[Lucky_Will]

Not to be a Debbie Downer, but there have been some issues that have cropped up on test playthroughs. I wanted to highlight those here just to get them in the permanent record.

Tournament Cities

The game sort of uses the Olympics model for major tournaments. It assumes that the tournament is in a fixed location and just one city, not a host nation or is a season-long tournament like the Champions League that might use teams’ home stadiums.

This leads to issues with tournament scheduling, all the stadiums are set to default, and it seems like the game selects some relevant stadium in the home city and schedules all the games there, usually simultaneously. Obviously this isn’t realistic.

The problem is that changing these tournament cities is pretty cumbersome. Each game requires finding the stadium number and typing it into the league schedule (League Settings > Options > Edit League Schedule…).

A “Set to home team’s stadium” button or option would make this a lot easier. So would a drop-down, search, or some other function besides stadium number.

National Teams

My World Cup and Euros tournaments use national teams, but the features for these teams are pretty sparse. There’s no auto-load for national team logos or uniforms, and no way to generate a baseball card (and maybe no team picture?) during or immediately after the tournament. It would be fun to generate a World Cup Golden Glove baseball card with the player in his national team uniform.

I’d love to be able to put some personality into national teams, and model their uniforms on soccer uniforms, but the functionality for national teams just isn’t there. I’ve made uniforms for national teams, but they don’t get much mileage because of the limited integration with the game.

XML colors

I spent a lot of time beating up the uniform colors file naming/CSV/XML thing on these boards and I’m really grateful that the dev team worked out the XML file feature. I currently have 564 XML color files, and I like being able to plug a team’s year-by-year uniform changes and then load it in the uniform editor. I don’t have an interest in making 564 teams’ worth of jerseys, caps, and pants every year (soccer teams and their jerseys, dude…), so copying and pasting a bunch of stuff in an XML is really handy.

The one nitpick is that it doesn’t look like the autoload XML feature works (Game Settings > Players & FaceGen > [Right Side] Team Picture Functions > “Load All Colors XML Files”). There’s no way to specify a directory for the XML colors, and I don’t know what file path the game uses looking for XML files, so I had to go through every team and load them by hand to make them work.

This is really time consuming compared to auto-loading uniform files, but better than making uniform files, so I guess it’s a win. But the feature doesn’t seem fully implemented.

League History

I’d love to be able to import a league history file. Bare bones like standings, championships, etc. It would be nice to have Real Madrid listed as a multiple-time Champions League winner, or Brazil as World Cup champs. It would also be nice to have team name and location changes.

This wouldn’t actually do anything except add some texture to the history of the game without having to simulate 100 years of play.

Alternate Team Nicknames

Baseball and soccer teams have a lot of alternate nicknames. The Yankees, for example, are the Bronx Bombers or the Evil Empire or just the Yanks, the Orioles are the Birds or the O’s, the Brooklyn Dodgers were the Bums. Tottenham Hotspur are Spurs or the Lillywhites, Fulham are the Whites or the Cottagers.

It would be nice to have alternate nicknames for teams, unofficial ones that could get used in storylines or news items. You could have official nicknames and then alternate ones that get used in other contexts.

Diacritical Marks

The game’s file settings have troubles with diacritical marks (i.e., accent marks). I’d like to have teams represent their local language, but the file imports for logos and uniforms don’t work. So, for example, instead of “İstanbul Büyükşehir” I use “Istanbul Buyuksehir.”

The problem is that using diacritics in filenames doesn’t usually work, and the game doesn’t seem to parse those marks on import. It’s not a big deal, but it’s probably solvable by making the auto-load function look for the unaccented version of the letter, e.g., looking for “u” in the file name when it sees “ü” in the team name.

Player import

This is less a nitpick or drawback and more wishful thinking on my part. I would love to import real soccer players into the game from a game like Football Manager, which is basically the soccer equivalent of OOTP.

FM’s databases are notoriously opaque, so extracting any data from there can be a real pain, particularly because they don’t have backwards compatibility. So this is less to do with OOTP and more of a lament that large amounts of data transfer between OOTP and other games is pretty tough.

That said, I scraped a FIFA 12 website (which provides a simpler version of the kind of ratings that FM and OOTP use) and converted the top 51 (I meant to do 50, but lost count!) players from FIFA 12 to OOTP players and placed them on their IRL teams. I also put my thumb on the scale and picked the top five American players in FIFA 12 and put them in the game too, just for fun.

The FIFA ratings seem a lot more generous than OOTP because I essentially introduced 56 (the US players all ended up with super high ratings) legendary players into the game, so we’ll see how that plays out. Soccer also skews a lot younger than baseball, so it’ll be interesting to see how long Messi and Ronaldo stick around.

Okay, that’s that! Next up I’ll be simming towards Cup season, the spring knockout tournaments that precede the regular season. Five countries have cup tournaments: England, Germany, Spain, Italy, and France.
In the meanwhile, if you have questions or suggestions for what you want to see as I run this sim, please let me know!