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What caused you to turn back to FM12? Was it the tactics creator/slider system?
Someone put up a post on the official FM forums over at SI that there are stats out there showing that people are abandoning FM13 in droves and going back to FM12. I think he quoted Steam figures for his evidence. This was a week or so ago, so I might have remembered this incorrectly but I seem to recall him saying that there he'd never seen so few people playing a version of FM.
The post was deleted. I don't know whether he took it down or SI did but I couldn't find it again.
Although I'm slightly happier with the game having read some instructions on a forum about how to get it working (terrible implementation of a seemingly new way of playing FM) I still think this is the worst version of FM I've played.
It's concerning that, if you ask them, staff who work for SI think it's not an issue that people are turning to forum posts they've created for help on how to play and enjoy the game. As you can see from the feedback on those threads the information on them has helped people understand slightly better how FM13 and the tactics creator work, but without those two threads (wwfan and cleon are the SI staff who wrote them) those same people would be struggling to gets results and/or enjoy the game. So what about the multitude of people who'll never visit the forum or who don't understand English? Don't worry about it, so says SI.
The game needs a proper instruction manual with clear information and tutorials to help a player understand the TC and ME to the extent that their decisions are logically consistent with whatever logic resides behind the scenes in the game. The whole things a big mess just now.
If they don't want to produce an instruction manual they should at least put some kind of feedback system into the game that guides a player if necessary about issues such as tactics and the like.
For example, wwfan (designer of the in-game tactics creator) says that your playing strategy has to be logical and consistent among players. So you shouldn't tell your strikers to attack at all times, your midfielders to sit back and wait for the counter, and your defenders to shut up shop, because if you do you're essentially telling different parts of your team to play different types of football at the same time. That might be obvious to some people and not to others. That information was only available to readers of a post on the official forums. Your ass man should tell you in the game whether your system is consistent and logical - not some guy on a forum!
The game will fail if they don't sort it out.