Mana Games

[Kej]

Hi there,

just wanted to give a bit of feedback on TEM2 after 40+ hours put into it. First of all, I had a blast playing it so thanks for the game. As a Football Manager fan, it felt good having a similar game ofr tennis, even though of course the two games are hardly comparable.

However I did have a few issues with the games that made the experience feel a bit "unfinished" :

1) The regens are always absolutely insane in my games. They come at age 18 with 90s everywhere and quickly dominate the "real" players. It makes a fun challenge trying to compete with them but it feels weird.

2) Another problem with the regens, why do they have fake names ? If they are indeed randomly generated, why not give them actual names from their countries; without the changed letters ?

3) It feels like training is more important than playing. I would love to play 16-20 tournaments a year but I always end up playing only slams + masters 1000 because I feel like I'm losing stats. The only good point in tournaments is having access to good sparring partners for the 150% bonus but there should be another mechanic to encourage players to play more tournaments.

4) My motivation always seems quite low. It is unclear how I can improve it.

5) The AI players are too inconsistent. It often feels like there are too close from one another and thus keeps exchanging positions from ranks 1-20. I like the unpredictability but it is a bit too much.

6) I would love to have more feedback on my stats gain in training. Like a bar of a different color for the bits that I gain during the training week, with a combined total number at the top for example. "Total stats gained during this week : X%". That would allow players to improve slowly by seeing which training strategy is better. Is it going day-by-day, resting one hour or two at the end of each day ? Is it better to train for like 18 or 24 hours straight before resting ? I honeslty still can't tell after 7 combined seasons in my two games.

7) For the in-game strategy, I don't know if it is a bug or not, but to have access to the service and return strategy, I need to be in the according type of point. For example, if I want to change my return strategy on the opponent second serve, I need to wait for a point where he is second serving or it won't show up. It would be less of a hassle if we had both screens accessible at the same time !

8) I don't seem to have access to boosts in text mode, I assume it is because the simulated matches don't take properly into account all the players stats in input like the real 3D matches ?

Hope the feedback is somewhat useful. Great job on the fun game !

Cheers.

[manutoo]

Hello,

0) Thanks for your feedback !

1) It has been a bit tuned in the August version, and the incoming v1.0c will address a bit more the issue

2) Regen names have been changed in the v1.0b released in last May, so I guess you're playing with an old version (or it's a very strange bug)

3) You need to play tournaments to get XP points to train your mental skills

4) => topic11-32522.php

5) You mean from one year to another ? It has been fixed a bit in the August version, but they might be still less constant than the Big 3 (or 4) epoch we just lived in real life ; I don't think it'll happen again in the future : just look at the woman Tour to see how it might go in the future for the men...
Maybe it could happen sometimes in some career, though.

7) I feel it's more simple like this, especially for people not too familiar with the terms

8) In text matches, you still can give a boost but only before the match started

[Kej]

Hello, thanks for answering

A quick follow-up on some questions :

2) Yeah, I checked and it did change, it was an old remark I had on an older save and I didn't notice it was changed

3) That's a fair point, but I still think it is slighty imbalanced towards training. Like the optimum is to play all the slams and Masters 1000 and that's about it. I feel like the optimum should rather be around 20 tournaments a year to match real life.
Also regarding mental points, it is still hard to spend them because it still takes training hours, so it is at the expense of another stat. It is also hard to spend it all anyway, you always end up with more experience than hours available to spend it (granted there is boosts to use too).

1, 4, 5, 7, 8) Fair enough, thank you for your answers !

6) Do you have any opinion on such a feature ?

I have another question that comes to my mind right now : is it planned to have an in-game editor in the future ? A simple tool to edit names, players stats etc would be pretty cool but I guess it's not that easy to implement

Anyway, as an FM fan, I'd like to say that the most important in sport manager games is to find the sweet spot between having a game that is not too easy, but also giving players the feeling that they can make a great career if they play it right. In FM, you can win the champion's league with an amateur club if you invest years after years of quality gameplay, but you can get sacked in 10 games at Barcelona if you suck. So it empowers players because they feel that they have everything in their hands to perform or not perform in their games.

And really I think that it is amazing how close you landed to that sweet spot in such a "small" game with, after all, very simple mechanics. It is not perfect but in my careers in highest diffficulty, I managed to win slams and be episodically world #1 but I never dominated like crazy winning everything. I really had fun trying to optimize everything as much as I could.

So congrats again

[manutoo]

3) It's relatively similar to what are doing the top players : end of 2019 rankings, 17 tournaments for the Big 3 => https://www.atptour.com/en/rankings/sin ... ange=0-100
So with 9 masters series + 4 slams + master final = 14 tournaments ; it means it'd be good to feel the need to play 2 TET500 & 1 TET250 and that'd be ok.
It can be good to go to win a small tournament to boost your Self-confidence before a slam ; or to boost your motivation if there's too much time between 2 big tournaments...

6) It has been asked several times already ; it could be nice, but once your skills are very high, the gain would be barely visible... Maybe it'd need little flying numbers or something... It's not obvious how to do it so it'd work well in all cases. Maybe I'll try to do it one day.

7) TE2006 had an in-game player editor, but it's just much more convenient to use the Modding SDK and a text editor : topic11-31376.php . Plus if I spend time on that, it means I won't be spending time on features that are really missing.

8) I'm glad to know you enjoy the challenge of the game ; it's kinda lucky it turned out like that, because although I designed the game in a way it should bring a good challenge, I didn't test a lot and I just tuned a bit the difficulty levels from user feedback...