A case for full manual

Does anyone else feel that manual passing is unfinished?

I played yesterday with semi controls for the first time and the passing felt like it had more zip to it. Ultimately I did not like semi passing because I felt that, like the player switching, the game does not pick the correct player out in certain situations.
When I went back to manual the charging of the power bar and the speed at which the ball moves just seemed slower. There was a chance for me to slide the ball between 2 players and release the forward for a 1 on 1, the ball had to travel around 30 yeards or so with considerable pace to avoid being intercepted, I charged the bar fully but the ball just did not have anywhere near the pace to get through without being picked up by the opposition. On PES I could have used the stick for passing and played this pass with the amount of speed necessary.
The more I played with manual after using semi the more I noticed that he passing really does lack for pace and distance, there should be a larger range for ground passes, PES had this spot on with their manual passing system.
 
romagnoli said:
How does your idea support individuality? All you're doing is raising one of the tricky questions about manual passing, regardless of both of our ideas. How can you aim the ball exactly where you want and still have player individuality? In truth there is a very slight amount of assistance with manual passing, so there is room in which to manoeuvre here, but it's very slight.
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My idea isnt about player individuality. Your idea is about player individuality. My idea is about how to handle the manual and assisted settings and the problems we're having with the fanbase split between them. I thought that's what the thread was about, right?
But to answer your question, yeah you need a small amount of assistance even on manual to give you player individuality but maybe most of it should influence the speed in which your power bar fills up and not the aim? The single biggest problem I have with manual right now is how slow I can pick out passes with it. I think I can aim through balls fairly well now after practice but its almost impossible for me to do one touch passes cuz the bar just doesnt fill quick enough. Maybe this could be something only very skillful players can do?

romagnoli said:
I don't think players should be made to switch to manual. Manual should be on generally equal terms with assisted passing; it shouldn't suddenly become the far superior option. That defeats the whole point of balancing the game, which is that manual players should be able to play against the other 95% of FIFA players out there without feeling cheated. If they want to play with assisted passing then they should, but they should expect some random inaccuracies because that's what they chose to put up with (notice how this argument applies just as validly to putting in randomness as it does to your idea).
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But with my idea, Manual isnt far superior, its just got more potential to be more useful and rewarding providing you put the work in. And theres a huge difference between putting up with passing limitations you know you have and a random factor that you'll never be able to predict. With randomness, you just try and hope for the best. Sometimes it'll work and sometimes it wont but theres only one way of knowing. With passing limitations like mines, atleast I'd know which passes to avoid knowing they ain't gonna work, cuz I can see that they're out of my reach. So I'd have to play within a set of rules without being able to blame the CPU or lady luck cuz if I ever had a problem, I know where the settings menu is.
The mistake EA and your problem is making is that assisted, semi and manual doesnt mean beginner, intermediate and expert.


romagnoli said:
Besides which, I can only see your idea leading to people ramping up the size of the circle and just hitting more passes until it gets to the right player. Slight formation change so that everyone's evenly spaced and you can ping pong between them, et voila. Assisted wins again.
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But again you're forgetting that the bigger the circle becomes, the more manual your passes become within the circle too. So how does simply "ramping up" the circle help anyone who cant aim their passes properly?
Increasing the siz of the circle to maximum would simply put you back into full manual settings.

romagnoli said:
The whole point of using some sort of random factor is that the player doesn't know exactly what is going to happen when they press pass. The problem people have with PES is that they can't articulate what type of pass they want the player to try and hit, whether they mis-hit it or not. Complaints of scripting are a combination of bullshit and not having a power bar/proper analogue aiming system to properly select the right player to aim at or whether the through pass should push the recipient out wide or infield. It's not that players mis-hit it randomly; it's that they hit the wrong type of pass randomly.
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I'm ok with that in theory but you want a random factor that's big enough to match the difficulty of aiming passes on manual, so that you get a level playing field (if you don't then I honestly dont see the point in your idea). But lets face it, if you were gonna do that, the random factor would have to be pretty big. And that's where my problem is.
 
I don't intend for wild inaccuracies along the lines of an average manual player but to represent those of a good to very good manual player. The point of the imprecision having a random factor is precisely that people shouldn't know exactly where their pass will go. The recipient in real life doesn't know exactly where the pass he is receiving will go. The passer himself knows where he intends to place the pass but if he mishits the pass it's not as if he did it deliberately. The whole point of passingnot going in a guaranteed straight line but within a cone of uncertainty is that you don't know exactly where the pass will go and have to judge the odds of the ball actually squeezing through that gap between defenders. Manual players get the increased certainty of knowing that this uncertainty for them is far more heavily weighted towards their controller than the player they are using.

My answer regarding individuality for manual passing is simply that I don't think you can have your cake and eat it. I don't see faster charging powerbars as a solution because it means you can more accurately weight passes with lesser players, even if it reduces their one touch ability. Personally I do see some sort of assistance as vital for true on-the-ball individuality. The reason people perceive manual passing to be more realistic at the moment is that passes go astray, making certain passes not worth the risk of losing the ball and forcing the game to slow down. Assisted passing needs risk of this sort to slow the game down and make it more tactically paced.

I hadn't spotted your comments (and am not in a position to search atm) that the circle was gradually more manual rather than on/off. I'm fine with that and I think that some of the disagreement is probably down to misinterpretation on both sides. I still don't think the slider will make the circle smaller, and as such I dont think restricting the player's choices within that area (which seems to be the crux of your argument for using manual passing over this) is the right way of going about things. It will just be perceived by the masses as making the game less articulate in the way PES is (though obviously not in those words!).
 
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Quietriot - It's a matter of taste. The PS3 stick can feel slightly too loose, chiefly because it's slightly longer. However I'm not 100% convinced of the superiority of the X360 left stick. I feel like the 360 left stick has more of a deadzone, and I don't like the tops of the sticks at all. I've never used it for manual controls so I have no idea how they stack up for FIFA, to be fair, and I guess that'd give me a more definitive answer.


Rune - I'm really sorry. I've given it another read, and it's a complete gamebreaker IMO. EA would never implement that as it stands. The past few weeks have morphed what I thought the idea was; in fact I don't think I understood the idea in the first place as it is so far from what I'd thought anyone might suggest.

Making short passes only possible within a certain range but not giving people the option to hit a manual pass any further?? Blimey. I thought you were saying that passes would be heavily assisted within that circle but then become manual beyond that range, with some sort of slope from assisted to manual depending on the power you put on the pass. That would at least make some sort of sense.

But ditching the power bar and giving long grounded passes to (mostly) manual players only?! Wow. EA would lose sales faster than they could burn the equivalent profit.

I think a player being more prone to mis-hitting a pass because he isn't very good is infinitely less random and annoying than making professional footballers unable to kick the ball along the ground more than 20 yards.
 
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I realize this is an old post...
just wanted to share my thoughts on this subject.

i am one of those players using all manual settings.
been playing online for a couple of months now against assisted setting users.

but after playing some higher skill level players online...
i came to the realization that they are good at what they do.
it does take skill and practice to play to get to that level.
i don't think i'll be as good as a lot of players playing with assisted settings.

the purist will see at it as 22 man basketball...
but they enjoy the game as much as anyone... that's all that matters at the end.

bottom line... same fifa, different game.
 
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