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Fmlive Operational Changes


avlad

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Back in July we finally were able to
with KTH to create an MMO for the South Korean market.

We followed up with a high level overview of how this deal affected Football Manager Live and since then you might be forgiven in thinking that we'd gone to sleep as some of our activity on the forums has been admittedly muted.

This post will try to explain things in a little more detail, outlining some of the process changes that have gone on behind the scenes and tweaks we're making to our operation.

Publishing responsibility passed to SI.

"In related news, Sports Interactive and SEGA have also announced that Sports Interactive have taken over publishing repsonsibility for perpetual online game Football Manager Live, with studio director Miles Jacobson now heading up the publishing side for the title, as well as his role as Executive Producer on both Football Manager Live and Football Manager Online projects on the development side."

This was the final part of the announcement and arguably it's had the most impact on day-to-day life for the FML (and FMO teams). SEGA are still involved in the project, however we no longer have a dedicated team working on the game in the same fashion we had before.

As you know, Miles is the boss of the studio and is Executive Producer on both FMO & FML. I report into him on both projects but the only way this works is by ensuring I have a great team around me which is why Paul Hecker and Rob Barns-Graham both made transfers from SEGA to join the SI team and have taken on roles as FML Assistant Producers . Their roles mean they are involved in a number of key areas such as looking after the moderation team, managing the development team and organising beta. They spent a lot of their first few weeks centralising the moderation function and building a new suite of tools. More recently they've been heavily involved in v1.7 which is our next major release

Team shape

In order to deliver a new game for our partners in Korea we expanded the team adding 4 new faces to the FML/FMO area. Our structure is fairly simple with FML having 3 gameplay coders, FMO also has 3 gameplay coders and there is a technical team straddling both games.

The old FML setup had Oliver Collyer, Rob Cooper and Dave Soley and under the restructure it has Oliver Collyer, Dave Soley and new recruit Robson Brown, with Rob Cooper transferring from FML to FMO.

We also welcome to the team Miguel and Andreas who complete the FMO gameplay team.

The technical team had Graeme Kelly and Carey Hickling and was complemented by the introduction of Kevin. Since this announcement we've announced that we're looking to expand this technical team further and we're on the
.

Announcement of announcements

One of my old favourite FML blogs recently wrote in sarcastic reference to SI "
So we're announcing that we will have an announcement" ...."However we will announce that in due course. ". Comments which
summed up a discussion we had internally in August.

It's not nice for us to read such blog posts but ultimately we felt very much the same that we were constantly announcing announcements, sometimes talking about features before they were ready and generally trying to promote the game in a way that was alien to us and wasn't working for anyone. Comparisons internally are always drawn to how our big brother Football Manager approaches PR and marketing and it was under the guidance of Miles that we decided it was time to change our approach.

This change is fundamentally the reason why we've not come to you with a roadmap in the same style that we had a year ago. We know many of you are calling for it, we know it's the source of much frustration and anger but we think the new strategy will cause all of us less frustration.

Our focus since the release of 1.6 has been evaluating the core areas of FML and much of what we are doing for 1.7 is taking this into account.

Core Area : Game performance

This has been a topic we've constantly monitored and improved since the original launch and reboot. We receive daily reports from every game world as to what activities on the database are taking the most amount of time.

During the first week of August we spent time with a top MySQL consultant
and concentrated on game performance, slow queries, lag and server configuration. We understand how important some of this is to you as players of the game and you should see many improvements in the 1.7 release. We're continuing to review the nightly reports from beta to ensure as new things are added they don't create further issues.

Core Area :
Server stability

Again another topic that has been under constant review, especially since the reboot. The honest assessment is that we've fallen a bit short in this area. Yes, we added a
but this was a bit of a plaster over the actual issue as to why the servers sometimes crash.

Most server crashes are pretty easy to find, as soon as they go down a report is generated with an indication to the coding team as to where it crashed. The one issue that kept us busy was a seemingly random crash to do with memory allocation on the servers, we managed to locate a few areas that might cause this and in our most active and up-to-date beta world we've not had a server crash for over 2 weeks. High hopes indeed for 1.7.

Core Area : Game Features

Match engine , academies, morale, MV, acquisition fees, scouting – I could go on naming core game features but they've all come under scrutiny, assessment and in some cases change for 1.7. Issues reported in beta and live are monitored and circulated via email to all coders and Ben and the QA team are emailing weekly graphs and analysis with areas such as player progression.

This is going to be an on-going process to ensure that some of the game issues seen recently are not repeated and again we're learning lessons from the Football Manager team who frequently do this type of analysis work.

I wanted to end this post to once again say a big thank you to each and every one of you playing FML.

Thanks

Marc Duffy

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