Review – Top Eleven

     You can play Top Eleven at their own site, or as a facebook app. I’ve mainly used it from topeleven.com though I signed up through facebook, so I can’t comment on the sign up and log in process at the site itself as I’ve just been let in as long as my facebook account is active. There is also a phone app, though again that isn’t something I’ve tried.

     It’s very easy to get going on the game as the menu system is very intuitive. Unsurprisingly, you start off at level 1 with a very basic ‘stadium’, or as most people would know it ‘some grass’. At level 1 you will only be entered into a league competition and the general cup. You need to finish in the top 4 of your league to compete in the following season’s Champions League competition. There are 14 teams in each league, and each season lasts for 28 days. I’m not sure whether signing up through referrals on the main site works in the same way, but joining via facebook at the same time as friends should see you put into the same league together. It’s actually quite an important part of this game, but I’ll come back to that later.

     One of the first things you’ll want to do is make a start on building up your stadium. The balance across the different elements is quite well worked out, and you should find it easy to have something being built at all times, unless you spend all your income on players I guess. You need to work on each of the different elements of your stadium, as there are points where progress for any particular area is blocked until your stadium as a whole is improved to a certain level. So my plan to go right through the development of the Football School came a cropper, but it is a sensible system and works pretty well.

     Player training is a bit basic. You can train each player at either normal or hard intensity. There are three types of training you can use, though the only difference is the amount of training done. These three types (Stretching, Cardio and Practice Match) are unavailable for a set period of time after use, with the lightest type useable again after 10 minutes and the highest level after an hour. The players have a progress bar showing how close they are to improving by one skill point with a cone appearing to let you know they have a point which you can then assign to one of three sets of five attributes. You have full control over where the attributes go across the three attribute groups (Defence, Attack, Physical & Mental), but none within each group. A further restriction is that no group of attributes can be left more than 20 skill points behind the others.

The player quality is shown using a star system:
1 Star – Poor
2 Star – Average
3 Star – Good
4 Star – Very Good
5 Star – Excellent
6 Star – Scout
7 Star – World Class

     These quality definitions change according to the level you are at. Each is a 5 point quality band, but if you get promoted, your whole squad loses 1 star, though not any skills, it’s just to make the star system useful again as you have advanced up the leagues. If you look at a team a few divisions higher than you, then they’ll look like they have a complete squad at World Class, though to the person running that team, the stars will more than likely look similar to the way your squad looks to you.

     This star system is very important when it comes to using the transfer market. There are three different methods of transferring players between teams, and which is applicable depends on the star rating of the player you want to buy or sell. Until you reach level four, you can’t enter negotiations with another manager to buy their players, but you do have access to the general transfer auction system from the time you start playing. There is also the ‘Scout’ system, where you can buy a high skilled player instantly, but with a high charge in tokens.

     And so to tokens. There are two currencies in the game, cash and tokens. As with the stadium building and squad progression, the balance on finances is well worked out and scales reasonably as your income and expenses both increase. Whether that stays the same once you have built the stadium to its maximum level, I can’t say as I haven’t reached that point yet. On the other hand, the token system is just a method of generating real money for the game developers, and any good work done on balancing is undone by the fact that you really can pay-to-win in Top Eleven.

     Anyone used to games that are playable through facebook probably won’t see a problem with pay-to-win as it’s the norm among them, but as someone used to standalone websites for football management games, it makes the whole thing feel a bit pointless to me. Building a cartoon farm is one thing, but not having a level playing field in a sports simulation game is a bit of an issue. Some versions of freemium games flirt with giving an advantage for players that pay, but here it’s a full on shortcut. Not that it’s denied anywhere that I know of. It is what it is, but bottom line is that real money can buy success. I guess that really is a good simulation of the real life game… (Apart from QPR, obviously.)

     With the ability to buy tokens for real money, you can bypass all the balancing and just buy a squad that’s out of reach of anyone else at your user ranking level, unless they’ve done the same thing. As well as being able to buy in game cash, you can also buy ‘packs’, which come in three varieties and allow you to improve condition and morale for players, with the third giving you the option to shorten the recovery time from injuries, or heal them instantly. There is also a player win bonus element, which I doubt you could leave set to maximum for a whole season without going bankrupt, unless you use real-money-bought tokens to fund it.

     The tactical set up actually looks pretty good. You have four tactic slots available, with a reasonable amount of scope in where you can position players on the pitch, plus a player by player option to push up or drop back. The additional drop downs for mentality, passing/pressing/tackling/marking styles and passing focus add a lot of usable options tactically. You can also set player roles for penalties, free-kicks and the like, and set default subs to come on in case of injuries.
     Sadly though, combined with the ability to buy improvements, there’s the possession boost system as well, and between them, they almost make the tactics you set unimportant. The possession boosts are a double edged sword really. You get an 8% boost for being online and watching your match, though this can be matched by your opponent doing the same. There is also a 5% boost for playing at home, with a good crowd, with less of that 5% being granted if your stadium isn’t filled, and a 2% boost for any friends that watch the game and support you, again matchable by friends of your opponent. There’s a cap of 15% total possession bonus. If you play the game with a group of friends, being online and supporting tactically can be a great part of the game. Other than that though it’s just too overpowered. As an example, I’d lost 2-0 in the first leg of my Champions League semi-final in the season just gone, so I set a full win bonus, and turned up for the second leg at home, with a full stadium, gaining a 13% total possession advantage as my opponent wasn’t watching. We won 9-1.

