Pace & Acceleration in football video games...
These two skills have been a bugbear for me throughout all my years playing football management games.
The problem is games companies seem to treat Pace & Acceleration (lets call it Quickness) like any other skill in the game - often scaling them the same as something like passing.. i.e. 1 - 20, with one being very poor, and twenty being excellent. In regards to Quickness following the same logic, 1 would be ultra slow and 20 lightening quick.
That way of thinking is flawed because in competitive league football there is no way you would see a player getting picked for a team if his quickness is so far off the general pace that he'd be an embarrassment, let alone a liability. Well okay... maybe occasionally you'll see it in a pub league on a Sunday morning.
But pro and semi-pro footballers are athletes, and there really isn't much difference between the fastest players playing in the Premier league and the fastest players playing in the Blue Square leagues. What sets these players apart are other crucial aspects, like talent and fitness. But in football simulations going back decades, games companies never really grasped that concept correctly - often leading to their games being invariably easy to dominate just by building a team based on quickness, with all other attributes secondary. FM11 & FM12 were prime examples where often (not always) a team full of lesser skilled but very quick players could dominate a slower but much more skillfully balanced team.
I remember testing this theory in the FM11 editor - giving one team 20 quickness for every player but only 5 in their mental and technical skills.... a team of super fast but technically lacking players if you like. And I put them up against a team of players with just 10 quickness but 15 in their technical and mental abilities.
The lesser-skilled but much faster team would run rings around the slower, more skillful team, and thanks to no collision detection, the faster strikers would just run through and create endless clear cut chances.
In real life it'd take the slower but more skillfully astute team about 2 minutes to realise they're up against a team of Usain Bolts with the technical ability of Carlton Palmer, and they'd adjust their game-plan accordingly - probably by dropping deeper and not allowing the opposition space to exploit. Computer AI just isn't good enough to recognise that type of thing yet and this is why Quickness is often an overpowered skill.
In FM13 its good to see SI have finally added player collision detection. In previous FM's players could just sprint through other players - this compounded the over-powered quickness skills. However thanks to the new collision detection they can no longer do that. They often get 'blocked' or stopped in their tracks. This bodes well for the future.
I still think Pace & Acceleration should be scaled differently than the 1 - 20 we currently have though. I think something along the lines of no visual numerical values at all for these particular skills - to give us at least some ambiguity - and have them instead displayed as "Very Quick" "Quick" "Above Average" "Average" and "Below Average". That's 5 categories. 5 levels of 'Quickness', not 20. So the difference between "Very Quick" and "Below Average" is narrowed - allowing players generated at the highest levels and those generated at the lowest levels to have more realistic disparities between them.
If the general scale of quickness is narrowed, it will bring into to play, and make much more important, all the other skills in the game, both technical and mental.
These two skills have been a bugbear for me throughout all my years playing football management games.
The problem is games companies seem to treat Pace & Acceleration (lets call it Quickness) like any other skill in the game - often scaling them the same as something like passing.. i.e. 1 - 20, with one being very poor, and twenty being excellent. In regards to Quickness following the same logic, 1 would be ultra slow and 20 lightening quick.
That way of thinking is flawed because in competitive league football there is no way you would see a player getting picked for a team if his quickness is so far off the general pace that he'd be an embarrassment, let alone a liability. Well okay... maybe occasionally you'll see it in a pub league on a Sunday morning.
But pro and semi-pro footballers are athletes, and there really isn't much difference between the fastest players playing in the Premier league and the fastest players playing in the Blue Square leagues. What sets these players apart are other crucial aspects, like talent and fitness. But in football simulations going back decades, games companies never really grasped that concept correctly - often leading to their games being invariably easy to dominate just by building a team based on quickness, with all other attributes secondary. FM11 & FM12 were prime examples where often (not always) a team full of lesser skilled but very quick players could dominate a slower but much more skillfully balanced team.
I remember testing this theory in the FM11 editor - giving one team 20 quickness for every player but only 5 in their mental and technical skills.... a team of super fast but technically lacking players if you like. And I put them up against a team of players with just 10 quickness but 15 in their technical and mental abilities.
The lesser-skilled but much faster team would run rings around the slower, more skillful team, and thanks to no collision detection, the faster strikers would just run through and create endless clear cut chances.
In real life it'd take the slower but more skillfully astute team about 2 minutes to realise they're up against a team of Usain Bolts with the technical ability of Carlton Palmer, and they'd adjust their game-plan accordingly - probably by dropping deeper and not allowing the opposition space to exploit. Computer AI just isn't good enough to recognise that type of thing yet and this is why Quickness is often an overpowered skill.
In FM13 its good to see SI have finally added player collision detection. In previous FM's players could just sprint through other players - this compounded the over-powered quickness skills. However thanks to the new collision detection they can no longer do that. They often get 'blocked' or stopped in their tracks. This bodes well for the future.
I still think Pace & Acceleration should be scaled differently than the 1 - 20 we currently have though. I think something along the lines of no visual numerical values at all for these particular skills - to give us at least some ambiguity - and have them instead displayed as "Very Quick" "Quick" "Above Average" "Average" and "Below Average". That's 5 categories. 5 levels of 'Quickness', not 20. So the difference between "Very Quick" and "Below Average" is narrowed - allowing players generated at the highest levels and those generated at the lowest levels to have more realistic disparities between them.
If the general scale of quickness is narrowed, it will bring into to play, and make much more important, all the other skills in the game, both technical and mental.