Football Hero wrote: ↑04 Jul 2022, 14:03
TheRumourMill wrote: ↑04 Jul 2022, 08:38
A large reason for the higher points totals though is the increased amount of blanks and doubles due to the pandemic. We also had an extra free hit last season. I expect this season the points total to come down a bit, assuming everything else is equal. Although there might be some tweaks or surprises to the rules/chips, let's see when the full game is released.
A few extra DGW's from Covid would have had a slight effect overall as this was counterbalanced by (i) games being called off last minute and managers fielding teams of much less than 11 players for a few blank weeks earlier in the season, (hence the reason for getting the additional chip in the first place), and also (ii) in general random individual players failing covid tests and missing unexpected matches throughout the entire season etc.
Overall it probably equates to like 50 points or so of the 200+ points the average is rising by. Most of it will be down to the fact that we are all able to pick super teams with 80%+ of our squad coming from the top 6 or so teams, rather than it being more like 50% of our squads being elite players like it was 5+ years ago. You actually had to pay attention to bottom half clubs as you were fielding many players from those teams each week and it made the game far more interesting.
TheRumourMill wrote: ↑04 Jul 2022, 08:38
That said, these sort of arguments come out every year,
but once the games released we all play and adapt to whatever the price performance landscape is anyway and on the whole we enjoy it, I think you just have to play the game in front of you, whatever it is.
Your point about us all just adapting doesn't hold water either, because you can't adapt when you and all the casuals have got the same great picks. That is the whole underlying reason for this complaint in the first place, that you cannot actually 'adapt' in any way in practice. You either go with the same stale template team and keep along with the masses, hoping for some random luck factor to get you ahead, or you try to 'adapt' and do something different and you end up falling behind the masses and do even worse as a result.
When the best picks are obvious, well-known players, they are selected correctly by accident by the casuals, and since the masses team's are full of these great value propositions, your ability to actually make a difference vastly decreases. There is no real 'adapting' opportunity that you allude to.
Completely disagree, it wassn't counterbalanced at all. In a blank you in many cases have the chance to get a player off your bench. That was certainly the case when it was only individual players dropping out due to covid. When we had whole fixtures being postponed, yes in some cases we had to play slighly short but this was only about 3 gameweeks and was more than counterbalanced by the 10+ double gameweeks we had. All the doubles also meant the chips were also more powerful in terms of raw points potential aswell, not to mention captaincy generating more points also.
I don't think we were able to pick super teams with 80% of our squad were we? Certainly not at the start of the season when budgets were tight. I think there were a number of breakthrough seasons for young players at top 6 clubs, but thats different to being able to pick a super team right off the bat. Saka, Bowen, Kulusevski, James, Chilwell, all sort of emerged as top quality cheap assets as the season went on, it wasn't always immediately obvious before the fact. There also wasn't much pressure on budget from the premiums, Ronaldo, Lukaku and Fernandes were all dreadful value, Kane was for half a season, so were Sancho and Rashford.
Where I do agree with you is that this year a number of assets do look underpriced, more so than last year. But we need to wait for the full game to be released to appraise that fully, there could be rule changes or a higher base price for mids/strikers, for example.
I think there's some truth in what you say, maybe parts of what you fear will transpire. But some mangers will make mistakes in trying to "force" it, by being different for the sake of it, others will conversely be too slow to react to shifts in form, some will go successfully against the grain, there are still fixture swings, we will still have injuries, we will still have managers sacked, we will still have players transfer in and out the league, we will still have blanks and we will still have doubles. Plus there's the random factor of a world cup in the middle of it all. All of this, all of it, creates opportunities and threats for your team on a weekly basis. It won't be as boring as you think!
