Thank you! Now will an FM Aurora skin from Sortitoutsi work on my copy of WWSM?

Yeah should be fine

(that is presuming its made for the correct version of the game - ie. FM2005 skins will not be guarenteed to work on FM2006 and vice versa)

I did not know that colours do not change according to teams by default. I had used Chameleon up until Frogger recommended Aurora, then I switched to Aurora Flow (Blue/Left, for what it's worth). I tried Frogger's new favourite style of Swoosh but couldn't deal with the fact that the in-game slider is tiny so I stuck with Aurora.

Swoosh, I believe, has some extra statistics in one of the player's screens.

Holidays are over. Someone tell me what city Digital River is in. :D

Thanks, Marc.

Digital River patch now available from www.sigames.com and the check for updates button inside the game. Apologies for the delay

NIIIIIIIIIIIIIIICE!!!

w00t!

WOOOOOOHOOOOOOOOOOOOO! Before I leave for work. Excellent.

oooooy. I hate one thing about this game, it's too popular. 68 mb d/l for the patch and the thing is crawling. Almost 4 hours left right now.

double dola- it has slowed down even more. 9 hrs. :(

yeah i've been downloading all day

Someone needs to mirror this. Ah, well. I just came home with an XBox 360, so I'll just set that up and play with it until this patch gets downloaded.

Not working must be killing you. :mad:

we really need a mirror for that patch... downloading at the blazing speed of 5.36KB/sec, download should be over in 3hr 32 min... sigh...

FM

that is blazing, I am at 4.83KB/sec. :thumbsup:

that's cause our lines are icy cold up North, bytes slide better :p

FM

I have the file and am now uploading it to my webspace just in case anyone needs a faster mirror (it won't be blindingly fast, but it'll be good enough). The file won't be on my webspace for about half an hour, so at 7pm EST, I'll have someplace for FOFC to download from, if anyone's going to be interested. Anyway, I'll check back here after I'm done uploading the file and see if anyone has any thoughts.

So what differences has everyone noticed with the patch so far? The two things I noticed when playing last night were that...

A) The threading issue is fixed and...

B) Player's stamina has increased greatly. I was able to have my entire team on tight marking and closing down of 20 (except my CD's) for an entire game and I didn't have to sub anyone.

So...?

http://www.operationsports.com/fofc/...ad.php?t=45942

Damn, I seriously need new glasses or something...:(

a couple I noticed after playing some last night:

1) they tweaked the 2d engine some more and while it was doing a good job before, I felt it was even more diverse in events and twists last night.

2) the "sound going off after quick tactics" issue is still there :(

FM

whatever happened to the players getting pissed at the Ref's? was that overdone in comparison to real life or something?

I just had one of these the other day, so they are still in the game.

Having a blast with this game, by the way. Was starting to think it was too easy but that was before my team tanked three matches, before my newly acquired defender got stressed out by some comments I made about him, before both my right midfielders went down with injuries, before my goalkeeper forgot how to catch the ball, before I went over the salary budget, and before I ran my lowly semi-pro team over 70,000 pounds into debt.

I'm not sure it's too easy any more.

For what it's worth, I've found a great game speed balance with lower leagues by loading the normal database and then loading all the players from the countries I've activated leagues in. I tried the large database size but the game was sluggish.

...so I turned on threading since patching and just had my first CTD. Sucks. off with the threading....grrr

great, it wont let me turn off threading....f'n wonderful

Oh great. I didn't have any last night. Now you've got me paranoid.

i think it did it when it tried to Auto-save. Has anyone found a correlation to the threading and when it "used to" CTD? Is there a workaround, like turning off auto-save?

I haven't downloaded the patch yet because of getting Civ IV for Christmas, but when I had threading on I tended to get the CTD's the first continue after a game.

Mine would just crash when my cpu got too hot. I noticed that if I tried to continue my game while my fan was running, it would crash. I never noticed anything related to the auto save. I'll be playing for most of the night tonight so I will see what I encounter.

Come on, you big babies. Just suck it up and live without the threading. Mine doesn't even let me select threading as an option, and the game isn't that slow.

(I'm just joking about the "big babies" thing, so please don't get mad)

what really sucks is now that Ive checked it I cant uncheck it :(

If you're a brave man jump into the windows registry and find the one marked Sports Interactive / Football Manager 2006 and kill it, when the game restarts it'll write a new one with default settings and it'll be turned off again (although I will try and remember to check whats up with enabling/disabling it - will have to be friday though as my eldest son is ill at the moment so I'm looking after him at home tomorrow).

