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English >> Questions
Board restrictions (7)
The 'board' or at least the game software allows you to choose from your best 6 defenders, 5 midfielders and 3 forwards.
Does anyone know how this works if you only have 2 forwards or 4 midfielders?
And in a similar vein what if you have a youth midfielder with a star rating of 1.00 who is (say) your 5th best midfielder. But you have a defender who is better than him in midfield with maybe a midfield rating of 1.80. Which one does the board prefer and count as the 5th best?
I'll see if I can answer some of these questions for you next season with my second team. They are, after all, a disgrace to football. But it might be difficult to get the data quickly because of the following allowance:
If the line-up you created is on average one star stronger than the best 11 players of your opponent then the line-up is always allowed. This means you have a lot of freedom when you are expected still to win the match.
Cheers Stephen. Second teams do have their uses then.
The main reason I'm trying to find out some of the finer points is to see if there are any workarounds for some of the flaws in the restrictions.
In particular, if you have a DM trained with lots of duelling then although they may be the strongest player for their position the game sees them as a weak player. Same with a forward trained with duelling and longshots or similar.
If you have a few of these players then it becomes a real problem trying to play them and also rotate the squad.
The design flaw is, of course, that if they are genuinely a good player for their position then they should be allowed. The chance of getting this looked at any time soon is slim so I'd like to see if it's possible to structure the squad in such a way that gets around or at least reduces the problem.
I feel your pain there. I have two players in my squad who are the best or second best for specific positions in reality. But the game mechanics award them a laughably low star value when I put them there. This means it becomes a real pain to rotate my GKs and play them both.
There'll be a brief window when my GKs are close enough in star value that the game will be a breeze and then they'll swap over so the weak one becomes the strong one and we can do it all again :D
To be fair it's not really a huge problem for me at the moment.
My DM is popular so plays every match and this means I only have 2 'weak players' left to play with. The main problem is the second Gk counts as 2 and it can be difficult rotating the squad to give xp to the youngsters.
However, I'm looking ahead and planning to have a few of these kind of players in the future. But there's no point spending a load of money on buying them and training them up if it becomes too diffcult to pick the strongest team.
The whole point of the restrictions is to try and stop you deliberately losing (which it doesn't) and not to prevent you from picking what you think is the best team.
Agreed. The restrictions are a bit of a sledgehammer to crack a nut. There are weak players and then there are weak players. Both kinds count the same. There was a game today where two 14 year olds played 45 mins in what should have been a very tough match for his opponent. Board still allowed the lineup, despite the fact it made a defeat much, much more likely.
Unfortunately the tool to prevent deliberate cheating (I'm not saying what I saw is deliberate cheating, I know it wasn't) doesn't really work and it doesn't preserve the integrity of the competition either.
It's never difficult to lose a match if you really want to and most people who do that aren't cheating if they are doing it for the perceived benefit of their club. Either for more popularity, choosing to stay in the same league, getting relegated or simply fielding players for experience and not bothering too much about the result.
Since the board restrictions don't actually work as intended I really can't see the point of it. They makes most people's selections a bit more difficult while not really achieving anything. In addition to my previous examples there are also players who may be 'weak' by star rating but have much better specials.
The whole thing needs a rethink.
This wasn't my intention when starting the thread but - assuming we can't just abandon the restrictions - it seems to me that one solution to the problem would be to have a dispensation scheme a bit like with the U21s where you can register players as 'not weak' and give a reason. These could be requests that are reviewed and agreed by admin.