Another vexing flaw in the FIFA World Cup Fantasy game

 

I noted last week that among the many irritating shortcomings of the FIFA World Cup Fantasy game website is the inability to deselect your captain. However, I had thought this only a minor annoyance, since you can change your captain by selecting another player to replace the current incumbent.

But I've just discovered a further wrinkle to this - one which has the potential to be quite damaging. In fact, it is a huge bloody booby-trap in the game design!

The dratted game won't let you change your vice-captain into your captain (or vice versa).

And that is something you're quite likely to want to do. Especially if you have - reflexively, as a result of always naturally doing this in Fantasy Premier League and other such Fantasy games... - made your second-best player your vice-captain at the start of the MatchDay.

Again, it is possible to get around this. You have to appoint someone else as vice-captain, to 'free up' your current vice-captain as a potential captain selection. The problem here is that, later in the MatchDay, you might be running out of players you can transfer the vice-captaincy to (although the vice-captaincy is utterly otiose in this game, it won't let you transfer it to a player who's already played).

If Messi should have a poor game today, I find I'll have to transfer my vice-captaincy to Nuno Mendes, so that I can take a chance on Haaland with the captaincy. But if Haaland also disappoints, I won't then be able to try my luck with Nuno Mendes as well.

I'm annoyed with myself that I didn't realise this sooner. It is actually a pretty huge deal. Since the vice-captaincy is utterly irrelevant in this game (it is inactive, unless you fail to make any manual changes to your team during the course of the MatchDay - and who's going to do that??), except in this maddening obstruction that it creates in freely circulating the captain's armband, we must get it out of the way - by selecting a vice-captain who plays at the beginning of the MatchDay.

Also... I'm going to have to set an early alarm tomorrow, so that I can get up in time to move the captain's armband to Haaland if Messi has delivered only modest points. Damn, this game is exhausting....

Hoping for THE WORST....

With the mercurial Frenchman looking bang-in-form, and with a tempting-looking fixture (though it might turn out not to be a stroll in the park...) against Iraq up next for France, I decided I wanted to use my '12th Man' booster chip on Kylian Mbappé in MatchDay 2.

Alas and alack, that selection was not 'saved' by the game! (I already inserted a brief gripe about this into my review of MatchDay 1 a couple of days ago.) 

It might be that I was merely flummoxed by the perversely idiotic game design. Although the final 'Confirm' button on the Team screen is large and prominent - it simply shouldn't be there, and so you don't look for it, don't notice it. Activating the chips (and selecting captain or vice-captain) is carried out through a completely separate pop-up window; and that process appears to have been fully completed and confirmed when you close that window. There shouldn't be any additional step required to 're-confirm' the selection you've just made. And, if there is, there should be a bloody prominent pop-up notice on screen alerting you to this fact - and there isn't.

But... I had already run into this problem with the captaincy, so I am pretty sure - 80% to 90% confidence - that I had 'confirmed' this chip selection on the Team screen too. And I had seen Mbappé appearing as the extra man on my MD2 teamsheet. But the next morning,... this chip activation had disappeared again! And, since the new MatchDay had started, it was too late for me to try to activate it again. (This too seems harsh, unnecessary. There is no need for chip activation to be 'timed out' like this; you should be able to activate them at any time during the MatchDay - so long as the relevant player or players haven't played their game yet.)  It thus seems horribly likely that the FIFA Fantasy site is subject to the same sort of gremlins that beset the Fantasy Premier League site, that occasionally (probably when site-traffic is peaking) it will glitch.... and just 'lose' apparently saved team selections.

Now, with such an over-abundance of booster chips in this game, and since I don't really fancy the Final as an attractive option for playing any of them (except possibly... the 'Maximum Captain'?), I am faced with having to play a chip in every round from here on.

What's more, I now find myself crossing my fingers for a poor performance from Mbappé, so that I won't be left regretting how much this glitch has harmed me. (One wouldn't want to wish injury on anyone. But... perhaps a little soreness in the calf that forces him to sit out this one game???)

The awful design of this Fantasy game has strangely worked out in my favour once already. In MatchDay 1, I somehow wound up with my captaincy on Oyarzabal before Havertz - and didn't notice (because the bloody game doesn't tell you who your captain is). I was fuming when the Spaniard missed multiple chances and returned a blank. But as it turned out, that left me free to move my captaincy to Haaland - who, of course, delivered a monster 17 points. If I'd started with the armband on Havertz, as I'd intended, I would certainly have stuck with his initial return of 13 points (26, when doubled for the captaincy), and would have missed out on 4 extra points. I very rarely get conspicuously lucky with any of these Fantasy games; but there I did.

It is inconceivable that Dame Fate should rescue me from disaster like that twice in succession. A 20-pointer from M. Mbappé is surely incoming....

