.

[Josquius]

Not a million years ago I applied for a job with SI to deal with its ux.
They did the thing companies do and ask expected salary and I was vague but... Gave something reasonable. They said that was too high and were actually looking at a entry level salary for a senior level role.
I see it shows.

Big problem with these sorts of games seems to be they decide their interfaces are ugly and too spreadsheety and need improving.... So they hire someone who is basically just a graphic designer who makes them pretty but useless.