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Great News!; SI assign dedicated MLS coder!
Topic Started: Feb 12 2011, 06:55 PM (1,950 Views)
SaintsCanada
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1. Correct roster rules working properly. Have the 2011 rules been officially announced yet? They must have been. Anybody have a link?

2. Academy relationships working properly. Looks like this will be more straightforward this year. Each club can sign up to two players from its own academy team onto a Generation Adidas contract each year, who then becomes a normal GA player under all other roster rules.

Plan B would be that each MLS club generates two (or whatever the number is) youth intake regens each year on season update day that are allotted GA status.

3. All r-l drafts implemented and working properly. None of this blocking you from drafting somebody because the game thinks your over your international players limit, even when you aren't! In fact, the game should just let you draft anybody, and if you have to waive somebody to register for the season, that's your own problem to deal with. We don't need a draft-nanny.

4. General Managers and Assistant General Managers should be able to go on scouting missions. In real-life, they would choose where to go themselves, as they outrank the coach, but in FM the manager has full powers (even at clubs that have a director of football listed), so the user should get to send them on scouting trips wherever (s)he likes, within the rules of MLS (these can be implemented as board limitations on scoutable nations).

If necessary, the real-life GMs and AGMs could just be listed as scouts in the database, though it would be better if they "outranked" the manager and couldn't be fired by him/her.

Scoutable -- I just invented a word.

That's enough for now, IMO. We don't want to overwhelm the person.
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SaintsCanada
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Nevermind I found the rules. If anybody else needs to see them:

http://www.mlssoccer.com/2011-mls-roster-rules

This link should be sent to the MLS coder immediately. This should be his starting point once he has the correct teams, league table and playoff structure working.
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Aljarov
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SaintsCanada
Feb 14 2011, 12:26 AM
Nevermind I found the rules. If anybody else needs to see them:

http://www.mlssoccer.com/2011-mls-roster-rules

This link should be sent to the MLS coder immediately. This should be his starting point once he has the correct teams, league table and playoff structure working.

That stuff has been in the coding DB since the day MLS published it. Obviously the sooner it was in the better chance we had of getting it coded (even better chance now with the new guy on board).
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Smokecell
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Since I haven't seen it mentioned, finances should definitely be looked into so we can finally get those "other expenses" under control and be able to have financially successful teams in MLS
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looknohands
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Al-
I understand about the coding stuff, and that's why I've asked SI previously to give us the option of "loading" a league's rule set; for leagues like MLS and A-League, ones that require "special" rules, it'd be great if we could pre-load those rule sets into the editor and work with them. Is that just not possible? I guess I'm just not really clear on what exactly needs to be "hard-coded" into the game that would prevent us from experimenting.
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Aljarov
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looknohands
Feb 14 2011, 01:20 PM
Al-
I understand about the coding stuff, and that's why I've asked SI previously to give us the option of "loading" a league's rule set; for leagues like MLS and A-League, ones that require "special" rules, it'd be great if we could pre-load those rule sets into the editor and work with them. Is that just not possible? I guess I'm just not really clear on what exactly needs to be "hard-coded" into the game that would prevent us from experimenting.

My understanding (and i know naught about coding) is that certain things are "hard coded" in that they are so alien to the general workings of the game without these provisions it would be impossible to replicate the rules via normal means.

Other than that I got nadda
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The King of Norway
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I don't have any specific requests to pass along to the coder other than to say please extend a big THANKS to Sega for doing this. They've just guaranteed one sale at least!

I skipped FM11 because of all the MLS bugs I'd heard; I've been very content to play FM10 with the mods garnered from this board. But with real support AND Portland/Vancouver joining the league, FM12 will become a MUST-BUY!
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Coasterkoa
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Another thing:

Stop former pros from entering the draft. It's terrible, and the MLS teams seem to think they are hot commodities. The Number 1 draft pick in the 2011 draft was former USL Sounder player, Adam West (CA 77, PA 92).
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looknohands
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Coasterkoa
Feb 18 2011, 03:25 PM
Another thing:

Stop former pros from entering the draft. It's terrible, and the MLS teams seem to think they are hot commodities. The Number 1 draft pick in the 2011 draft was former USL Sounder player, Adam West (CA 77, PA 92).

Wait...are you seriously telling me that you would pass on the chance to draft Batman?! I can only assume Christopher Reeves went second?
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Chad Beaulieu
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lol...took me a moment but very funny
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Aljarov
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Coasterkoa
Feb 18 2011, 08:25 PM
Another thing:

Stop former pros from entering the draft. It's terrible, and the MLS teams seem to think they are hot commodities. The Number 1 draft pick in the 2011 draft was former USL Sounder player, Adam West (CA 77, PA 92).

Yeah, I've requested the draft pay attention to the Draft field. It's not supposed to just be there for show. I hope this one is cleaned up too. I will say though, that the 2011 so far has thrown up several confusing precedents, like Arnoux and Veeder (especially Veeder) as well as the foreign loan-signings in the draft which would be an absolute disaster to code.
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MarkyMark
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Aljarov
Feb 19 2011, 12:56 PM
Coasterkoa
Feb 18 2011, 08:25 PM
Another thing:

Stop former pros from entering the draft. It's terrible, and the MLS teams seem to think they are hot commodities. The Number 1 draft pick in the 2011 draft was former USL Sounder player, Adam West (CA 77, PA 92).

Yeah, I've requested the draft pay attention to the Draft field. It's not supposed to just be there for show. I hope this one is cleaned up too. I will say though, that the 2011 so far has thrown up several confusing precedents, like Arnoux and Veeder (especially Veeder) as well as the foreign loan-signings in the draft which would be an absolute disaster to code.