Marc V - Could you kindly shed some light on the effects of time wasting. I see a lot of tactics over on the SI boards with it on full claiming it helps with ball possession. I haven't seen it yet, so I'm wondering if it has any effect on that at all.

Basically I'm just trying to get a grasp on how to fully use it.

Thanks.

Time wasting - its basically a situation where a team attempt to play 'keep ball' more often passing it amongst themselves and away from the opposition.

A player may also 'go to the flag' which involves moving to the corner flag on the pitch (generally the oppositions end, but not always) - this is because its very hard to get a 'clean' non-foul tackle in if you hold the ball in that area and keep your body between your opponents and yourself (they basically have to run around you which requires at least two opposition players really to pull off).

Advantages of this ploy:
* Frustrates the opposition which can mean they push onto you and open up holes for you to exploit and better still will wind up any volitile players on their team.
* If your team is good enough to hold onto the ball for long periods it can effectively kill a game

Disadvantages:
* Your fans and theirs will hate it, this is a very very negative ploy.
* If your team ISNT good enough then you'll find them losing the ball trying to play 'keep me' in the wrong areas and give away a scoring chance ..

Generally safest to use when the opposition is tired and thus not as able to chase down the ball as otherwise (ie. if you go ahead during Extra Time in a cup-game then you can probably safely use this to kill the game off, unless they've just brought on a load of subs).

Hope this helps,

Marc

Thanks Marc, yeah that sheds some definite light on the subject. So since one of the objectives is to keep the ball more, would you say that this is kind of what Chelsea uses to help them "rest" on offense and maintain more ball possession?

I turned Threading back on and had zero crashes with the new patch (I did with the old one, though) However, I also don't have autosaving on, so you may want to look into that. Also, I didn't play as long as normal because Spurs had a game that I needed to listen to (w00t, 2-0 win! CL here we come! :)) I'll report back if I have any crashes tomorrow while playing.

About time wasting...my current normal tactics have this set about at often (about 3/4ths of the way...or around 15). I guess it helps, soon after making some tweaks (that one included) I went from struggling around 14th in November to 3rd at the end of the season, one the Premiership and FA Cup my next year and am doing well again. As well, the tactic has done well in the CL.

But as I said, there were several other changes that were made in addition. Such as a backwards arrow for Carrick (and holding the ball up) and a few other tweaks here and there.

I am using the Aurora 2006 flow left skin. I am enjoying it except for a small problem. On days when I have a match or right after a match, the game "continues" for me without my pressing anything. After a match I've had 2 seperate e-mails regarding player physio/specialist decisions and the game has "decided" physio for me without my doing anything. On days when I have matches, it takes me to the squad selection page without my pressing "continue" or anything. Has anyone else experienced this?

This is the sort of tactic that a lot of large teams use when they're 1-0 up to kill off a game around mid-way through the second half (I have seen teams try it earlier in a game, but its generally a lot less likely).

Chelsea do this very well - as have Liverpool in past seasons, England* (international team) are generally abysmal at it and often find themselves under excess pressure because they've tried to hold onto the ball in the wrong place and lost it ...

*This I tend to put down to the fact that this tactic relies on knowing your team-mates very well and being able to complement them by moving into open space to recieve a pass when they're under pressure, something which comes more naturally to a club side than an international side (where they might only play together a few weeks of the year).

are there any good training files out there. I made a couple but Id like to see some that others created to see if Im missing the boat.

What I would suggest is to make sure and always have your tactics and ball control training high for everybody -- I find that stressing the mental aspects of my players training makes for a big difference on the pitch as time progresses.

kill the whole thing or just one thing inside of it? under /installs? or the WWSM one? just "enable_threading"?

Well, I haven't had any crashes with my pre patch game, but my new game started with the new patch, I get that same old crash. :(

I downloaded the patch last night and fired up my game, turned off the threading and had a crash within 15 minutes. Guess it's back to threading off for now. :-(

Dola, I really regret getting the download version.

Finally got sucked in and managed to take Serie C1B side Napoli to promotion in my first year. Okay, so the season isn't quite done yet, but my record is something like 23w-4d-1 and I believe if I get first in my division it's an automatic promotion (instead of playoffs). I'm still in the Coppa Italia C as well (quarterfinals). These things probably weren't the hardest tasks in the world, but this is the first time I've played the game.

