The Sh!t Show that is Chicago Politics

*warning: not FML related. I have relapsed into a former version of myself, the political blogger* Forgive me ;)

Some of you may know I spent the past two years working on the Obama Presidential campaign so this one hit home. Today Rob Blagojevich the Governor of Illinois who gets to appoint Obama's replacement in the US Senate was arrested for bribery and corruption related to the filling of that seat.

Below are some of the transcripts taken from the criminal complaint against the Governor along with the all the necessary commentary in the following paragraph.

Mr Governor, go fuck yourself.

Governor talking about President-Elect Obama's preference

By this time, media reports indicated that Senate Candidate 1, an advisor to the President-elect, was interested in the Senate seat if it became vacant, and was likely to be supported by the President-elect. During the call, ROD BLAGOJEVICH stated, "unless I get something real good for [Senate Candidate 1], shit, I’ll just send myself, you know what I’m saying....And if I don’t get what I want and I’m not satisfied with it, then I’ll just take the Senate seat myself." Later, ROD BLAGOJEVICH stated that the Senate seat "is a fucking valuable thing, you just don’t give it away for nothing."

Obama, despite cutting his chops in Chicago where "vote early vote often" originated and isn't just a cliche refuses to play along.

ROD BLAGOJEVICH stated that he is "struggling" financially and does "not want to be Governor for the next two years." ROD BLAGOJEVICH said that the consultants (Advisor B and another consultant are believed to be on the call at that time) are telling him that he has to "suck it up" for two years and do nothing and give this "motherfucker [the President-elect] his senator. Fuck him. For nothing? Fuck him." ROD BLAGOJEVICH states that he will put "[Senate Candidate 4]" in the Senate "before I just give fucking [Senate Candidate 1] a fucking Senate seat and I don't get anything."

Later in the conversation, ROD BLAGOJEVICH said he knows that the President-elect wants Senate Candidate 1 for the open seat but "they're not willing to give me anything except appreciation. Fuck them."

Wheeling and Dealing

Today I sold Dagoberto for 110k + 30% of profit from next sale (which could realistically double the fee).

This got me thinking, I'm spending a lot of time buying and selling players. Have I made any money?

Turns out I have.
I have bought 44 players
Sold 16 players
16 sales = total profit of 740k
6 in-coming sell on clauses
only 1 out-going sell on clause (but it's 35% on a world class player)
2 active auctions close tomorrow. @current bid will add 207k to profit (expect to get to 350k profit minimum) and two in-coming sell on clauses @11% & 14%. This would be 1 million pounds profit plus 8 future income producing opportunities.

All that being said, I don't participate in ripping off newbies nor do I think I am that skillful in the "player to player" transfer negotiation skills. In fact, looking back I've overpaid and undersold FAR too many players for way too much $$$.

Instead, I've been successful due to a combination of recognizing which players are undervalued (both by players and the game) and by taking the time to find these deals in the wage auctions and approaching users one-by-one to sell their players.

Re: New Toys

I just realized I omitted this entirely in the post below. It refers to a request for new UI (user interface) features for the 1.1 version of the game due out in January. Still no official response but we still have hope as other players seem to be fans.

Ov et al,

Two requests for 1.1 graphical display of info (that is already in the DB).

1. Any way to show historically the AF or MV of a player? I've taken to tracking my players on a google doc (which makes me a metrics geek...and that's cool) it'd be nice if you could save me the effort . Okay, this data may not be stored in DB beyond current amount but it could be.
2. Would it be possible to display the green/red attribute levels on the squad "overview" page? I know 1.1 is going to have the 4-week graphs which will display the in season changes, but it still requires clicking through each player & attribute one by one. I'd like to be able to quickly scan the whole squad.
3. categorized past expenditures/imcome. Right now if I want to know how much I've spent on wages, transfers, won/loss on unofficial comps, etc...I would need to add them up one by one if be great if the game could do that for us (and bonus points if you allow us to filter the results by period of time, ie 'past week', 'past month', etc...)

UPDATE: Ov Collyer, developer-in-chief of FML has responded. Score one for the good guys at Team Awesome FC...now I just need to con my way into a beta server....

1) I like the idea.
2) We've already added arrows to 1.1 for the above squad overview, though it's optional in the preferences because they do make the columns a little bit wider.
3) Nice idea again - I'm thinking that this could be applied generically to all table columns - basically make it show the total, or average, or whatever in a special row at the bottom. That way, you could filter your past transactions for a time period (which you can already do) and then see the total at the bottom.

We're "feature-locked" in 1.1 now, just polishing it up and fixing bugs, so 1) and 3) above would be for a future version if they made an appearance.

FML Bloggers and Requests for New Toys

*UPDATE* this is only part 1 in a series of posts. Was getting to hard to write and play FML on dueling laptops.

The FML Forums are a fantastic source of info about FML updates, tactical advice, place to gripe, ask a question, etc...

Last night I asked for the other FML bloggers to identify themselves (for linkage - not nefarious purposes) and got some great response. I will be creating my blogroll in a bit. In the meantime, below are some links to some great blogs with a one or two line description.

I also put up a poll asking if readers had an FML blog, 68.18% of respondents said yes...this leads me to believe that my professors warnings regarding 'self inclusionary polls', someone please inform Zogby of this fact.