     Overall, Top Eleven isn’t a bad game, but is only at its best if you join as part of a group, and agree among yourselves to play by the same rules. So you either allow token buying or you don’t, and a rule on whether sponsor tokens are fair would be needed as well, unless all players are in the same country. For a while I ‘watched’ all the sponsor videos, which gave me an advantage over some friends that were playing from a different country and had far less available to them.
     If you haven’t played football manager games before, Top Eleven is a good looking game that could work well as a gentle introduction to them. If you’ve played similar games before, unless you’re joining with a group of friends at the same time, then I’d give it a miss.

Online Football Management Games

Is there a market for a ‘How-to’ success book?

    It’s something I’ve been thinking about a fair bit recently. I’ve played a fair few management games over the years, most recently online games against real people, so I have a lot of experience of them. Offline I go all the way back to Football Manager on the ZXSpectrum. I’m not 100% sure there’d be an audience for a book that would help anyone interested in these games to improve, but if there is I’d really like to be the one that writes it.

    One problem with a ‘how-to’ on this subject could be how broad it is. There are a lot of games to choose from, each with their own specific challenges and way of doing things. I suspect there are a lot of similarities though, and there will be basic elements that are universal, or close to it.

    Realistically, I doubt a physical book would be of much interest, so it would probably be an ebook. Maybe with a related website for updates and additional content.

    What do you think? Would anyone be interested?

A new start in online football management

     Apart from a piece about an ill fated attempt to relive my first manager game experience, and a mention of a successful moment in another, I haven’t written about online football manager games here. Which, given that it’s verged on an obsession at times, is a little surprising. I suppose I didn’t want to admit to the addiction side of things.

     As shown by having played the original Football Manager on the Sinclair ZXSpectrum, I’ve been playing these things for a long time on and off. For the last ten years though, I’ve stuck with online versions where you get to test yourself against real people. Often many of them, and from all over the world. I never felt there was any point going back to offline versions once I’d found a decent online game. I can’t even remember the names of some of the first ones I dabbled with, but the first that really gripped me was Championship Manager Online. Sadly, that closed after a while. Although that was a few years ago, the fact that you had to pay to play seems to have been the problem, and one which has only got worse with more and more manager games using freemium systems of one sort or another. Even the masters of the offline game, The Collyers, couldn’t keep their online game going for more than a few years with a fully paying system.

     Now there isn’t a lot of choice, as virtually all the online football manager games use freemium to some degree. Most will try and keep a level playing field for all managers, but it seems to be beyond their ability to actually keep it that way. A more recent trend is to just go with it and allow the buying of success, mostly seen in facebook based games.

     Personally, for a small monthly fee, which you almost have to pay to get the best out of a lot of freemium games anyway, I’m perfectly happy with a pay to play game, as long as it’s good. Finding a good one can be a problem though. There are so many around and you can’t really see what they’re like without getting involved for a while. Then if it’s not really what you wanted you have a difficult decision on whether to stick with it (you may have liked the community within the game and some elements) in the hope it will be more suited to you in the future, or move on, having invested time, and knowing you’ll have to make the initial higher intensity effort again while learning a whole new game from scratch.

     Anyway, having played at managerzone.com and footballidentity most recently, I felt I needed to move on from managerzone. They’ve recently added U23, U21 and U18 leagues there, which suited me perfectly, as youth development had always been my strong point within that game. Unfortunately, to play in those leagues you had to pay extra for it. Given that there was already a ‘club member’ system to be paid for, an additional cast for these leagues was too much for me in a game that I’d been less interested in recently anyway. A perfect storm of both club member and Uxx league season tickets needing to be renewed, and almost having run out of the in game tokens has helped make the decision to mothball my team and move on.
     The decision to find a new game was also driven by a desire to start a game at the same time as other managers I’ve met in different games (mostly footballidentity). We’ve been playing Top Eleven, but didn’t all start together, and as we are based in different countries, have different amounts of sponsor videos to watch, which supplies you with one of the two in game currencies. Yes, it is sadly one of those ‘pay to win’ games. Not ideal then.