Now to the tricky part. I was just offered a contract extension and it kind of blows. I'm making 2100 euros/week currently and this new 4-year deal will give me 1800 a week. Also, the transfer budget and wage budget are hardly increasing at all, which I can understand. We aren't making huge dollars right now and the team I've got is probably already close to being more of a Serie B side anyways.

Why are they offering me less wage though? They are ecstatic with my current performance, so that can't be it. I ended up delaying the deal and I've got until the end of the season to sign it. I really want to stay at Napoli and get them to Serie A, but not if they are gonna be totaly cheapasses.

Anyone got any advice or thoughts on the matter? Do I dare negotiate with them or do I not have enough bargaining power yet?

A lot of it depends on how much money your team has. I mean no matter how good of a job you're doing, if the balance isn't high, then you're not going to get a raise, nor are they going to increase transfer or wage funds.

I started my career in the Slovakian 2nd Division making $22k per year. I got us promoted the first season and made money fairly steadily. My contract extension offer was for $20k per year, but with a slightly higher transfer budget. I had the same questions as far as why would they offer me less money. I did try to negotiate, but they (very politely, actually) told me they simply accomodate my demands (which was for $24k, iirc) until the club's financial status was more secure. I wanted to stay though, so I ended up taking their last offer.

When that contract was up two years later, they offered me a 3-year deal @ $70k per.

Like MikeVick said, it depends heavily on the club's overall financial status. If they're delighted with your performance, then it's probably a safe bet that they simply can't afford to pay you any more. Shouldn't hurt to ask though, again assuming you're on good terms with the Board.

Whoa, had to put some life back in this thread.

Just had a question about the swap position function this year. Now I know what this does, but what exactly are the advantages of it? I thought I would be cool and have my wingers swap just like Chelsea is famous for but after a couple of seasons of doing this I started to wonder is this even helping me? Then I started getting paranoid about having my LW playing on the right half of the game (especially with the new patch) and wondered if he was even playing up to his full abilities on that side.

Anyway, thoughts?

I'd only suggest using the swap positions on wingers if you're very very confident that you have truly world class players in your squad - if you don't then its more likely you'll find them in the wrong place at the wrong time.

More commonly use it on DR/MR or DL/ML combinations to encourage cross-overs ...

Hey Marc, while you're sniffing around in here...;)

Is there an available definition list for player's favorite moves? I am puzzled by several of them.

Thanks in advance!

But what exactly are the advantages of players crossing over?

Does it come into play when...let's say my left winger gets dragged over to the right sid due to the nature of the play and then since he and the right winger know to switch positions he will just stay over on that side so the team doesn't leave a big gap on the left side waiting for him to get back over there?

I liken it to having an offensive defender in hockey, à la Paul Coffey, a guy who likes to go forward on the wing and effectively switch position for a little while with the winger on his side.

I have a DR on my current Luton Town squad, Kevin Foley, who does this fairly often, without me asking him since he's got the prefered move of "likes to go forward whenever possible" so I wouldn't even think about asking him to switch as I'd almost fear he'd feel like making the switch a permanent one ;)

Seriously, he is amazing at crossing the ball into the box and he does switch with his side winger quite well...

FM

Err, this is odd...

Strang Table...

That looks really odd to me...Now, I'm will to accept that perhaps Malaga B gets relegated because Malaga A is being relegated from Primera, and that Castilla may not get promoted because Real Madrid is, obviously, in Primera Division.

But I don't get Albecete. Now, I'd love for them to not get promoted if it meant I could nab Mark Gonzalez...but thats a bit odd looking.


Also, Mark, an annoying bug I've had for some time now...when a player makes a fuss about something, sometimes when I answer him, I get two messages about my reply...and this results in two responses from the player...which isn't a problem when they're both the same...but when one is negative and the other positive, it's annoying.

Oh and what's up with this?

Let's say I'm offering a new contract to one of my players and the player/agent will say that he requires $15,000 per week for example. So I offer him a new contract, basically as it's initially laid out on the screen, and then I'll get an email saying how the player will not accept the wage amount. Well he was the one that threw out that amount so why is he not accepting it? Then if I go back in and offer him a new contract, the wage amount requested will be the same. This is something that has always confused me.

Ditto. My guy claimed the offered wage was a "pittance" despite it being exactly what he'd asked for.

