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vaeliget

something short sighted about [https://fm-arena.com/table/18-player-attributes-testing/](https://fm-arena.com/table/18-player-attributes-testing/) is that you might read it and think finishing+off the ball are useless stats, but you must consider that it's judging the performance of a FULL TEAM all with those stats. pace is useful on everyone, depending on tactic finishing and off the ball are only useful on 1-3 players. finishing and off the ball are still S+ stats for players in the positions that need them, but the tests aren't adjusted for the fact that giving your no-nonsense center back high finishing isn't going to come in handy very often, unless he tries some nonsense


MooseBadda

very short sighted. for one they are testing - the effect of increasing x stat for all players, playing x tactic, in x league , with x assistant manager making substitutions, on points accumulated after x games. which clearly brings a lot of variables and randomness into it no matter how many iterations are run. If you want to test whether higher passing leads to better passing i'm sorry to tell them but you have to WATCh the games to see the difference. plus, to assume greater passing would mean more points on it's own and less passing would lead to less points is absurd but it seems like they want to believe that and should be allowed to i guess. shrug.


please-send-me-nude2

> If you want to test whether higher passing leads to better passing i’m sorry to tell them but you have to WATCh the games to see the difference So a higher off the ball stat would lead to better animations but no recordable change in results


jeorjhejerome

I think the engine is flawed with how they favour physical players, and it should be a fix for fm25 with the new engine. But ppl saying the other attributes straight up dont matter are wrong. Specially because there are very few players who are actually great at ALL those meta attributes like in the tests. Most are average or good in some, bad in others. Thats when you look at other attributes to evaluate them. Like, I've built many good teams that werent made of pace merchants and found great success. It is an OP attribute when in the 17-20 range, but it isnt a requirement exactly for a good player.


Svonn

I fully agree - I would love to see some stat-driven rework, where they take some archetype-tactics (like tiki-taka for passing/vision) to implement some solid test scenarios that ensure all attributes have a meaningful impact in the relevant scenarios. As a developer, this is insanely hard to do, as changing one variable/behaviour can cause cascading changes and break several others. But I am fairly certain the FM devs try their hardest to improve that stuff as much as possible, since people usually don't work in that field if they aren't passionate about it.


jeorjhejerome

They've made improvements every year to the match engine, but they havent been really groundbreaking. I believe they are focusing on the new FM 25 for more changes, since its supposed to be a new engine.


Daltain

Is the engine changing massively or the graphical representation of the match engine? Also the AI is absolutely moronic in terms of tactics, player roles and formation so obviously you don't have to focus on the meta attributes to overperform, it just makes it even easier if you do.


jeorjhejerome

>Is the engine changing massively or the graphical representation of the match engine? Hopefully both, but idk. >you don't have to focus on the meta attributes to overperform, it just makes it even easier if you do. Yeah, but I mean, it isnt like ppl here portrayed in the sense of "everything else doesnt matter". Specially bc, like I said in the other comment, you wont find many 16s-in-every-meta-attribute players like those tests have. You'll have to rely on other stats too.


Cicero912

Nah I think the physical attribute weighting makes sense. But yeah, its 100% not needed to have a great team, it matters more for some positions (CB, Winger) but otherwise? You can work around it.


MooseBadda

about it being flawed in favouring physical players, i think it's built to do that. It can be said that football is a physically exerting game at all levels and better athletes would fare better. There are more than enough real life examples that favour it and tbf they have made the "favourable" attributes expensive in a way to balance it out.


jeorjhejerome

I disagree. In the game, pace merchants always perform better than irl. Players like Adama Traore or 18yo Vini werent world beaters just because they were super fast, because they lacked other qualities. In FM they'd be terrific strikers regardless. It is unrealistic.


MooseBadda

Is Adama Traore a great striker in the game ? Genuinely asking. Never knew that.


jeorjhejerome

If user-controlled, yeah. IIRC somebody did a test a while ago replacing City's attackers with Adamas only and they performed better than regular City


MooseBadda

Well, how realistic is that, in game, to find 10 Adama traores (i'm assuming the gk wasn't Adama Traore) to play in your system. I just checked and found the thread, the user created 4 Adama traores who could play the 4 attacking positions and replaced Man City's frontline with them. He also made it impossible for them to get injured and greatly increased their consistency. A lot of caveats there. Don't get me wrong, i'm not "defending SI or, saying the game is perfect or whatever" but why is that so much of a bad thing that has people in an uproar (it seems) ? You have people looking under the hood of a game and being unhappy at what they find. Well, it's a game, it's a program, if you try hard enough to break it, well it will break. I just checked in my save for players with just 20 pace 20 acc and found just one, Mbappe. Toned it down to 19/19 and found 5 , Mbappe, Adama, Alphonso Davies, Dan James and Daizen Maeda. The game is still playable and quite easy to play without doing what these "tests" are doing, so i'm always surprised to see people get so irate at the game when they see these "tests". oh well.