[Well, damn, he did manage another brace of goals for a very useful 13-point haul. Not as bad as it might have been for me, but still rather galling. I now have to hope that I can do at least nearly as well as that, if not a little better, from playing the '12th Man' chip in one of the knockout rounds. Yes, unfortunately, since I don't fancy my chances with any of the chips during the final round of the group stage, I am now left having to use a chip in every round thereafter. There are too many chips in this game!]

FIFA World Cup Fantasy is already starting to piss me off...

Is Haaland captain? It's anybody's guess! 

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. 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.]

One more WISH

 

I know I said I was done with this wishful thinking when I came up with this afterthought a week ago, but.... one final FPL wish-list item has occurred to me. This will be it now, I promise. (Until next year, anyway.....)

I'd like FPL to introduce a display of 'Team History' - not just the 'Gameweek History' list we have at the moment, which provides only headline stats for each week, but a more detailed breakdown of how each player has performed for us.

I envision a grid display, with our current players listed in 15 rows,... and then all players we've previously owned in further rows beneath those; then a column for each Gameweek, indicating which players started for us then (or were only on the bench), and how many points they returned. (It would also be nice to have a little pop-up triggered by the mouse-cursor clicked on each Gameweek, or even just hovered over it - revealing the breakdown of how the player earned his points for you in that week.)

The first few columns should also give a few summary totals: how many games the players have started for us, how many points they've returned, how much their price has changed while we've owned them.

This is pretty basic stuff, surely not much to ask??

Dear FPL - please FIX this!

Long ago, in one of my 'previous lives', I worked for a while in website design (I was more the sales/client liaison guy, but I had to work closely with the development team to fulfill the client's needs). And there were certain basic principles of UI design that were universally recognised - even a quarter of a century ago, in the early days of the Internet: a) Avoid pop-up screens (they're clunky, and people hate them); b) In particular, avoid 'large' pop-ups (they're an awkward compromise between small or mid-sized and full-screen pop-ups: if you need a larger display space, you should always go full-screen); c) Avoid sliders (really, really fiddly and irritating); d) In particular, avoid lateral sliders (shuffling from one side of the screen to the other in order to view all the information it contains is excruciating...); e) NEVER leave anything essential outside the initial field of view (if you have to have your sliders, they must be immediately visible when the pop-up opens; any 'control' items or essential information must be within the visible area of the screen when it first appears - you can't have people needing to scroll down to find a lateral slider, and then scrolling back up to look at the part of the screen they want);  f) If you must have sliders, leave row & column headings outside the sliding frame - so that they'll remain visible and unmoved as you scroll down/sideways.

How many of these 'golden rules' does the FPL 'Player Info' screen break? That's right - ALL OF THEM! It is an abomination, a disgrace, an absolute shit-show.

There are several aspects of FPL's User-Interface design and data presentation that I'd like to see changes to; but we have to start with that one - it is the most massively annoying defect in the game, because it's a screen that we use multiple times every week.

Improvements I'd like to see in the game's UI

1)  The 'Player Info' screen: make it a full-screen pop-up, or - better - an 'open in a new window/browser tab' full-page display. And reformat the layout, if necessary, so that it can be navigated without the need for slider bars. (It would also be nice if we could get hotlinks under the 'previous seasons' totals to open a page with the full week-by-week records for each year.)

2) a)  The League tables: make them searchable by Gameweek (as well as, or instead of by month, which is the only option currently offered). It's nice to be able to easily check who the weekly winner is, in any league, or find out what your weekly position was in your country league,... or remind yourself how you did during a crucial double gameweek, or whatever. Shouldn't be at all difficult to implement.

2) b)  The League tables: display the current total number of participants for each one!

3) a)  Player search: make it available on every 'team' page, not just the 'Transfers' page. We don't need the full sidebar, just a search box. We often want to check up on a specific player - often mid-gameweek, while we're monitoring our own progress on the 'Points' page - and it is a pain-in-the-arse to have to keep switching to the 'Transfers' page (or to have to leave that open in a separate tab, which is what I usually end up doing) to do that.

3) b)  Player search:  clear the search automatically when parameters have changed, and/or add a quick 'clear' button.  If I've switched my field of search from 'Midfielders' to 'Goalkeepers', I don't want to be told that no goalkeepers can be found... because the stupid bloody widget is searching for a goalkeeper called Mbeumo. (Again, it doesn't help that the 'search box' is usually off the bottom of the field-of-view when you're adjusting the other search parameters!)

3) c)  Player Search: broaden the data field so that a player can be recognised from any part of his name. It can be impossible to find out anything about Diogo Jota's history unless you know that the game recognises him ONLY as 'Diogo', or about Korean forward Hwang Hee-Chan unless you realise that the game mistakenly believes Hee-Chan is his surname.