Anybody get a "array access" error? Do I have to delete and restart my career?

Yeah, I've gotten that bit about wage demands once or twice before too. Strange. Footballers... :rolleyes:


Also, Marc...I'm having some problems with Friendlies. Used to, it was that I'd try to schedule some, and they'd be accepted...but anything over four just...vanished. Now, I've got my AssMan doing it, but lately I've had several cases where like either he or another team will offer a friendly, I'll accept, and then a day or two later...it's cancelled! I was really looking forward to my friendly (at Xerez) with Real Madrid too, :(

Oh, and about the previous thing...I figured out that Albecete didn't have one cuz they were still fighting for the championship. Though, I think they should prolly have been given a P untill it was official that they were champions, oh well.

Wow, now this is awesome SI!

Greedy little...

I just wish I could tell him to either take GAK's deal, or sit on the bench all year at Xerez. Oh well. Still cool. Lucky for him, I'm not in the best financial situation and the good that'll come from his transfer outweighs the bad.

I"ve been playing, or more accuratly, trying to play this game off and on. As I've said before I'm a complete noob to this type of football both in dealing with strategy on the pitch and roster moves ie transfers, buying, and selling. Not to mention dealing with so many different levels of competition and then throw in promotion and relegation on top of it all, something this Yank has never had to deal with in his professional sports leagues.

I have been thinking of picking up a ps2 game like "Winning 11" (I"ve heard this is the best one) to try to help me out at least on the strategy side of the game. Anyone esle play any of these games? Any opinion whether this would be a waste of time and money or if it might actually help?

I'd prefer to watch games on tv to help me learn about the game. But where I live matches are few and far between unless you count the occasional game shown on one of the two Mexican channels we get on our cable system and I don't speak spanish.

Thanks

I can point you in the right direction if you want to watch some taped games on the computer. Need a BitTorrent client though.

I don't know what a bit torrent client is but if you have links to info on that and the taped matches I'll sure take a look.

Thanks

Yes, I've gotten that twice now, when negotiating contracts.

No, you don't have to restart. The game kicked me to Windows when that happened. I just clicked back on the game in the task bar and immediately saved it under a different name. Quit Football Manager and then restarted and the game was fine.

Dola...

I've been playing this game a ton in the past couple of weeks. Played Workington in the Conference North for a bit then decided that my game was too clunky because of how many leagues I selected. Started a new game unemployed then took the first job opening in Northern Ireland's lowest division. Trying to build them up to the top then leverage that job performance into an offer to come to England Conference North or South.

Been writing a small dynasty about the second game:
Lurgan Celtic

I think your best bet is to pick up Marc's tip guide off of the SI website. It was new to me way back when I started playing this game (damn, five years now!) and that was a BIG help for me.

PM sent. :)

I started a career out unemployed with all of the UK running and was actually offered the Lurgan job but declined because I was "familiar" with that team through your dynasty. I waited and was hired as manager of Burscough in the English Conference North.

By the way, since downloading the Digital River patch I've gotten some strange things happen when loading the game, notably the box congratulating me for trying the demo. After that, my game doesn't load but CTD's. Usually rebooting fixes it. Has anyone else noticed this?

Neat. How's the game going?

You have a reply, and thanks for the help.

Thanks GB I'll give that a try.

A few people on the SI boards are having the same problem. I basically have to reload the game every time now. So far, that seems to work.

I feel sorry for everyone that got the digital download from them, but this is too funny. Took them how long to put up the patch? And then they broke it in the process? You're kidding, right?

Unfortunately, no. It takes about 2 minutes on my machine to load the saved game (~ 350MB and growing) only to have it crash back to the desktop since it thinks I've using the demo. I then restart the game and it works.

I just hope it continues to work in some fashion...

Just the way I feel about the whole thing. It's kinda sad that I have the digidownload version and while it works fine, I consider myself extremely lucky not to have the crashes. It shouldn't be that way...

I sympathise with my FOFC brethren who are having a rough time with it...

FM

I'm enjoying this game but there are still numerous bugs that need sorted.

