On the 27th October, I posted a State of the Gameworlds piece in the subscriber forums outlining, in very broad terms, what we at SI and SEGA saw as the major issues within FML. The post went on to announce that we were preparing to form the first ever meeting of the FML Council.

My vision of the FML Council is for a group of FML managers, both past and present, and appointed by the community to represent them, would meet the development and publishing teams in London regularly.

Due to the timelines involved and the current issues on the table, the first meeting, however, was going to be slightly different to the longer term vision. We handpicked a selection of people and brought them in to the office to discuss the issues with the game as well as form a sort of ‘focus group’ to hear our proposals. I have to stress that this was a one off although it still did manage to cause a minor fuss with some people and a few popular community websites.

For those of you interested in who attended; Bazrah99, Jakswan, Millie, Vid, trainspotter and lukekarts all came to our offices on the 6th November (there were a few more invited but they were unable to attend). They joined us at 11am and left around 5pm and the agenda consisted of a tour of our studio, a presentation from myself and a few of the SEGA team followed by a very open Q & A session with the whole development team including Oliver Collyer conferenced in from Turkey.

The first part of the presentation involved laying out what we saw as key learnings one year on from launch. We laid the cards on the table and told it exactly how we felt it was (and encouraged our guests to do the same), something that the Council have since told us they appreciated. We then moved onto our proposed changes and plans as to how we felt we could execute these changes. Discussions (and debates!) followed and we came away from the day with lots of food for thought (although we all agreed at the time, that the council’s opinions weren’t necessarily representative of the community as a whole).

Since then, we’ve gone away and finalised the plans which means that we feel we’re are very close to being in a position to announce them in full. Over the next few days we’ll be preparing a series happen in the week commencing Monday 23rd November – As there is so much to tell you and explain we plan to do this over the course of a few days.

We’ll also be dedicating some timeslots where we’ll sit on the forums and try to answer any questions that arise from these announcements and we’ll also appear on the Gameworld One podcast the week after to try and do the same.

We’re aware that this is another ‘announcement of an announcement’ but there is no intention to “tease” you with the information. We just want to make sure that we get everything right our end before we announce it as well as keep you in the loop of where we are and what we are working on.

Discuss this in the forums

UPDATE:

Unfortunately we are going to have to delay Monday’s announcement about the future of Football Manager Live until later on in the week. The plans are all in place and the announcements have been written and we’ve even been hard at work on some of the new developments that you’ll read about. However, after coming back from a series of engagements this week, Miles has asked that we get some extra points of view on the announcements from other areas of the company before we go live.

We’re very much committed to getting these announcements to you as soon as possible and apologise for the slight delay.