The S.F.A. In Shearer is a fantastic (and metrically based :) ) blog covering the SFA in Shearer GW (as the name may imply). They put up their FAs "team of the week" for each of the qualifier leagues and other great stats. Anyone wanna help me do this for the EEFA? Methinks I might switch to SFA if I don't make the EEFA Premiership which I am currently on track to do.

Fat wallet FC lives up to it's name!! Not only does he recap buying a player for £6,800 and selling him a month (season length) for £800,000 + 10% of any profit on the players next sale (a sell-on clause). That's just absurd. He also just bought Messi, lucky bastard. Also provides some great Saunders GW-wide metrics and stats.

Strawberry Fields Forever and ABCDE FC Advocate are the club blogs for the MacLean brothers' blogs. (coincidentally, I live in McLean, Virginia in the States). Great detailed write-ups in the 'press' style format.

Diary of an Addiction is a great (and detailed) blog following the Fen Ditton club on Clough. The blog's title is also an accurate description for anyone playing FML 'properly' ;)
Described by the author as:

A rambling account of the goings on at my team. Mostly just news reports copied from my in-game Mail, but with the odd match report thrown in. I keep meaning to write a couple of week/season roundups, but never get around to it.

Almost Retired follows club Inter Retirement on Shearer GW. Team Awesome and Inter Retirement have faced off 26 times with Inter Retirement dominating the series with 16 wins, 7 draws and only 3 losses. I'm going to blame this on the fact that 21 of those matches were youth matches and Inter Retirement currently down the #1 youth ranking. Conversly, Team Awesome's youth squad is merely a play-pen to entertain young and decent players that haven't just yet cracked the first team.


Blog name: FC Fife
URL: fcfife.blogspot.com
GW: fernandez
Topics/genre: team news, player info, goal videos & screenys, general rubbish

A Little bit of the Awesomeness

I'm not going to recap everything that's happened with the team so far because that would take a long time, and I'm sure nobody cares. From time to time, however, I will posts little updates about Team Awesome FC which I'll refer to as "State of the Club Addresses". So without delay.....

State Of the Club Address December 8, 2008

The state of the club is horrible. Gonzalo Castro and Marco Zambelli, two starting players that can each play over five positions and serve as the core of our Defense and Midfield with supporting cast shuffling around them have been on the injured reserve list and out of duty. The talent and versatility they provide was sorely missed and we promptly destroyed our record.

Before the injuries we were ranked 63rd in Shearer, as I write this we are ranked 123rd (out of ~650 active clubs). I'm not going to publish our record of the last 48 hours because I'd have to count the 150 or matches by hand, but suffice to say it was less than stellar.

That being said, We Shall Prevail. Both Castro and Zambelli are back in action and we acquired a major new player, Xabi Alonso through a perhaps over-priced wage auction. (note, he has yet to play to his potential as this manager just realized that the "playmaker" skill had yet to be learned therefore rendering his skills useless. This has been remedied)

Victorious update to follow.

Somebody Cares About What I Think....for now...

Check it out, I was quoted in the inaugural edition of the The Weekly Shearer. For those who care, FML is played on multiple "Gameworlds" limited to 1000 players each. The GW I play on is called Shearer, ergo, our weekly round-up The Weekly Shearer.

In anycase, below is the excerpt.

The Big Issue
This week’s big issue comes in the form of whether or not the UFFA is really worth joining.

It was Tim Bayliss who first raised the point that the UFFA Gameworld Cup wasn’t worth anything to him and posed more risk of injuries to his team which would spoil his chances in other competitions. His point was based on having 8 knock-out rounds with a £0 prize fund.

Tim said: ‘’It SHOULD have the biggest prize pot of all competitions..... Instead it has the least. Why.’’

The first reply came from none other than Mod God Richard Tebbutt. He argued ‘’ It has, however, probably the most PRESTIGE in the gameworld (except perhaps the Gold Cup) - You also get increased ranking points for winning UFFA games.’’, a point that everyone else seemed to know and agree to and have backed up comments from Nate De la Piedra, Paul Wallace, and Eric Davis.

However Scotty Watson did agree with the original point saying “Without money... there cannot be prestige! Would teams bother to take part in the Champions League if they got nothing from it?’’

But later after it all died down a final reminder to enter was sent out with the description:
'The Gameworld Cup.
A seasonal knockout cup that is open to all users in the Gameworld.
The Gameworld Cup winner can argue that it is he/she who is true master of the Gameworld.’

So... join or not, enjoy the game in which ever way you like, but the GW Paper sticks by UFFA as a great honour and something to been seen as huge without letting those winners walk away with a huge prize that helps them dominate everyone.

The Eternal "First Post"

These don't stay on the front-page very long (if you are a proper blogger)so I'm not going to use this to explain my raison d'être or what have you. If you need it, the uber-short version is I am a geek and play Football Manager Live. Clearly, the team I manage is called Team Awesome FC. FML is a soccer simulation game where you manage your own club (US equivalent would be combining the roles of the GM, Head Coach and owner).

The 'style/genre' of this blog should be fairly evident when read. I won't delve too much into that here beyond pointing out that this blog will serve only as a receptacle for my random thoughts about the game, then FML community or my team. It will not attempt to keep up to date with all the "news". Nor will this blog be "about my team" written in the style of pretending to be media covering a real club.

In other words, don't count on this blog as a source of info on transfer markets or competitions...unless I have an opinion about it or merely find it interesting. For a good "general news" blog visit Jakswans Blog if you want to follow a team allow me to suggest Waukesha 1834.