     If only there was place that you could go to where you could get advice on which manager game would suit you and the elements of play that you’re most interested in. Well, there almost is. I started a forum for fans of online football manager games, but have never really developed it as much as I’d have liked. Too busy playing the games instead…
     So with a bunch of us split between those still playing footballidentity, and those who had left (you actually play the matches with users as each footballer, so the time needed us more than most games), and the idea that we could find another game and all start at the same time, I went off and found as many options as possible and made a big list. There was an element of deja vu about my search, having done a similar thing whenever a game I’d been playing closed, or I just felt like a change. Three years seems to be the default period between big searches, and strangely, it seems that the bulk of what I find seems to be largely the same selection of games.
     This time though, I found one that is very new. Still in beta in fact. And in the proper sense of the term, not like the footballidentity version of ‘beta’ which it’s been in since I started playing in season 4, over three real life years ago. The game is called Football Strategy and a stated aim is to avoid ‘pay to win’ entirely. It’s early days, and hard to tell how good it will be, but it’s nice to get a group of friends into a game together at a very early stage. Hopefully the developers will stick with their intention to reset once beta is over too. A nice clean slate and level playing field combo. What more could you want?

     Now that I’ve started writing about football manager games the floodgates may have opened just a crack. There may be many posts about Football Strategy. Or whatever comes next…..

A Neutral View on the Plight of Portsmouth

At the time of writing, Portsmouth are basking in the light of a silver lining on the single cloud covering their sky. They sit at the foot of the Premier League two points behind the team immediately above, having played a game more.

This is actually a slightly experimental post, as it is being written by request, after I asked my facebook friends for subject ideas. The title is based on the way this suggestion was phrased, i.e. ‘The continuing plight of Portsmouth FC from an entirely neutral footballing perspective’. I think there are actually two sides to the Portsmouth situation though, and it’s the behind the scenes element that prompts the use of a word like plight. That may seem an odd thing to say about a team that’s just lost seven league games on the trot and props up the table, but I think they’ve been on the wrong end of some close games, and with them finally getting a win under their belts, they may now have a little more confidence and momentum to start the long hard climb up the table to safety. As long as the traumas over their ownership and financial problems don’t carry on for too long, or in fact get worse, then I don’t think they will get relegated.

It seems that no side has lost their first seven games of a Premier League season and gone on to survive, but I really do think that Portsmouth might buck the trend. Sadly, the team stats pages on football365 no longer show a comparison of results against each of the other teams in the league for the current and previous seasons, but while they did it was something I found a more real way of seeing how my team was getting on if it felt they weren’t in a league position that really reflected the way they’d been playing. Even without that though, we can see who it is that Portsmouth played and lost to in that horrendous seven game run.

For a couple of seasons Pompey were in the group of teams outside the real title challengers, but in with a decent chance of a European place and maybe a good cup run. Last season they fell off that pace a little though, and finished 14th in the table. The teams they’ve lost to so far this season all finished above them last season, apart from a promoted Birmingham City. Five of the seven games were only lost by a single goal, with Villa beating them 2-0, and Arsenal 4-0, though they certainly aren’t alone in taking a beating from the Arse this season and pretty much any other in recent years. Given that 1-0 losses have been against Everton and Fulham, that makes up positions 4 to 7 from last season, Man City were 10th but I doubt anyone would expect them not to improve on that, and even the lowest of last seasons finishers were Bolton, and you never quite know which Bolton will turn up, and losing 3-2 to them isn’t exactly shameful. Given that as a list of fixtures prior to any of the games being played, I doubt many football fans or pundits would give Portsmouth more than 6 points at best, and maybe if they got draws with Bolton and Birmingham, only 2 points, which prior to the win against Wolves would leave them in the same position at the bottom of the table anyway.

I watched the televised game against Everton, and on the balance of play, Portsmouth deserved at least a draw*. From watching results shows and Match of the Day, I’d say they were a side having a very poor run, but not one that was getting easily turned over on a regular basis. Given that there have been so many difficulties off the pitch, a massive amount of credit is due to Paul Hart for at least keeping them near the right track, and when the opportunity presented itself to finally put some points on the board in their most recent game, they managed to keep their lead.

Oddly enough, as I’ve been writing this, news has come through that Ali Al-Faraj has completed a takeover of the club. I dare say this won’t be a cure all, but if it means stability off the pitch , it should hopefully let the players get in with playing, and the manager get on with doing his job.

Four of Portsmouth’s next five fixtures are against Hull, Wigan, Blackburn and Stoke. It’s often said, but in spite of the fact that no games are easy in the Premier League, that is a much kinder run than the one they’re coming out of. The next game is a very big one for them too. What better way to go into the four games mentioned than on the back of a home win against their ultimate Judas when Spurs visit on Saturday. If they only get one scalp from the teams near the top of the table this season, the timing of this one could be enough to keep the momentum going, and take them to safety before other sides even realise they’re starting to slide in the other direction.

An extra filip could be the fact that in spite of their poor league record, they hadn’t entirely lost the ability to win. Granted, the opposition wasn’t of the highest standard, but they’ve progressed through a couple of rounds of the League Cup without any sign of a banana skin, scoring seven goals in the process.

* Impartiality only goes so far. I do think that Portsmouth should have got more from the game against Everton. Most likely a draw, they’d have been flattered by a win, but beyond any doubt they should have had a red card for whoever it was that tried to decapitate Bilyaletdinov almost as soon as he came on (I think it was Kaboul).