I would be fine with the FM12 leaving out those random foreign draft prospects if the players generated in the draft were of sufficient quality and teams didn't make stupid decisions like drafting 5 GKs (a la NYRB in one of my saves).


In general, because there are a lot of things the coder can work on and with limited resources, I think this person should work on getting the most important things right first, before moving onto less important details that require significant coding and testing.



Preseason training camps could be a fun addition and possibly straight forward to code. Around late January, early February your GM sends you a message saying something like:

Quote:
 
I looked into some possibilities for pre-season training this year and here are our best options:
- Practice at our usual facilities
- Travel to Raleigh, North Carolina (cost of trip: $20k)
- Travel to Phoenix, Arizona (cost of trip: $25k)
- Travel to Antalya, Turkey (cost of trip: $60k)
- Travel to Guayaquil, Ecuador (cost of trip: $45k)

Where should we hold our pre-season training?


We would then get to choose one of the locations similar to when the board presents feeder options. Teams would go to these places for like 3 weeks or whatever and play against local sides of equal or lesser reputation, and maybe train with a host team. We would get scouting reports of opposition players and maybe gain a little scouting knowledge of the host country. The choices could either be predetermined from a list of real-life pre-season trips or they could be randomly generated based on criteria such as weather (no one would train in Iceland in February), economy (MLS teams wouldn't go to Bangladesh or the Ivory Coast), and maybe something else that I can't think of now.
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Coasterkoa
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I agree with everything that MarkyMark said (never thought I'd say that, damn you Funky Bunch!).

To expand on the pre-season training camps, the ones specifically in Arizona and Florida, you should be given a note regarding what MLS teams will be training there that year, so you can schedule friendlies with them in said camp.

I think in a general sense, there should be an option to schedule these training camps as you would a tour, where you pick where, when and for how long, since for instance DC United went to Florida and California, and scheduling one, 3 week training camp isn't common. However that is something of a feature request for the whole of FM12.
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Coasterkoa
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A couple more things that aren't necessarily unique to the American database, but would improve it. Though these may be not worth the coding effort if they take any appreciable amount of time:

1. "Tarped" large stadia. Qwest field is listed in FM as 35700 seats, but obvious this is only because they don't sell the rest of the stadium. The issue is that as the attendance increases, you have to pay to enlarge the stadium, despite those seats already existing. In real life, just remove the tarps. The same can be said about Gillette Stadium, and others. There should be a settable number on the team screen that allows you to set the "usable capacity" for the stadium the team in playing in. Should you sell out at that capacity, the next season, the FO may come to you and say, "we're selling X number of seats for next season due to increased ticket demand." Something like that.

2. Owner/Operator Designation for Stadia. As we know, no MLS team "owns" their stadium (either owned by the city e.g. Toyota Park or by the company that owns the club e.g. HDC), since it isn't a common thing in the American sports landscape as it is in other countries. However, control of the stadium is usually designated to the team. It's sort of a de facto ownership. For example, if a father buys his son a car, it's not in the sons name, but the son controls (for the most part) where the car goes and such. In other databases, even teams who don't "own" the stadium are considered to "own" it, and having the owner/operator designation would allow things to be more controllable.

3. Rather than "trials" invite players to participate in your pre-season camp. Essentially it is an extended trial, but slightly different in that you'll have a date when they join, and no real end to the trial, just when the pre-season ends. This is obviously extremely low priority since trials are already in the game.
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Aljarov
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Coasterkoa
Feb 20 2011, 09:04 PM
A couple more things that aren't necessarily unique to the American database, but would improve it. Though these may be not worth the coding effort if they take any appreciable amount of time:

1. "Tarped" large stadia. Qwest field is listed in FM as 35700 seats, but obvious this is only because they don't sell the rest of the stadium. The issue is that as the attendance increases, you have to pay to enlarge the stadium, despite those seats already existing. In real life, just remove the tarps. The same can be said about Gillette Stadium, and others. There should be a settable number on the team screen that allows you to set the "usable capacity" for the stadium the team in playing in. Should you sell out at that capacity, the next season, the FO may come to you and say, "we're selling X number of seats for next season due to increased ticket demand." Something like that.

2. Owner/Operator Designation for Stadia. As we know, no MLS team "owns" their stadium (either owned by the city e.g. Toyota Park or by the company that owns the club e.g. HDC), since it isn't a common thing in the American sports landscape as it is in other countries. However, control of the stadium is usually designated to the team. It's sort of a de facto ownership. For example, if a father buys his son a car, it's not in the sons name, but the son controls (for the most part) where the car goes and such. In other databases, even teams who don't "own" the stadium are considered to "own" it, and having the owner/operator designation would allow things to be more controllable.

3. Rather than "trials" invite players to participate in your pre-season camp. Essentially it is an extended trial, but slightly different in that you'll have a date when they join, and no real end to the trial, just when the pre-season ends. This is obviously extremely low priority since trials are already in the game.

#1 - I'll have to see how the game interprets the 'used' part of the stadium options as this might already be covered. If not, it's a good idea and I'll add asa feature request.

#2 Interesting idea, especially for those that are just on as renters. many of the owner/operators are put in as owners for gameplay reasons, much as you mention. However, I'll look into this a bit more.

#3 I've already put in a feature request for training camps invites but it is a low priority. That's more of a polish item in the uynlikely event that we get everything else perfect. Would be a nice addition though, and provide an alternate option to a fringe player in particular to stop them from signing a contract too early and taking themselves out of consideration. IE have a camp invite list (to go with the contracted guys). I incorproated this originally for draft picks, but it could well extend to other trialists as well.
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