minos157

Me reading all these threads about meta attributes and best ways to build the team to game the match engine as I sit in my save in first place with my 200-1 odds team built entirely on star ratings only and have no idea what attributes my players have. ​ (The nerd in me loves these posts though!)


wetrwwr

nice test. the x stats give a bit of insight eg in boosted team, actual goals scored was above xg generally meaning players were more effective at putting chances away than expected. in the non boosted team, there's a mix of result in this same comparison which supports the match engine. it's logical that can happen to mere mortals at palace xg against vs actual conceded , also supports it. defenders need physicals. and they need less mental and technical, it's logical, for the tactics used defenders with league average or below league average physicals are going to have a tough time in the wrong tactic. no matter how talented they are on the ball. makes sense


piiJvitor

I'm impressed by how terrible the defense is despite having all those 16 attributes. The average xG against is almost the same and what seemed to make a difference here truly is the goalkeeper. The attack seems to be creating and converting more chances since the average xG increased by 5 goals and the average goals output increased by almost 12 goals. I'm still disappointed to see the attributes having such a little impact on how your team defends according to your findings. I think something worth testing is re running the test to see if the team keeps the same defensive record or if was just down to luck/unluck and re running the test but with the same goalkeeper. I'm glad to see that at least your attack and goalkeeper seems to be impacted by the said non meta attributes.


Svonn

Don't forget blank sheet tactic is quite terrible! Even a good squad with great mentals and technicals will concede many goals in the premier league. Also, I think the relevant mentals for defenders weren't change all that much, since most PL defenders have >13/14 in those attributes anyways.


_George_Costanza

One of the ways I quickly tested this was setting every Man City player to the stats Jonathan Quarcoo(godly physicals, terrible everything else, Norwegian semi-pro). They improved in the most meta stats but tanked everything else. They didn’t come close to winning the league. Still, they never got relegated in 5 tests with a team of Norwegian semi-pros, so it’s safe to weight those stats incredibly highly. Edit: Quarcoo’s physicals outside of pace are way lower than I remembered. He’s just fast. https://preview.redd.it/ustkl1td8olc1.jpeg?width=1290&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=dea7306c8bfd915334374cf3a166ae1d50ad75f0


Akitten

> Jonathan Quarcoo I mean, he's fast, but his other physicals are incredibly meh for the prem. The fact that speed seems to be all you need to stay up in the prem is madness.


_George_Costanza

I’m one of the people who thinks the degree to which meta stats matter breaks the game and has stopped me playing outside that small test, so no argument here! I will add a screenshot of his stats to my OP. They’re much worse than I remembered, the 17 natural fitness got confused with an important stat in my head.


MooseBadda

That's JQ the Norwegian-Ghanaian Flash. Put some respect on him haha


imabearlol

I don't understand these recent posts testing attributes and doing 5 season max when fm arena has done the same thing for each attribute over a sample size of thousands. Am I missing something here?


Svonn

Both are closely related, but there's a difference between: "We can't measure any change that can't be explained by RNG when increasing most attributes +5, except for pace, acceleration, etc." and "No stats except those play any role in the match engine". Increasing a single stat like passing by +5 is only like +2 or 3 CA, and most players in the given tactic (fm-arena uses some dribbling focused high-intensity tactic) don't really pass that much, so not really a surprise that the change is indistinguishable from RNG. Increase a stat like pace with +5 is also "only" ~8 CA, but it matters for each and every player on the field, especially if 1on1 compared to someone with 5 less. But for a proper comparison, they would have needed to only to do pace +1 or +2, since that's already as much CA. Even then, the impact is likely way higher, but you get the gist. I do totally understand why folks that are passionate about FM are feeling insecure with so many posts with totally exaggerated clickbait titles, I'm just hoping people calm down a bit and can, at the end of the day, still enjoy FM, knowing that while it's far from perfect, it's still by far the best football sim we have.


Stybb

I'll keep on saying that we need a large number of replicates for any of the stats to be meaningful. With only a small handful of replicates we could come to any conclusion either way.


KPplumbingBob

Thanks for doing this. But if the other test doesn't prove that non meta attributes matter very little, this one doesn't disprove it either. The boosted team should be doing way, way better than this. It still doesn't look good for the game and is more in line with FM Arena findings. It's basically more that your unboosted team underperfomed more than anything else. Unfortunately it seems the truth is that while non meta attributes do have an effect and are not just cosmetic, meta attributes are still by far more important than anything else. Telling people to just enjoy the game is burying your head in the sand.


ddyfado

Super late to the party but I'm the one who did the original test that this is responding to. Just wanted to say I appreciate someone going through the effort of trying to replicate this (and improving on some of my errors in setup). It's encouraging to see someone get results that do seem to suggest the "non-meta" attributes have a measurable difference, although as I said in my original post many times its hard to take too many definitives from a test like this. I appreciate the write up and the time that went into this a lot, so thanks OP!


