[Carlo M]

It's been long enough to have an opinion on each of the new features. Which is you favourite and why?

For me, it's Dynamic League Reputation. I feel it's an excellent feature with long-term saves in mind. It has been requested for a while and SI have found a way to make it happen. I dare not speculate how complex it must have been to figure out, so props to SI for being able to deliver it.

Training is both more intricate and less mechanical now that players can have their individual programmes, subject to the manager's choice of emphasis. This was an area of the game left alone for a long time, but hopefully this superb step in the right direction will be subject to a follow-up in FM12.

The agents system, for me, has been disappointing and I can't help but be concerned that the system hasn't been tweaked much after 3 patches. It's a bit silly when some agents are able to rake in more from one deal than what they make over the course of a year or more in real life. The AI negotiation coding also needs a bit of work. In particular, if the agent waits for you to make an initial offer, they should almost always walk away if you offer something far lower than they expect, just as they do now on 11.3. when you fail to make an excessive offer immediately when a player has hardly any interest in joining. That was a nice touch, but it really needs to be added to normal negotiations where the player does have interest, too. Under no circumstances should we be able to offer £1 in order to play it safe and prevent paying too much / identifying what would be reasonable by what they respond with. It completely defeats the purpose of being made to make the initial offer in the first place. Another issue that needs addressing is where an agent snubs your offer, only for the player he represents to join another team with a significantly lower salary than what you offered. On the plus side though, it's fantastic to have "real time" negotiations at long last.

Match preparation is tolerable, but definitely didn't come anywhere close to living up to expectations for me. After conducting a series of tests which revealed extremely imbalanced familiar levels on 11.1 (as acknowledged in my topic on the bug forums at the time), I found that the quickest way to learn 3 tactics was to learn one at a time. Simultaneous learning of tactics was harshly penalized when learned in tandum, even if they were very similar / close to identical but for one difference. This convinced me that the feature was barely tested before release, to be honest. Furthermore, with the layout of the special focus area and the lack of clarification about which ones are and aren't relevant to an upcoming match, the overall presentation could have been better. Add to this the fact that your assistant urges you to chose your match preparation x days before a match, despite the fact that there is no merit in bothering unless it's the day before a match, and it surely makes for a clumsy introduction to the game for match preparation. Nevertheless, it has enormous potential should it get the attention and emphasis it deserves. Here's hoping that it does.

While board interaction is infinitely better than the near non-existent channel of communication with the board before, I can't help but be slightly critical of player interaction. While in most cases it can be a lottery, when you're eventually comfortable with commenting on player's performances, you will usually enjoy the luxury of being able to pick up free morale boosts more often than not. Considering how this makes it easier than ever before for your team to reach and maintain high levels of morale, this surely has a bearing on the difficulty of the game. After all, if you keep morale high and take advantage of the quicker rate in which you can be listed as a favourite personnel by your players, tactics become less important in order to be successful. Motivated players perform above the sum of their parts, arguably too much so.

The social networking / uploads stuff is something I don't really care for, but I understand that it's a popular feature that was much anticipated. I can't say I see the appeal, but that's just me.

So, for me, Dynamic League Reputation > Training > Match Preparation > Agents > Player & Board Interaction > Social Networking / Uploads.

An honorable mention to the vast match engine improvements between FM10 and FM11. That would be my true favourite feature, personally, but since it isn't branded as such, I excluded it from the poll.

What say you?

[cagiva]

I really like all the new features. Of course, as something new, there is no way they will be perfected so soon after creating.

Every new feature have more or less big issues to deal with, but as you said - the potential is huge and I tend to thing in that way rather blaming SI for not developing them in the first time with perfection.

The match preparation is something I use more - it's indivisible (the right word?) for the whole preparation and strategy for every next match.

I didn't voted for anything, as I think everything is good enough to cheer us up. As every year - I'm waiting for the next version of the game with huge optimism and positivism.

[supermini]

I voted for dynamic league reputations. It's the only feature worth mentioning, really. The 'improved' training is only slightly easier to work with, most of the time agents are annoying rather than interesting, player interaction is only a slight improvement (it still feels mechanical), match preparation is unbalanced and bugged, and social networks I don't care about as I have real friends and a telephone line. So it hasn't been my favourite version, really. I don't think there has been a substantial improvement since the tactics wizard and mind you that wasn't all SI.

The research they do on players each year is still extremely good and the match engine is better than it was, I'll give them that. It doesn't help that SI doesn't have a real competitor in the football manager market, really.