Yup, same deal. Also, if you just start a new game...when you get to 6 months, it'll crash. Strangely, that helped me in my current Xerez game...I had saved and exited to go watch the NFL playoffs, came back played my next game and immediately after losing quite badly got that...since it said it saved I figured I wouldn't have to replay, but apparently it didn't save, so I had to replay...and won. :)

I chalk that one up to God being a fan. :)

But yes, I have to restart my game each day...it's annoying, but oh well. It'd be nice if we could get some sort of fix for that, and for the threading issue, since these are download only problems. :(

I continued getting the array access out of bounds error and ending up doing the check disk, went back in there were no fixtures for my team! So, I ended up deleting the old game :( and starting a new one.

I am getting the demo notice, followed by an error (I believe R6025, can't recall off the top).

Restarting the game produces the same result.

This is frustrating to no end.

Care to elaborate on this?

Off the top of my head:
1. Games where you go in and your team is on a 10 game winning streak and during the match you see the message: XXXX is in control, this will be their 10th win in a row. When in reality it is the 11th win.

2. Messages about playing games at <%stadium> in the news section. Usually see from a game being played between 2 National teams.

3. Telling a player that he will get more time playing in the first team in the coming weeks and he responds that he is delighted with the managers comments and has seen a far greater commitment from the manager to get him into first team action in recent weeks...but you haven't really done this and the player is still unhappy.

4. Players who complain that they aren't getting playing time, but the reason they haven't been is because they are suspended (and have been for the last 2 or 3 games) by the league and you can't play them.

5. "upto" is two words, isn't it?

There's more that caught my eye. Its hard for me to remember not being at home with my notes to look at, but I'll bring them in and post them if you want.

Crap, I just started a new game because I thought that would help. This really sucks -- I've been playing this game for five years and have never had issues like this. :(

6. The intermittent sound loss when using the quick changes in games.

That's my main one, very annoying...

FM

I've always been able to get it working when I restart immediately afterwards, I've never had it come back with that error again while playing unless I exit out of it for awhile.

Maybe you knew this already, but after you use the quick tactics and the sound "breaks", just pause and unpause real quick. The sound will be back.

I know that, but I still find it VERY annoying to have to do that...

FM

Gotcha. I move so fast during the games now that I never use quick tactics anymore.

yeah, I'm a slow player during games, tweaking here or there a lot and having the sound go off when I use the simple quick tactic thingie, well, it's annoying. Have I said that before, annoying? ;)

FM

When you say restart you mean reboot the computer, right? That's what I have to do. And I also get the very slow initial load, so all in all it's taking 5-10 minutes to get into the damn game.

It's funny how different things bother different people, I've never had a big issue with the sound breaks....

well, if I had the big issue you are having, the sound thing would also be tiny to me ;)

Oh, even though I don't have any crashes (knock on wood), I do find that the start of the game is v-e-r-y slow. I don't mean loading my game, this was slow in FM2005, I mean before we get to the splash screen. My PC sits there with nothing apparently happening, for at least a good minute...

FM

No. I've never had to restart my comp. or anything like that.

What usually happens is I start comp, load up WSM, pick load last game, it loads and then goes to desktop with the "blah blah demo blah" junk, I click ok and then click on WSM icon on the bottom, two more errors come up and then it goes away. I then restart WSM, click on load last game, and it loads perfectly fine.

I have had many crashes to blue screen, more so than any other previous version.

incredibly..since following MArc's directions of regediting out the threading line, I get no crashes. knock on wood.

has any of you bought young players with the mention "touted as the new..."? I find this very cool. I'm at the start of the 2007/08 season with Luton Town and my starting keeper is getting up there in age at 35. I mean he's served me real well in my first two seasons but I was looking to find him a replacement in the offseason. I got a 20yo kid who's touted as the next Shay Given, not too bad, huh. Even better, I signed a 16yo off some League Two team and only realised once he got to my team that he is touted as the next Paul Robinson... Both of them are promising keepers and obviously the 16yo is a long way from the starting eleven, but the 20yo is already a top notch keeper with a couple of 20s in his skill set...

FM

7. When negotiating co-ownership deals, the other team will respond back with a transfer offer instead of the redone co-ownership deal. If you don't accept the original offer for one of your players to be a co-owned player, then it gets lost.

Actually, other than immediately after downloading, installing and playing the patch without rebooting I got one crash. But since then threading has been on and I haven't had any crashes while actually playing. It's the startup that's the issue now for me.

I do find myself manually saving much more often though, so don't know if that's a factor or not.

Hmmm. I'm at work so I can't remember right now exactly right now but IIRC I get the demo message, click on that and immediately get the crash and the two additional errors. No chance to hit any other icons.