Svonn

<3


Daltain

Was this done on the new patch? If so, it's not really refuting a test done on a different match engine. I put in a random 2.5 star player of mine into a CA calculator after making the changes you did and it has him at 173CA now. Not sure a team full of 173CA players coming 13th in the league is a glowing endorsement of the match engine.


jeorjhejerome

I dont think the new patch has any match engine/gameplay changes. At least in the patch notes I didnt see anything


Svonn

This was done with the old patch. CA with that kind of test is pretty meaningless, as real players with high CA are being Min-Maxed - if you take a at any player at that level, you will see that an attacking player like Kvaratshkelia will have very low Long Throws, Marking, Tackling, Positioning, etc., so that the available points go into the stats relevant to the role. To get the "real" CA of the players in the test, you'd need to substract the stats that are irrelevant for the role.


[deleted]

[удалено]


_George_Costanza

What you are describing is [the FM Arena attribute tests](https://fm-arena.com/table/26-player-attributes-testing/)


xkufix

Be the change you want to see in this world.


theocy88

I always thought its the CA that influences the game engine. Physicals have a greater weight on CA. Which kind of means any increase in physicals will have a disproportionate impact on your CA. Someone needs to do a 170 CA with technicals and mentals and one wIth physicals and run the test again🤣


3359N

That was covered ages ago, physicals are still op even when you account for them taking up more CA


theocy88

I understand that but a player with 16 acceleration 16 pace and all 10 will probably have a significantly higher ca than one with 16 dribbling 16 shooting and all other atrributes at 10 ? Just feels like the whole weighting is wrong. Might be wrong need to test this


Rahiya

Another FM apologist. „I’ll admit this is *curious*, but just stop thinking about these things and enjoy playing our game“. Pathetic .


oulu80

What are all the non-meta-attributes again?


Cazter64

Physicals are the meta ones


Akitten

Physicals + dribbling and not horrendous work rate. Everything else is more or less irrelevant, some people argue anticipation.


oulu80

Thank you


oulu80

Thank you


xXxCountryRoadsxXx

Where can I see the rest of the save game results


Svonn

I can upload those as well if you want - do you want to see a specific run or do you want to gather / share stats from all of them?


xXxCountryRoadsxXx

How many more save games did you do? Can I see the league table results for all of them?


SinofThrash

Can you also run this test but only boost the "meta" attributes? Both tests have missed this and I'm interested to see the results.


Flippin_inColors

its a physical game, of course they are the most important. look at the best team in the world CITY. they have Physical monsters all around the pitch. Ruben dias, Stones, Walker, Rodri, Akanji, Haaland, they Jump, they run fast and they win headers = win things, add to that they are elite technicias.


interpretagain

I like this experiment. I do think we can have a bit of a discussion about the numbers, though. Excellent work setting everything up as well. The biggest difference is the average position, to start. We can leave this for now since every football fan knows there can be several reasons for this. What strikes me as interesting is that possession, xg against and pass completion are almost identical. I would argue that this should not be the case if your experiment has boosted something along the lines of 20 attributes, a lot of which should have to do with passing such as vision, passing, technique etc. Let's move on to the stuff I find more interesting. Non meta got Crystal Palace an extra 5xg over a whole season. I would suggest that's not really much of a difference in xg considering we've boosted SO MANY different stats. Surely you can agree there? Another point I would like to make here is that the unboosted team clearly underperformed xG, while the boosted team seriously overperformed. Why is that? Maybe you could have a look at how the strikers in both teams performed, or the wingers? I would be interested in that. The default team also conceded a lot more than they were supposed to, on average. However, once you have a proper look at the numbers season by season, it seems that in both the boosted and unboosted teams, they concede what you would expect. Overall I find the results interesting, and we can definitely talk about it. My conclusion from the data here, is that something about maybe one or two of these stats that you boosted has some effect on forwards. There's a 5xg difference between the teams, but a 12 goal difference in actual output. Can you type out or show me the list of attributes you boosted? My guess is one or a couple of these is making forwards better. Edited to change 17 goals to 12


xXxCountryRoadsxXx

Using a 95% confidence interval, we can be 95% confident that the true average final league table position of randomly simulated default Crystal Palace teams (control) would be between 16.84 and 18.76, and the true average final league table position of randomly simulated non-meta 16 Crystal Palace teams would be between 11.61 and 14.39. These two ranges do not overlap. Therefore, the changes made to the non-meta 16 Crystal Palace team had a statistically significant effect on final league position for Crystal Palace. Math: 13±((1.96\*1.581)/sqrt(5)) 17.8±((1.96\*1.095)/sqrt(5))