Football Manager Live dated Comments by Oli Welsh

I could possibly... maybe... be tempted with this if it really is less time consuming.

MMO and less time consuming in the same sentence has to be an oxymoron tho surely?

Sounds fantastic. Can't wait!

Er.. what have I been playing for the last month?

It was soft launched last month as have been playing it for the last 5 weeks

It is quite enjoyable, although it is a completely different experience to FM generally. It can get a bit time consuming although they do claim you can put in as little time as you feel you can. Overall I have enjoyed it and am looking forward to some of the changes set for the January 'Full' launch which should improve the game in several key areas which otherwise may have put me off it long term, whether it continues to hold my interest I will have to wait and see!

As a FM nut I'm defo staying away from this. I know I'd pour in a lot of time and money in this, which is something I don't want. Even cancelled my pre-order. I've managed to avoid FM2009 this season so my rehab is good!

I think this game will be a big hit if they get it right. The target audience is huge.

They can't even release the single player game without being broken. Imagine in what mess this will be.

I am not going close to it for at least a year.

Having been part of the beta for over 6 months, i 100% disagree about it being less time consuming. Regular Football Manager you can play when you want, how you want, at the pace you want. Football Manager Live however, requires you, to be successful, to login pretty much daily to play occasional games if nothing else but to keep up player fitness. Add to that the mass crunch that is the off season; a week long "grind" (for me) in finding good players on "frees" in wage auctions; it ended up being the only game I really had time to play. Nothing casual about that. And no, you don't have to be part of that, but if you don't, your team will very quickly fall down the pecking order, and lose more and more games. And people who lose all the time because they don't have the time to dedicate to the game aren't going to want to stick around!

Being part of the b3ta was enough to put me off this, i wish they'd gone a different route.

Playing the beta was great... until the novelty wore off.

You have a TON of info coming into your mail box constantly that verges on annoying.

Once you play the couple of guys in your league that are on all the time, it is really hard to get the other guys on to play and you end up playing the AI team which always seems to do better than the actual team for some reason.

In the off season, it just seems like you are killing time. You spend a whole week just bringing players in/out and playing an ENDLESS stream of friendly tournaments. I find after a day of transferring and friendlys I lose interest, and have to remind myself when the season starts again.

It is NOT casual. To be good you will have to log on and play at least a couple of times a day.

The skills are annoying the way you have to learn them. They need to be retooled I think. As it is you just pick a management skill you want to learn and drop it into a box, and it can take from minutes up to weeks to learn. I don't want to have to wait weeks just to use a simple tactic that Sunday League Managers use! It is an attempt to give it more MMO elements but detracts from common sense I think. No coach would have to learn about about 6 or 7 different things, taking him the best part of a month just to tell his team to hoof the ball up to the tall guy up front. It is ridiculous how few tactical options you have available to you right at the start.

They have changed direction somewhat with Version 1.1 which is in test now. Version 1.01 (you can play this now) is a bit Football Trader Live where 1.1 looks set to be building a team over a longer time period, stadiums etc.

It's not easy to play with 1000 users chasing the same players but if you do well then you've done it against 1,000 other managers!

The original article is slightly misleading. Football Manager Live did soft launch in November and there are a very select amount of gameworlds currently running 1.0.1 code.

We've been working on a new version (1.1) for a number of months and it introduces a number of new elements to the gameplay experience which can be read about in full here http://manual.footballmanagerlive.com/?q... Some of the changes address some problems specifically mentioned in this thread.

Marc Duffy
Sports Interactive.

Also can i add these 2 links for stuff in 1.1.0
About fans go to http://blogs.sega.com/fml/2008/10/01/its...
About stadiums go to http://blogs.sega.com/fml/2008/10/03/the...

have a read, some good stuff on the way :)

By buying retail you are basically just buying a sub then because you don't actually need to buy the game.

try hattrick.org, not really the same deal but it's [a] free [b] football and [c] playing against real people all over the world. have been on it for about a year and a half, it's a once a week thing that isn't a huge drain on your time and worth checking out