Mitze90’s Weblog

Todays post is for all the Football Manager fans looking in from the outside, reading all the great blogs that are kicking about from other Beta testers, well todays im going to talk about something that your all waiting for, the release date. I’ll be drawing conclusions from the various snippets of evidence, and give you the date when i think that Sports Interactive will release the beast you’ve all been wanting to take on… Football Manager LIVE!

Firstly the game has been in feature lock for a few months now, this means that no new gameplay elements are being added, the game right know is what everyone will be playing on release, for the first month anyway (i’ll come back to that). This has given the developers a chance to listen to our concerns about bugs and problems, these have been ironed out more or less, theres no real glaring flaws with the right game now, and the online bug forums on SI’s website have been fairly quite on the SI front. Theres a few still in there but nothing that effects enjoyability.

Currently SI are working hard on the lag issues, this is there main focus, getting the game running smooth for release. Today will see the third event called “One Night Only” this is where SI overload the servers for a few hours by forcing eleven gameworlds worth of beta testers into just two gameworlds, in theory thats 11,000 managers logging in and trying to play with 2,000 teams. The first One Night Only was a complete disaster (to us beta testers) the lag was extreme, you couldnt stay online for very long as we where getting booted left right and center as the servers creaked under the strain. The second One Night Only went much better, SI tested various tweaks throughout the night to get data on what went best, Graeme Kelly got the joyful task of compliling a report of the night and had to decide from the numbers what was the best tweaks, unlucky. Later on today will see One Night Only part three, tho it wont be in the evening it’ll be in the afternoon, go figure. The reason SI are working at squeezing as many people online at once all loging in at around the same time is to see how the servers and game will cope when everyone trys logging on on the gameworld release nights, as two gameworlds at a time will be going online. This leads me to the impression that if all goes well with these tests the game is going to be more or less good to go!

Also the guys at SI are set to announce a moderator manager, the job has been in the offing for a few months now, tho i cant tell who it is theres ruours that he’s from another planet, i reckon probably Mars! Their job will be to keeps the Mods, Gods and Knobs whatever you call them in your gameworld, all in check. So thats more or less all the release hierarchy in place ready for release.

The developers have also been working away deep in the basement of SI towers under the watchful whip of Ov and there is a update waiting in the wings update 1.01, yep you got it thats the one that will come out post-release, about a month after release to be exact as SI are planning on doing monthly updates to keep everyone interested longterm.

So, we’ve got a almost bug free game? Check. Test being carried out to stop the lag and make sure all the punters on release can get in on release? Check. All the people who make sure everything runs smoothly, like customer support, mods, mod managers? Check. A update ready for after release? Check. What do we need now? A release date… drumroll please… 29th of August.

Stick it in your diaries, cos thats the date when i believe release will be, obviously i dont actualy know for sure, but im pretty confident it will be within two weeks of that date.