An open letter to the BoD | My argument to allow player instructions

[McLumberjack]

> Every single team had the exact formation and instructions they ran after MD1 of this season, sure some teams switch their tactics midseason however that is actually irrelevant to this test. I was testing Xelaju's performance. The rest of the league NEEDED to stay the same in order to be able to have proper results.

To have proper results does not mean that the results can be reflective of what may be an accurate season. This is a huge piece that in my opinion renders the study obsolete. When you are discussing how PIs may affect a league/team over a season only running 1 tactic however many times does not give any meaningful data on how this would play out in a season with 12 teams all running unique tactics per game versus one team running a tactic with PIs.

> Each simulation every team had their attributes frozen, no injuries, perfect morale, perfect fitness, max tactical cohesion
You don't specify that this was performed after every single game, and another thing that you failed to account for is that the AI managers make substitutions. You did not specify if you removed the super subs which do indeed effect games and AI managers are keen to sub those people in. Another issue with your study is that FM has 2 different engines, a quick sim engine and a full match engine. It is hard to know how this would affect the full sim engine without running each individual game over a season.

> The chance of finding a tactic that is actually better than any of the fmArena ones (without doing massive controlled tests involving thousands of matches) is very small. 99% of orgs can better spend their time worrying about player activity, scouting, player builds and other things :)

This may come down to different priorities or interests, but I got into this league because FM was unfun for me, not because I was interested in sim leagues in general. I honestly don't particularly care how good or bad Matias is in any regard if we are winning. The league doesn't need more fmArena tactics it need 0, football is an awesome sport and I am much more interested in the side of fun and funny tactics compared to a tactic that's pulled from a website which has no effort put towards it. Tactics are also something to talk about which helps with player retention.

Regardless of the worldview or information you may have left out, a study must be reflective of real world conditions to be able to be taken seriously. Drugs are tested on animals before being readily used by humans. Compilers are tested with programs that are reflective of programs you see in the world. This study doesn't show me that, therefore I am not sure what to take from it.

>To have proper results does not mean that the results can be reflective of what may be an accurate season. This is a huge piece that in my opinion renders the study obsolete. When you are discussing how PIs may affect a league/team over a season only running 1 tactic however many times does not give any meaningful data on how this would play out in a season with 12 teams all running unique tactics per game versus one team running a tactic with PIs
I am not exactly sure what your point is here, are you suggesting it would be a better experiment if everyones tactic was different every matchday? How are you supposed to find the impact of specifically player instructions, if you do not keep the values around it the same? Once again, the goal was not to find WHO is going to win the league, the point was to see how much better a tactic does with player instructions compared to the same tactic without player instructions. The only way to reliably do this is to keep all the variables the same EXCEPT the player instructions. I think this is basic scientific theory.

> You don't specify that this was performed after every single game, 

Just to give some insight, with fmrte you can freeze players throughout a whole season, which means the moral, fitness injuries etc will be reset after every single match. I did not need to redo it after every match manually.

>and another thing that you failed to account for is that the AI managers make substitutions. You did not specify if you removed the super subs which do indeed effect games and AI managers are keen to sub those people in.

This indeed happened, however this happened for every single team in every single sim, once again, I am not pretending that my simulations will be an accurate representation of what results of a normal season is. However over the amount of sims and seeing every team did the same, this evens out and still gives reliable results.

>Another issue with your study is that FM has 2 different engines, a quick sim engine and a full match engine. It is hard to know how this would affect the full sim engine without running each individual game over a season.

This is a fair point, what engine fm uses to simulate matches seems a bit of a black box. ive seen places say that holiday is definitely different but ive also seen places say that as long as the detail level is set to full detail it should simulate the exact same. My counter argument would be that the setup I used is virtually the exact same as the setup that fmArena uses to test (they holiday every single match too) and we have seen just how effective fmarena tactics are. This would lead me to conclude that even if holidaying is slightly different than watching the whole match, it is still meaningfull data.

> I honestly don't particularly care how good or bad Matias is in any regard if we are winning. The league doesn't need more fmArena tactics it need 0, football is an awesome sport and I am much more interested in the side of fun and funny tactics compared to a tactic that's pulled from a website which has no effort put towards it. Tactics are also something to talk about which helps with player retention.


Once again, these are valid points however they are also completely unrelated to player instructions. As I have shown the use of fmArena tactics is ALREADY widespread in the league, without there being player instructions. If you want to have a discussion about having to reduce the amount of these, that is a different discussion (although I dont see a way to solve that that would not restrict people heavily or create a massive workload). I do not understand how you think adding player instructions would REDUCE the amount you can talk with players about tactics, if anything it gives managers more freedom to be creative.


> Regardless of the worldview or information you may have left out, a study must be reflective of real world conditions to be able to be taken seriously. Drugs are tested on animals before being readily used by humans. Compilers are tested with programs that are reflective of programs you see in the world. This study doesn't show me that, therefore I am not sure what to take from it.


Lets take your example, if you are testing a drug on a dog do you

1: Keep the environment, diet and stress levels the same and only administer the drug

or 2: Give him medicine, move him to a warmer climate and change his diet?

Extreme example ofcourse but I think it is basic scientific method that if you want to test a variable you need to ONLY change that 1 variable and keep everything the same. I would argue if I ran this experiment and for every matchday cycled the tactics of the opponent to a random one (they use) it would make all my results invalid, not more valid.




Lets flip this around though, what kind of test would satisfy you to believe we should allow player instructions. What is the setup, how many times would it need to be ran and what would the results have to be?