I have read from page 195 on this thread and seen a lot of posts from people saying "don't blame the match engine - the fault is with your tactics and the way you're playing the game". But I'm seeing players do things on the pitch that are totally inconsistent with the concept of being a professional footballer - irrespective of the specific tactical instructions assigned to individual players.
For example:
- Wingers, being played in their preferred positions, with decent dribbling and crossing attributes and no problems with fitness, finding space and then just stopping, simply standing still despite the presence of other forwards waiting for the cross, until a defender comes and takes the ball from them.
- Erratic simple passes out of defence at a rate far greater than anything I ever saw during my own Sunday league career.
- Goalkeepers, rather than playing a simple pass to an unmarked full back as instructed, regularly playing hospital passes between the full back and the oppo's winger, usually resulting in injury, a yellow card or conceding goals or corners.
- Defensive midfielders whose specific instructions are to play it short and to the wings blasting hopeless shots at the corner flags at a rate of 4 or 5 per match.
- All the above happening to my team - but not to the slick, direct, determined opposition!
These things do happen in professional football, but at nothing like the rate evident in this supposedly realistic simulation of the game. It would also be interesting to know the real stats on the number and frequency of long-term injuries and superhuman goalkeeper displays (by the oppo, not my keeper) in professional football and how that compares to FM. Before anyone replies, no professional football manager ever told his team to go onto the field and tackle 'easy' in a competitive football match. I don't know why the option exists in the game, unless it's only intended for pre-season friendlies. If you don't tackle hard you don't win the ball; that's true at every level of the game, from kids to amateurs to women's to professional to veterans.
Plus, the animation was better in FM11 (which I played for two years, so I by-passed FM12 altogether). The players had heft and weight and looked as though they were running on grass. Now they look as though they are slipping and sliding on glass, or playing Rollerfootball - like poor CGI in a disaster movie. And all long range forward passes skidding out of play or to the oppo's keeper, irrespective of the weather conditions... like watching the real life Liverpool midfielder and England captain Steven Gerrard totally failing to understand that the pouring rain at St Mary's Stadium made his repeated chipped throughballs to Luis Suarez unobtainable even for the rubber-legged Uruguayan, a major contributory factor to his team's 1-3 demise!
I understand the commercial imperative to constantly innovate and reinvent the game so it looks as though they aren't just reissuing the same thing year-after-year, but I wish SI would get better at understanding and retaining the elements that they have already got right, instead of trying to fix things that are not broken in the first place. I temper that by saying that I have worked as part of a web development team and understand that to add new features to a piece of coding you first have to break it and changing one feature can affect how another functions, so I appreciate they have a difficult job.
The screenshots and changes for FM14 look encouraging and hopefully they will correct the obvious flaws in the AI and match engine, at least to a level of quality that we have already seen in a patched version of FM11.
Having said all of that, my game as AFC Bournemouth in League One has started to improve since I found this web page, to the extent that during October I have climbed out of the relegation zone and into 15th position, with ample time to mount a challenge for the play-offs:
http://www.footballmanagerstory.com/fm-13-tactics-index/