WHO designed this abomination??

 

While I said a few days ago that I really rather like the new Club World Cup tournament, and even the streaming media coverage of it,... I am finding FIFA's Fantasy game derived from it a 'Trail of Tears'.

It is one of the worst-designed game interfaces I've ever seen. Here are just some of the things that absolutely bug the crap out of me about it....

1)  Hideous appearance! A black background - really?? And even the 'pitch' behind your team display is in a depressing charcoal-grey.... WHY?! And unneccessarily huge menu bars at the top take up more than a third of the available screen area. Good grief!

2)  No country leagues?  Not listed as such, anyway. Rather surprisingly, the 'Leaderboard' page gives you an option to search by 'country of residence'; so, in effect, there are - they're just a bit hidden. (And you can only really check the top handful of positions.)

3)  No 'public leagues'?  In the Fantasy Premier League game we're more familiar with, we've grown used to automatically being entered in a giant 'Broadcaster League' based on who has the main TV rights to the EPL in our country or region; and we can opt to enter randomly generated small leagues created by the game; and many other entities - FPL tips websites, and media outlets like Goal and FourFourTwo magazines - also have their own leagues, which are open for anyone to enter. There seems to be none of that in the FIFA game. Or if there are such leagues, they're impossible to find. The search function in the 'Leagues' section produces absolutely no results - not even for leagues that I know exist, not even for leagues that I'm actually in. WTF?

4)  No help in identifying the teams!  When many of the participating teams are unfamiliar to a general audience, it would be nice to be given just a little bit of assistance in recognising who's who. I mean, some easily accessible background information on all the participants would help; maybe even a thumbnail 'team bio', or at least the full name of the team, in a small pop-up window when you hover your cursor over the team crest or abbreviation? But no, none of that. And they don't even use commonsense abbreviations for the team names. The two East Asian sides end up being the easily confusible UHD and URD. And who outside Brazil is going to have any clue that SEP might signify Palmeiras? Who, anywhere (even in Portugal?), is going to readily understand that Benfica are SFB rather than BEN? [Aha, I discover Benfica's acronym is actually SLB... I had been thinking 'Futebol' must be in there somewhere.]  (And a friend has just told me that on the mobile app, they've recently switched to showing player portraits rather than the team strips?! Sigh.)

5)  A perversely unhelpful UI all around!  If you're opting to take advantage of manual substitutions during the course of the MatchDay, it's really important to keep track of who's playing when; but the option to display the match date for each player is removed once the MatchDay is underway - so, you constantly have to refer to a separate fixture list to remind yourself of the substitution options. When making transfers, it would be nice to have the next opponent and the match date and the player price all visible simultaneously - rather than having to repeatedly toggle between different view options. Selecting one of the 'Booster' chips is only possible by clicking on an icon - whose significance is non-intuitive, and which they do absolutely nothing to draw anyone's attention to (I would bet that a significant proportion of managers will fail to use some or all of their 'Boosters' because they didn't know how to access them), I could go on and on.....

6)  No non-availability flags?  OK, I can see that trying to keep abreast of the full injury situation in such a big tournament (especially when manager press conferences seem to be few and mostly rather uninformative) might be a bit more trouble than they're willing to go to. But we've had several players pick up bans for receiving a red card or two yellow ones - and I haven't seen any indication of that in any of the in-game displays.

7)  Horrendously clunky player search!  The ability to even set search terms when trying to review transfer options is hidden: there's a weird and entirely non-intuitive icon you have to click to open a search box. Once you've found this, it can be vexingly fiddly to select the options you want: sometimes it takes multiple attempts to check or uncheck a box. And then the bloody thing is continually resetting the search parameters by itself. And that righthand sidebar area is constantly being obscured by an annoying dropdown from the menu bar above (inadvertently activated by moving your cursor anywhere near it??).  I simply don't believe it...

8)  No 'match reports'/player points breakdowns?!  Nope, there is no information at all offered within the Fantasy section of the FIFA website about how the games actually went down, apart from the scoreline. If you even just want to know who scored the goals, you have to dig out a match report elsewhere! If you want to know who got points for what in a match, you have no recourse but to laboriously search for every individual player and click on their profile to find out. (And I'm not sure if that works for players you don't have in your squad...)  Absolute INSANITY!!!

9)  No tabulated player stats??  Again, if you're trying to make smart transfer choices, it's nice to be able to compare the full roster of available players across a number of different metrics. But FIFA Fantasy has no 'Stats' page - so you can't compare players by anything other than their total points return shown in the transfer selection list.

10)  Screwed-up budget/player pricing!!  I know, it might seem perverse to complain about being given too much money; Fantasy managers traditionally moan about the opposite. But it is, I think, another sign of how badly this game has been put together. Now, OK, maybe the game's developers did not anticipate that Mbappe and Dembele would be injured at the start of the tournament, or that the likes of Kane, Haaland, and Vini Jnr would have a relatively subdued start - but perhaps they should have! And even if these premium-priced players had all been at the top of their game, there would often be a case for preferring a less illustrious attacker facing a very weak opponent, and/or offering the opportunity to earn the very valuable 'Scouting Bonus' for a low-owned player. The few very expensive players are not - at least in the early part of the competition - all that compelling; and there are far too many good alternatives at low and mid-prices. And how does a very capable goalkeeper who's first-choice at one of the clubs who are favourites to qualify out of their group get priced at only 4.0 million??  Franco Armani was a budget-enabling windfall for everyone - but his ludicrous pricing was an egregious mistake. In a Fantasy game like this, you really should not have 5 or 10 million left unused. For me, this was another sign - one of many - that this game has been put together with a mix of haste and idiocy.

11)  No information about participation levels??  There is no display anywhere on the FIFA Fantasy pages about the size of the global leaderboard; and I can't find anything about that anywhere else online either. Given that my 'home' country apparently has less than 2% of the participants we typically see in FPL, and that I've mostly been up in the top 10,000, which is considerably better than I've generally managed in FPL,... it would be reasonable to assume that the total number of managers taking part in FIFA Fantasy Club World Cup is only 100,000 to 200,000.  Which leads me to my final point....

12)  'Unsearchable' global leaderboard! It is quite laborious to search the global rankings in FPL; but at least they're divided up into 'pages' of 50, so you can select a page number in the URL in the estimated range you're interested in looking at. In this game, you can only click a 'See more' button at the bottom of the list, allowing you to keep increasing the length of the scroll. It only shows 20 places in each 'reveal', so it would take an inordinately long time to to get to the bottom of the league. But, of course, that's just not possible anyway, because such a long 'page' eats up too much memory - and either the site freezes or your browser crashes before you can get anywhere near even 10,000th place.

I am loving this tournament. And I am enjoying following it with the Fantasy game. But damn, they have made it unreasonably difficult to play!!!