4) (a)  Player Statistics:  make that page searchable by gameweek also. By month, or over a particular run of gameweeks - with 'from' and 'to' selectable - would be nice too. But at the very least, we should be able to recap players' relative performances in any given gameweek. (And heck, it would be nice to have a 'Season so far....' total available under a by-gameweek search too, in addition to the figures for that week.)

4) (b)  Player Statistics:  make 'historical' records available as well, by adding a facility to search by season.

4) c)  Player Statistics:  for heaven's sake, start displaying the saves points as well as just the number of 'saves'!  The number of saves is 'good to know', but it's not as important as how many points your keeper has actually contributed to his team (and yours). And after all, 75 saves in a season could represent anything from 0 to 25 actual points!!

5)  'Global Average' score: a pretty important statistic, it should be appearing in more than one place! Please add it to the weekly record in 'Entry History',... and to the 'Team of the Week' pages,... and anywhere else that refers to gameweek-by-gameweek results. And gosh, it would be nice if they'd tally the 'global average' for the season as well.

6)  Captaincy rates: also a pretty useful statistic, it should be added to 'Player Statistics' - at least for the historical record; although live updates for the current gameweek would also be interesting to see.

7) a)  Gameweek team records: make them 'historically accurate' as to player status. If we're checking back to see how we - or a rival - did in an earlier gameweek, we want to be reminded of players' injury/suspension status going into that gameweek, not NOW. That shouldn't be difficult!

7) b)  Gameweek team records:  also make the team 'Points' pages' linked league tables 'historically' sync'ed, so that if you click on that league, you'll see the standings as they were at the end of that gameweek. (Also, wouldn't it be lovely if clicking on your own team name in a league took you to the page that your rank actually puts you on? And perhaps, you know, you could even make the leagues searchable - by team name or by score/range of scores??)

8)  Fixture Difficulty Rating:  make it searchable backwards as well as forwards. Sometimes we want to check back on the pattern of fixtures (and their predicted difficulty [even though this is laughably inaccurate much of the time!]) in a previous gameweek; but, at present, everything prior to the following gameweek disappears as soon as a new gameweek begins. [And if they're going to keep the dreadful 'Assistant Manager' chip next season (although I'm fervently praying that they won't... #DownWithTheNewChip), would it be so much to ask if they could do something to highlight the fixtures in which a 'table bonus' would currently be available (or was available, in a previous gameweek)?]

9)  The 'Transfer' process: streamline it, and make it more idiot-proof. We hear sob-stories many times a season of people who've ended up paying for multiple transfers because they'd somehow inadvertently failed to activate a Wildcard or Free Hit as they'd thought. And I sympathise: the transfer process at the moment is a bit clunky and confusing. I think in the past you used to have an option to play Wildcard or Free Hit within the 'Transfers' pop-up window; but that seems to have disappeared - why? It is an unnecessary hassle to have to go back to the main screen to activate the chip. And if transfers are blocked (because you've inadvertently chosen too many players from one club, or strayed over-budget), you should have the warning notice about that in the 'confirm transfers' window - not just find that it is frozen, without explanation, and have to go back to the main screen to find out what the problem is. And I DO NOT WANT to have an annoying pop-up ad inviting me to participate in 'Fantasy Challenge' at the end of this process, rather than the quick reassurance of a confirmation of a successful transfer.

10)  Key buttons must be PROMINENT, CONSPICUOUS: returning to the point in my preamble about 'essential' items needing to be immediately within the field of view on a screen, FPL is often guilty of 'hiding' stuff in inconspicuous places at the edge of the screen, or completely out of sight off the bottom of it. Having to scroll down in the 'Transfers' pop-up screen to find the 'Confirm Transfers' button is a needless irritation; but even worse (in my experience, a very regular source of 'mistakes' - particularly with bench order or captaincy allocation) is the vital 'Save Team' button hiding off the bottom of the 'Select Team' page. If they're going to require a manual save to confirm the team (rather than just auto-saving every change), there should be a prominent warning notice to remind you of this: 'Do you want to save this team?'  And it would make more sense to have the 'Save' button at the TOP of the screen (where it's immediately in view) rather than at the bottom. [And maybe we could make this button and/or warning notice about the need for manual confirmation into a 'Do you want to enter this team this week?' question - part of my plan for expunging 'zombie accounts' from the game. If you don't specifically 'enter' a team for the coming gameweek, I think you should get ZERO points for that gameweek. And if you fail to 'enter' for a few weeks running, your entry for the year should be deleted.]

There will probably be a few more points about the layout of the FPL website that occur to me over time, but I think this is enough for now; these are the most important ones. [Yep, I came up with one more.]

Dear FPL, can you please fix these things before next season?  Pretty please.