FLiam

Tottenham 1-3 Aston Villa

Missed the deadline again! 

I’d argue it was much more than a petulant flap. You can see from one angle his facial expression in which there’s clear intent to hurt someone by smashing their forearm unsuspectingly into the side of their head. It’s assault.

In other sports - rugby for example, that would be a red card without hesitation.

All I can gather from what they have said is that it can be open season now to do this on a weekly basis. I don’t see it as subjective at all. It’s by the book violent conduct and they completely ignored basic rules of the game. 

It’s no surprise that Howard Webb didn’t talk about this one on his vanity show.

https://x.com/gunnersc0m/status/1724796197792358487?s=46&t=ZVi2V0_ikaOx-8_TAekX9g

Audio of VAR check on Bruno’s assault on Jorginho.

”It’s not nice but doesn’t meet the threshold”. So forearm smashes to the side/back of an unsuspected players head is now perfectly fine in the Premier League.

3 hours ago, Bobfoc said:

It would, although Game Pass has been delivering more games than I can keep track of lately.

It has had a good couple of months after a slight dip prior.

Two Like a Dragon games I want to play, but still not completed the last game. Then there’s Dead Space, Lies of P and the Lamplighters League - that’s before continuing Starfield.

Rumours of Baldur’s Gate coming to Xbox as soon as next month. 

Gamepass would be ideal.

Feeling nice and smug being the only one that predicted a Wolves win. 

Goalkeeper injuries are getting a bit silly now though. I see a goalkeeper injured in a match seemingly every few games. Already had my starting keeper out for 6 weeks and then my reserve got injured for two weeks. 

I know it's an ongoing joke about FM needing a patch to be playable but this is the worst I can remember it being upon full release. 

Main issues I am finding are too many goals, too many goalkeeper injuries, not enough substitutions by the AI, and players complaining even more than previous games. It clearly has the potential to be a lot better than FM23 but so far, all I can see is that it needs a lot of work.

Other than those things I pointed out, I am reading from people that have simmed multiple seasons that the AI are still not building squads as you would expect - clubs are stockpiling players in the same position, spending huge fees on players that don't play. Considering AI improvement was one of SI's headline feature announcements - I feel really let down by this release so far.

That's not even including the shambles that is the Japanese league not being as functional as they claimed it would.

But at least I can add facepaint to my manager now.

I missed that SI put out a note:

Quote

Good evening,  

Please find an update from our Studio Director, Miles Jacobson below: 

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Hi everyone,  

In the run-up to the release of FM24 I was really proud of the way that we’d communicated through the campaign – we’d wanted to give more transparency to you all on what was going on in the studio and the information about the new features. The series of blogs that I wrote was part of this, alongside a lot more info than we had historically provided – and we know this candidness was well received by our players.  

Then the Early Access version came out and we dropped the ball a little bit. There are some valid reasons for this but, at the end of the day, we should have been just as open and transparent in the couple of weeks leading up to launch as we have been since early Summer, and we failed on that. And for that, all I can do is apologise, and try and fix it moving forward. 

We knew about a week before release that some asset approvals wouldn’t be complete for day one – and we should have been clearer on this. We do have a disclaimer across stores and our websites stating approvals are ongoing (as we did for Early Access) - but we could have done more. We could have also explained that some licensing agreements have data cut off points for their league which means we can only feature players in that list up to that date. 

But we didn’t let you know. And, again, we apologise for that. We are still working with licensors to get all assets approved, and as we get those approvals, we will roll out missing assets. What we cannot do is add players to the game that joined after the data cut off point – the roster list is set at a particular date as part of the official licensing agreement, and that’s how the license works for us and other partners. 

Another thing that we did during the launch phase this year was a roadmap for when we were going to do feature announcements, and that worked well. So, we’ve decided to do the same for game updates too – albeit with a big caveat that this is what we’re working towards and could be subject to change. 

Before we give you that information though, I also need to explain that the days of us being able to release updates a few hours after we’ve merged the last bit of code are long gone. Many of the platforms that we are on have “submission processes” where the platform tests what they have been sent before allowing it on their platform – something that is much better for the consumer in the bigger picture of things.  

