The tournament itself is shaping up just fine. Some of the 'minnows' have proved to be quite formidable after all. Some of the more fancied teams - Brazil, Switzerland, Holland, Spain - have stumbled embarrassingly out of the starting-blocks (and I'd bet that at least one or two from France, Argentina, England, and Portugal may do likewise!). Some of the more 'mid-tier' contenders like Morocco, the USA, and Australia have produced the kind of performances that make you start wondering how far they could go in the competition. And we've already seen some absolutely cracking goals. These first five days have really given us everything we could have wished for.
It's just a pity that visiting the FIFA website to check how we're getting on in the Fantasy game is such an utter pain-in-the-arse.
The UI design is beyond-awful, really some of the most perverse and inadequate I've ever seen. Why is the 'business area' of the display - where you're actually going to view your team and make changes to it - restricted to this tiny 'letterbox' that's only about 25=30% of the total screen area? And why is even that extensively cluttered and obscured with overlarge action buttons and annoying pop-ups? Because it was designed by cretins, seems to be the only possible answer.
Also, although order of appearance during the MatchDay is crucial for deciding who to put in the original starting eleven and when you might want to make substitutions, you lose the ability to select this as the main 'player attribute' to display when the MatchDay is in progress; it's there when you're making selections for the next round, but disappears when showing you the current MatchDay - so, you're left having to scroll through the fixtures at the bottom of the page to remind yourself who's playing when. Here, the default 'player attribute' is 'scheduled opponent': that I think I can remember; but the exact order and kick-off times of the games I need to constantly double-check. Why would anyone do something this daft and annoying???
The thing that's vexing me most is how bloody fiddly it is to select your captain (and vice-captain). Instead of having a small pop-up screen with just that option available on a right-click over the player, you get a huge, screen-filling pop-up that initially shows you almost nothing beyond the player's name. You have to scroll down to find the options. And often the scrolling function seems to freeze; so, you have to refresh the page in order to be able to do anything. And even worse, there's no reassuring confirmation of the choice that you've made; the pop-up screen promptly disappears again.
That fiddliness in the selection procedure is, in fact, only the second most annoying thing about this UI. The most annoying thing is that it's impossible to see who your captain is. For some unfathomable reason, the designers of this UI have chosen to make the 'captain' (and 'vice-captain') symbol into one of a plethora of tiny, almost featureless grey discs denoting various aspects of player status: a collection of obscure symbols, picked out against a light grey background in thin lines that are only a slightly darker grey. Even with the display size on my laptop screen ramped up to 200% all of these symbols are utterly indistinguishable from each other. Again, it is a basic rule of UI design that icons conveying important information like this should be large enough to see and recognise easily, and clearly differentiated from each other by having distinctive shapes and/or distinctive colours and/or being placed in different parts of the relevant display frame. These bastards are all tiny and round and grey, and all in the bottom left of the player panels. It is utterly fucking ridiculous.
And oh, it does get even a little worse than that: when you click on a player to view his large pop-up details panel, it doesn't actually tell you whether you currently have him selected as captain or vice-captain; you just have to infer that from the fact that these action buttons are now 'faded out', presumably indicating that these options are not available to you. (But that could be because the player has already played his game, and thus can't have the captaincy transferred to him, rather than because you've already placed the armband with him. And god help you if you've forgotten who your captain and vice-captain are - because there really doesn't seem to be any way to find out, other than by making the selection all over again.) And.... you don't seem to be able to deselect a captain by clicking on the player; you can only do that by appointing another captain in his place. Could they have thought of any way of making this more clunky and user-unfriendly???
I've been particularly annoyed about this over the past 24 hours, because I thought I had my captaincy on Havertz - who'd returned a very nice 13 points in the demolition of Curacao. But it seems the armband was with Oyarzabal - who had a dog of a game the next day. It would be very unlike me to make a mistake with the order of matches (I am quite sure I had planned to move my captaincy, if necessary, from Havertz to Oyarzabal, and then from Oyarzabal to Haaland); so, I am now worrying if this FIFA website is prone to the same sort of glitches we occasionally find in FPL, where team data suddenly gets lost or scrambled. I hope not; it is conceivable, I think, that I blundered because of the fiddliness of making the selection, and the near-impossibility of checking what selection I'd made.
And yes, oh dear, the next mistake definitely was my own fault. This morning, having reached the point where my original eleven starters had all played, I could cast out the low returners to make way for my subs. Yesterday, of course, I had been fuming to discover that Oyarzabal was - unexpectedly and unwelcomely - my captain; but acting in haste this morning, that unhappy fact again slipped my mind: I moved out all of my 2-point and 3-point players - not realising that bloody Oyarzabal was one of them; his total was displaying as 4 points, because of the phantom captaincy.
Hopefully, I can redeem myself with a decent captaincy return from Erling Haaland (or Marcel Sabitzer or Nuno Mendes...). But I've thrown away a least 1 point with this unfortunate Oyarzabal cock-up - and possibly a lot more through missing the expected captaincy return on Havertz. (Despite all this woe, I'm actually having a very decent MatchDay 1. I usually get off to a terrible start in Fantasy competitions, and often fail to make up the lost ground despite a much stronger performance from there on. This time.... it's looking like I could actually do pretty well overall, if I can keep this early form going. Mustn't get the hopes up too much! This is a game that punishes hope!)
[It looks as though some of these unfortunate UI problems might have been addressed already. The 'letterboxing' issue seems to have disappeared now. And the captain/vice-captain symbols are now a little more distinct, and displaying at the top right of the player box rather than the bottom left. And I have found that by cranking my display size up to the max 250%, I can just about make them out now; but only these two symbols, not the welter of other ones, they're still an indistinguishable mystery to me.]
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