“This player needs to play for a team in the top 3 countries or in a country that is at least 3 positions above his home country.”

So pretty much if you WANT to play in a nation outside the top 3 you’re condemned to being bad, always. This “Next Step” pops up all too often and basically turns the game into “Loan Manager” where the leagues with the most managers stay superior at all times unless you’re willing to loan out your players who have stopped progressing.

I’m probably in the minority, since most people in Fast Ticker play in either Brazilian, Spanish, Portuguese, Argentinian or Belgian leagues and they’re quite happy to keep dominating.

No other league will ever be top 5 without half a dozen good managers moving to a different, lower nation.

As a manager in France in Fast Ticker my options are:

1. Loan out my good players to higher leagues and get ultra bored managing loaned players (not realistic)
2. Don’t loan them to higher leagues and watch them never grow and therefore I fail early in international cups
3. Get forced to resign and hire on at a team in the top 3/4 leagues

No one wants to play different leagues because of “This player needs to play for a team in the top 3 countries or in a country that is at least 3 positions above his home country.”

I think the “Next Step”s (almost all of them other than “Benefits from Training” and “Needs to play offical matches” and “needs to play cup matches”) are pointless, restrictive, unrealistic and basically ruin any chance of a giant killer. Ever. And the giant leagues need some competition.

Being in Sweden at the moment I can definitely understand where you’re coming from, but I’m quite used to loaning out my players to better countries to get them fully developed. We could spend some time coming up with more realistic steps or as an alternative allow players to improve playing matches where they are, though at a slower pace. What do you think?

Something should enable a manager to not have to loan out 8-10 players every season to to develop them a bit. It’s insane. A class players in real life don’t do a quick stint at Real Madrid on loan and then return to their club as World Class. It’s unreasonable.

It’s frustrating that the top clubs have a monopoly on not having to loan out half their squad. Then on top of that they get fully developed players. If anything higher classes of clubs tend to loan out prospects to lower level teams so they get playing time. Not the other way around. It’s completely backwards.

Half the fun of the old game was being able to pick up a team in any league and work hard at developing, subbing, winning matches and ultimately making it a world class club. That’s how the game grew.

As it stands right now you MUST play in the top 3 leagues or you’re just playing “Loan Simulator 2018.” Your team wins its league national cup. Rinse, repeat. That’s not how to get excited about a game.

Exaggerations apart, I do believe you have a valid point here. I’ll make sure we have an item in our backlog to review this sooner rather than later, as it will take some time for any changes incorporated to newly generated players (such as this one would be) to become the new normal. I think some time ago we’ve introduced different little things to make it more challenging to manage “smaller” clubs, but this would actually affect big clubs in lower ranked countries, which shouldn’t be the case necessarily (or at least should be less common).

I think the solution is make it “Play matches for a an A or B class team.” Other wise you just lump every team in a particular country into being not good enough to develop players.

Playing for a first placed team is not the same as playing for a last placed team. Painting an entire country with a wide brush I think is a bad idea.

If it was “they must play for a higher class of team” then it would make sense to loan them out for a bit, and then when your team improves to a or b or c then you get rewarded with players that improve more often.

Likee a simple reward system. And an easy way to get players loaned out to many more teams and leagues. And might actually encourage managers to play in other countries.

Not trying to exaggerate, just trying to stimulate the conversation, and maybe the competition.

I know, I was joking about exaggerating because of calling it loan simulator 2018 :-D

In any case I agree with you on using classes (both team and league) rather than country ranking, we just need to be careful when designing it. I’ll try to come up with something decent and share the thinking in this topic when it’s ready, I really enjoy this type of conversation.