Going back to the game proved to be fun. I feel I am looking forward to a future FM game as well, perhaps on FM 2023.
Anyways, it is a season with an extremely long streak of games without losing, and a second league win.
More importantly, the financial game plays very differently this time…
There was no update to the game for quite a few months. There were multiple reasons, but mostly because the ongoing real world event had negatively impacted my willingness to continue playing this game. The thought that the save game involves real people who might be completely disgusted with the idea of getting hired by the team I’m controlling, or getting that additional nationality through naturalization, has put me off the game for long.
Later, I thought, perhaps exactly because the real world is full of woes, I should look at the game as a more ideal place. It isn’t reflective of the world, but it is how it should have been. Along this line of thought, then, perhaps, I should just play on.
OK, back to the game.
Many scanned old books come with no table of contents. And Googling how to add tables of contents usually show up less helpful advice such as “buy Acrobat”. To save myself from having to Google this stuff again, it’s time to record it here.
This blog was down for a few days because Ubuntu update screwed the Apache2 PHP mod. Unfortunately, I wasn’t really paying attention.
Season 11 is full of worries. The team is weakened in multiple ways. Financial woes. Unhappy players.
But… it is also the first season I won the premier league.
Football Manager’s schedule generation has been a bit weird: the teams with European competitions often have lots of matches rearranged to make way for the European games. It is not uncommon that a team with European games to have played 4 fewer games than a team without.
For the past few seasons, I qualified for Europa League, and I was affected by this problem. The board often criticized me for the low league position, without taking the schedule into consideration.
This season, however, is the reverse problem: I have been constantly at the top place, because I am the only strong team without European competitions. It was all roses from the club board, but I know that once the season ends they will judge me on the actual ranking, which, again, makes it feel very weird.
Anyway, I maintained pretty good form to near the end of the season. When I had 3 games left, I needed to win the first game against Zenit to win the Russian Cup; win the second game against Zenit to potentially win the league, and, win the last game to secure a place in the European Championship. Unfortunately, I whiffed on all three, so all the way back to Europa League.
There is nothing much to say about. WordPress silently added an image rescaling functionality without any configurable UI. It automatically scales uploaded images when it thinks they are too “big” and thus “unoptimized for SEO”. The Football Manager game logs therefore have blurry images, while the Europa Universalis ones didn’t, because they were uploaded before the update that brought this functionality.
Here is the complaint: shouldn’t the default behavior be as straightforward as possible, and leave tasks like SEO to dedicated SEO plugins? That way, people who doesn’t care about SEO (like me) won’t need to worry about anything.
To make things worse, WordPress still keeps the original big images. There is just no button to use them. They just sit in a purposeless back store, wasting the space for no purposes. Speaking of which, vanilla WordPress should spend more time on media management, like, allowing me to organize my images with folders. Just a few years of Football Manager is already a chore, and I can’t understand how can people use WordPress as actual photo galleries. That is an area I am not comfortable with plugins, since I feel it is tightly coupled with all underlying mechanisms and is best not touched by any outsider.
OK, back to topic. I added this to my subtheme.
add_filter( 'big_image_size_threshold', '__return_false' );Problem solved, but it’s a problem that should never appear in the first place.
After an eventful Season 8, the game (and the player, that is, me) never ceases to excite!
In short, I set a very high seasonal goal, then brought in many free transfers. It turned to be a disaster: the free transfers took too long to merge in the squad, meanwhile dragging down the team and complaining about lack of first team opportunities at the same time. By the time I mostly sort out the problems, I had little time to turn the tide.
Yep. Another season. A season with the best results so far. A season with the worst events so far.
Another few months have passed without me posting anything about the Football Manager game. During those months I was generally very busy, and when I wasn’t, I was playing MTG or No Man’s Sky.
Still, I actually left my Football Manager save game at the end of Season 7, so it is time to quickly document what happened in the season.