Hello Hello.
I havent been online too much recently. There was a slow week in the GFL and because of it Kappa decided to hold back the latest fixtures until some more games had been completed. As such i have only played 3 GFL games in the last 10 days or so. The deadline for fixtures and the last remaining cup tie is tonight, so hopefully once i wake up tomorrow i will be able to see whats going on next week.
The lack of league games and just generally being a little frustrated at online ranked games at the moment (for reasons i will cover in a bit) has led to me exploring what the game has to offer offline a lot more.
I have a BAP career running, which i started when the game first came out. I am currently about 2 or 3 games into season 3, which shows how much i play it. There just isnt enough depth to the mode for me. Its just game after game and the overall goal of making your created player a Legend isnt enough of a draw to keep me playing it, i tend to dip in a play one or two games when nothing else is going on.
I started as an Arsenal player and the early games were great, playing in the reserves, but i was quickly promoted to first team football and at the end of season one Barcelona were keen to secure my services. Not realistic at all. I signed for Barca, had an amazing season there, and at the end of the season, the best club i could look at moving to was werder bremen. No consistency. Another thing i have noticed is that there isnt any activity elsewhere in the mode. All teams and players remain the same for the duration of your career. My final BAP gripe is that when i got to Barca i took Eto's place in the first team and he dissapeared from the game altogether. So i was stuck playing every game with Messi and Henry, i guess it could be worse, without the option to rotate Eto into games. Most likely a bug but a fairly big and annoying one!
I play lounge modes whenever my mates come round for beers and would recommend them to everyone. We usually pick one lower rated team and one higher rated team each, and then get stuck in. The cheap shots make things really interesting, Playing as Sheffield Utd with reduced stats against a boosted AC Milan is only funny after the correct amount of beers. Its nice to see the league tables at the end of the evening too, as long as you have the bragging rights.
Manager mode has been a weird one this year too. I have three running at the moment, one as Aldershot, one i started as Arsenal when the game came out and one as fenerbahce which i set up to practise playing with them on. As with BAP i find it really really hard to stay interested, i literally feel like i am slogging through every game just to get to the next transfer window to add a little variety. I used to love MM but i have seen the same format for so long its hard to find anything fresh about it. The AI is pretty bad offline and there doesnt seem to be any difference between playing one team and another besides the shirts.
So its back to online for me. I am going to have to suck it up and get back out there amongst the QRM players. Playing Man utd and Barca every game is no more or less repetitive than playing offline i guess. All i want is a little variety. Which is why I have been trying to gather together a load of information regarding Manual leaderboards being seperate from the main boards.
See the post before this one for details of the thread on the Official forums and how to contact me if you have any feedback or anything to add. I really think EA need to add the option for manual players to be able to matchup against each other easily online and play ranked games. Waiting in lobbies is tedious, and the assisted players dont have to do it. There is a massive difference in the control schemes, its almost a different game mode, so i dont think wanting to be treated seperatly is unreasonable. As i have mentioned a few times, the amount of manual players is increasing daily and adding Manual leaderboards and making manual matchmaking easier would boost and continue this trend. So far people have responded well to the idea and i have made some progress on my mission to dig out all of the past feedback on the matter out from the fifa forums.
Cheers guys
Tom