These processes can take anything from a couple of hours to two weeks depending on the platform and how busy they are at any point and with the last couple of versions of the game we’ve tried to have all these updates come at the same time if there are any cross-play possibilities. 

But for our first minor update, which you can find more information about below, we want to release it on platforms as soon as they are approved by the platforms – with the caveat that this may mean that some people may not be able to play network games against people on other platforms during this rollout and crossplay across platforms (such as playing Football Manager Console on PC & Xbox), so if you don’t want to be restricted in that way, which only affects network games & crossplay, then please turn off automatic downloads on your platform.   

We will, of course, let everyone know when the updates are out on each platform on our socials and our forums, and how cross play and network play could be affected. 

Now it’s over to Jimmy who will detail what we’re working on for our first two updates for Football Manager 2024. 

Miles Jacobson – Studio Director, Sports Interactive 

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

We would like to thank everyone in the community who have given us feedback on Football Manager 2024 since Early Access and Monday’s launch.  

As always, logging issues via our Bug Tracker and your general feedback helps us ensure we can continue to improve your Football Manager experience.  

Within the first of our minor updates, we’ve made changes to various areas across the game.  

Our database will now be further up to date with real world key events. We’ve also made changes to some attributes and kits from Turkey and France respectively. If you’re interested in the work that goes into our database and the research behind it, you can check out our latest blog over on The Byline. 

Most of our fixes involve general gameplay issues that include changes to the frequency of AI loan offers, player unhappiness, as well as duplicated clauses within player contracts that were affecting club finances. Managers’ preferred style of play should now be more varied and accurate, and we have made changes to currency representation and youth league scheduling in certain territories. 

Under the hood, there have been various stability fixes that look to address some higher profile technical issues raised on both our Community Forums and through SEGA support. 

And lastly, the Match Engine is receiving tweaks to Goalkeepers, and particularly their injury frequency. 

 
Minor Update Change list – Steam, Epic & Microsoft – Coming early next week 

Licensing / Database  

Kit updates 

Updated database to reflect real world key events  

Updated some players in the Turkish data  

Match Engine  

Reduced frequency of injuries to goalkeepers  

Bug fixing  

Stability fixes for crash issues that were reported via our backtrace servers  

Fixed an issue with “Lack of squad depth at Center Back” unhappiness  

Removed duplicate clauses in player negotiations (Transfers & Contracts)  

Fixed an issue which causes AI teams to make an excessive amount of loan offers  

Fixed a bug causing imported FM23 saves staff & managers to default to a “Wing Play” strategy  

Fixed currency representation in Korean  

Fixed an issue with Korean U21 players not having games scheduled 

 

Content Update change list – Coming soon 

We are also working hard on a wider list of updates with a near future target-date to address some of the other feedback we have received including:

Improvements to AI squad building and substitutions logic 

Further updates to the match engine 

Updates to player interactions  

Quality of life improvements  

Additional stability updates & bug fixes 

Localisation fixes and updates 

Data updates 

Please do not be alarmed if an issue you have raised has not been resolved quite yet. Rest assured, the entire team is working extremely hard behind the scenes.  

Thank you for your patience, feedback and continued support and stay tuned for more information next week.  

Might not be for at least a few weeks before it's properly playable for me. 

I see the frustration with players kicking up a fuss about nonsense now. 

Started an AS Roma save, the day before the first game of the season (bear in mind I do have first transfer windows off), Pelligrini complains that we don't have enough depth at CB, cue 75% of the team now being unhappy and morale has dropped to almost the lowest level. 

Can't believe this made it past beta stage. Genuinely baffling.

There is no realism in a new manager coming in and almost the entire squad being unhappy and against the manager who has no say in the current squad and cannot fix via transfers.

Wolves 2-1 Tottenham (Sat 12.30pm, TNT)
Crystal Palace 1-2 Everton (Sat 3pm)
Bournemouth 0-3 Newcastle (Sat 5.30pm, Sky)
West Ham 2-2 Nottm Forest (Sun 2pm, Sky)
Chelsea 0-2 Man City (Sun 4.30pm, Sky)

5 minutes ago, King Ellis said:

Goalkeepers being made of glass doesn't seem to have been fixed either which is why I'm now playing in the Europa League with Alex 'oh shit I need a home grown 3rd choice' Cairns in net.

