u/bfhrt

Apologies for being so naval-gazingly meta. Has anyone else ever been unemployed enough to come to a similar conclusion?

I think current day ramble is great, and I unquestioningly love the boys, but I think both their early days and the recalibration in the last few years (basically increasingly reverting to old school ramble) shows that they could have followed a more "build it and they will come" approach.

I think it's genuinely perplexing how little they have sometimes realised that THEY are the USP, in terms of their personalities and chemistry.

Two outstanding albums of course, and I think both are sort of elevated by the other one existing cus of the contrast.

In terms of quality of the songs, I don't think there's much in it, I might even give that to either/or. I just massively prefer the arrangement and production of XO.

It's a bit of an oversimplification, but ultimately I think the extra instrumentation and "bigger" arrangement elevates rather than dilutes the songwriting. Same way I much prefer the Ravel version of Pictures at an Exhibition than the Mussorgsky piano version.

It's a real pity they're all pretty much cynical pandering grifters, cus it could be a genuinely really interesting genre of video.

Anyone else agree that having a four person panel massively elevates the show?

I think it's fair enough for the random midweek episodes, but I'm always disappointed when Monday and Friday episodes only have 3 people. It just fucks up the rhythm I think.

I also think it's unfair to newcomers like DC, I think it's easier to ease into the vibes of a long established show when you're 25% rather than 33.3% of the panel, right?

one for the old heads

I'm probably just being old, but I found the discord channel... overwhelming.

To be clear, I think it's absolutely great that I can look at a summary of a mediocre Northampton Town season from 30 years ago and see most of the squad have their own pages, even the ones who played like two seasons at the very lowest levels of professional football.

But my pal, when doing his English Lit masters, would get pretty much all the articles he wrote about authors insta-deleted. Authors notable enough to appear in dozens of university syllabuses, and get pretty sizable paragraphs in academic textbooks, and similar. He was a pretty experienced Wikipedian as well - I don't think it was a case of him not getting the benefit of the doubt because he was writing crappy articles without an understanding of the tone/culture of Wikipedia.

I'm not sure if this is a case of poor guidelines or poor enforcement of them, but I think this is pretty objectively Bad. I'm not calling for the culling of the page for Chopper Smith and his 17 appearances for Kidderminster Harriers, but if an author is genuinely considered one of the dozen most important post-formalists or whatever, they absolutely should be allowed to stay as well.

Is this basically still the policy, or have things changed?

I have barely played since, but I had already been in semi-retirement for a while.

The thing I find funniest is realising how much of the stuff I did (and would confidently share on the few occasions people asked for advice) was basically predicated on absolutely fuck all. Oh yeah, assistant manager, make sure you get good man management and determination. Why? Er...

In a team sport where you need a quality squad of 20+ players to succeed in domestic football, discussing which dude a pretty arbitrarily selected panel of journalists have voted for to be the Best Player In The World is just fucking stupid.

I genuinely don't know if anyone really plays franchise mode or would be remotely interested in what I'm on about, but hello. Having wasted a non-insignificant amount of my 34 and a half years on this planet playing various sports management sims, I honestly think hoopland is really great. For lots of reasons.

I had already been slowly gaining knowledge of basketball and the NBA over the last year or two, but I still couldn't really tell you what a power forward or a pick and roll is. I do however know how to minmax number goes brrr games like this one.

Intrigued to see the perspective of people who perhaps know a lot about basketball but less about games like this more generally.

I'm an English 34 year old who has been playing cm/fm (/lma/premier manager 97 on the mega drive/the one where you could set the price of the cheeseburgers and bet against your team etc etc) since I was about 6 years old. A football management game pervert, ultimately. Ultimate soccer manager, that's another one.

Anyway, I've always thought the YouTube content around the game was a bit crap, and unimaginative. I've recently started to get into nba, and have been enjoying the MyNba mode on the 2k game, which is like the management modes that (used to?) get added to FIFA games.

As a sidenote, I actually think basketball could be a decent contender for the next sport to get a top quality management game - if only cus of the inherent smallness of it. Easier to simulate a game played 5v5 on a 28m*15m court right?

Anyway, there is lots of decent MyNba stuff on YouTube where people make alternate reality/experiment videos, and this is probably my favourite so far. Such an ambitious project to brute force the game into making a English football pyramid-esque system in the NBA, especially compared to the typical equivalent FM "I locked Haaland onto Bradford Park Avenue for 200 seasons!!" stuff.

Long-term is an important clarification, cus I think the games have largely gotten better progressively, and as someone who has been here since getting cm01/02 for Christmas, I still think FM 24 is the peak of the series.

FM 26 is prob the first time I've thought an installment was actively worse than its predecessor since cm4.

I initially wrote a really long and rambling theory for why I think this the case, but I deleted it cus it was shit and annoying, and also cus I'm not trying to convince anyone of a hot take, genuinely just curious what other people think.

Of the ~20 or so subreddits I lurk and occasionally post on, this one is definitely the one where negative opinions about the thing the subreddit is dedicated to are most negatively received. I'm not saying that's an inherently good or bad thing, I'm just curious if that reflects other people's experiences.