Oh yeah I forgot about this one. I presume they wanted to increase the probability of a goalkeeper getting injured but whatever they did was very wrong.

I definitely had goalkeepers getting injured before though, so I don’t really understand the decision behind this one. 

Played a bit last night and as far as FM releases go - I would say this one is pretty bad.

The AI doesn’t make many subs, if any - they come in the final few minutes most of the time. It was an issue in the beta and hasn’t been fixed. I played a few games of the season and in five games, my opponents only made three subs across all three. One came in the 71st minute and the others were in stoppage time. All this will do is lead to teams playing a second XI by October/November time.

One other massive issue is that one of their headline announcements being the Japanese leagues being “fully licensed and playable” are not fully licensed and there are 100+ missing players (including Juan Mata). Whilst I wasn’t planning on managing in Japan, this is a massive false promise by SI. They must have known they didn’t have full approval yet, so to announce it weeks before release is really dishonest.  

On a positive note - the Tato skin has been released. 

1 minute ago, Baddar said:

This is such a crazy offside trap from Spurs. Can't keep getting away with it surely.

Unfortunately as it’s Chelsea, I think they will.

On the subject of the goal, I still don’t see how this doesn’t prove the ball is out of play. It’s clearly out of play.

I'm late to the party here - but how the fuck did Bruno G not get a straight red card for that forearm smash to Jorginho's head?

I have seen reports that the VAR said it "wasn't nice, but wasn't an elbow so only a yellow card". So is blatantly forearm smashing someone in the head now acceptable in Premier League games?

The rule on violent conduct is:

Quote

Violent conduct is when a player uses or attempts to use excessive force or brutality against an opponent when not challenging for the ball, or against a team-mate, team official, match official, spectator or any other person, regardless of whether contact is made.

In addition, a player who, when not challenging for the ball, deliberately strikes an opponent or any other person on the head or face with the hand or arm, is guilty of violent conduct unless the force used was negligible.

When the VAR's are ignoring basic rules of the game, there's absolutely no point in having them.

Not even going to get into the goal decision - the referees in England must be the lowest quality around, it's staggering how incompetent they continue to be.

Fulham 2-1 Man Utd (Sat 12.30pm, TNT)
Burnley 0-2 Crystal Palace (Sat 3pm)
Sheff Utd 0-2 Wolves (Sat 3pm)
Newcastle 0-0 Arsenal (Sat 5.30pm, Sky)
Nottm Forest 1-4 Aston Villa (Sun 2pm, Sky)

Such shit news. The man had his share of demons - I hope he is at peace now. Friends wouldn’t be Friends without Matthew Perry. 

Chelsea 2-1 Brentford (Sat 12.30pm, TNT)
Bournemouth 3-0 Burnley (Sat 3pm)
West Ham 2-0 Everton (Sun 2pm, Sky)
Brighton 4-1 Fulham (Sun 3pm)
Man Utd 2-0 Man City (Sun 4.30pm, Sky)

Liverpool 4-1 Everton (Sat 12.30pm, TNT)
Brentford 2-1 Burnley (Sat 3pm)
Nottm Forest 1-1 Luton (Sat 3pm)
Chelsea 2-2 Arsenal (Sat 5.30pm, Sky)
Sheff Utd 1-3 Man Utd (Sat 8pm, Sky)

Yeah - the changes to the match engine so far are very, very impressive. Everything is very fluid, the way players interchange, and the animations are excellent too. 

It’s nice to be able to actually mirror real-life four at the back out of possession/three at the back in possession now.

Beta is out.

We started Killing Eve last night but now I have seen that the finale has a rating of 3.4 on IMDb. 

Wondering if it's worth watching it all or not now. 

Game of Thrones has a 4.0 and (original) Dexter has a 4.7 so this cannot be a good sign. 

The new fluidity with player roles looks exceptional. 

Amazing lineup for the rest of this month.

Like A Dragon: Ishin is also available today.

On the downside, Persona 5 leaves on October 31st.

Tony Hawk’s please. 

45 minutes ago, DavidMarrio said:

You must have been on the VAR for this game. Pick the still image at the end without any of the context

But when the end result is that image, there’s no question it’s a red.