Unexpected Earnings
Winning the title last season triggered a cascade of cash, an avalanche of bounty, a tidal wave of credit, a hurricane of moolah, a tsunami of dosh. I could go on there, but I won’t. It’s safe to say that I’m rich now, richer than I’ve ever been so far in this Master League career. I got £15,000,000 for winning the league. I got another £10,000,000 or so from new and renewed sponsorship deals. I got a bonus couple of million from the fan club.
With all that money swilling around it might be expected that I’d bring in a ton of great new players for season 11 and my first Treble attempt. But no. Something confusing happened with Expected Earnings, again. After upgrading a few of my backroom staff, I slapped in a few bids for some 90 OVR-rated players—a CB and a DMF. The combined transfer fee would have been around £6,000,000. Expected Earnings duly took this bid into account when reckoning my final balance, giving me a figure of -£1,000,000 or so. This triggered those warnings you get from the game that you’re about to run into debt.
I was utterly confused. I’ve never made big transfer bids before. I was unsure about what was going on. I suppose I couldn’t believe I was as rich as I was. I lowered my team staff levels right back down to where they were, and waited until the end of the transfer window. My two bids for the players were refused. I was too worried to make new ones for other players. Wages and costs were paid… and it turned out that I was still about £7,000,000 in credit. Expected Earnings had caused me to mess up a transfer window yet again.
So I go into season 11 with exactly the same squad that won the title last season. This is a good thing in one way—there are no new players to dilute the team-work pool. But with Europe coming up, my squad feels pretty lightweight. I’ll line up a few top signings for the mid-season window, and hope my season is still alive at that stage.
My annual change of kits saw me decide to alter the horizontally striped home kit that I loved so much last season. I wish I hadn’t changed it now. I really did love it. I’ll be going back to them stripes next season. For this season I made the stripes wider and adopted black shorts. For the away kit I chose a red strip with white trimmings. I’ve just noticed that I picked different shades of red for the shirts and shorts. Ooops. Thankfully, in PES2010 you don’t have to wait until the end of a season to fix mistakes like that.
Season 11 got underway, and the short news is: I’m struggling. Badly. I’m playing terribly. I’ve had odd good games, but not enough to make my current league position—13th after 7 matches—anything but an embarrassment. We’re supposed to be the champions…
At least I haven’t fumbled the Treble just yet. I squeezed through the first round of the Cup, against Arsenal, thanks to a lucky away goal. But things are precarious in the second round. River Plate are my opponents and after the first leg at my ground I’m 1-2 down on aggregate. It’ll be tough at their place. I’ve got to score twice to have any chance at all.
None of this post-title-winning struggle is unprecedented for me. Thinking back, all the best Master Leagues—PES5’s, of course, in particular—has thrown me a curveball in the first season after big success. I can vividly recall a season on PES5 where I flirted with relegation immediately after a superb title-winning campaign. This iffy start to season 11 is a good sign that ML is back to its classic best.
The Champions League has started. I’ve played one match in the group stage, against Juventus. I was ridiculously proud to see my Coventry City team—my Coventry City team!—lining up beforehand, and the music, and the lights… The match itself was a minor disaster. I lost 1-3 at home.
Juventus steamrollered me. They were 0-2 up before half time. I was totally on the back foot, and couldn’t seem to do anything to stop the relentless waves of attacks. I got a lucky goal back after the break to give me some hope of recovery, but they scored a killer third goal soon after that.
And so I had lost my opening game. It’s a weird Champions League group: myself, Juventus, Manchester City, and Aberdeen. I hate seeing Man City there, not just because they’re a good team—and they will be tough—but because they’re from my own league.
Finally I have to show this very interesting goal scored by the AI. I rarely show goals by the AI, but this was something very special. When I looked closely at the replay I could hardly believe it. This is the first time I’ve ever seen anything like this from the AI in a PES game:
Link: 
When I moved back to Kansas and started supporting the Wizards (Kansas...
That has to be one of the best AI goals I have ever seen on both PES or FIFA. I don’t mind when you get beaten by a good AI goal.
What a finish from the COM, ive not seen anything like that ever, fantastic finish, ive seen a few skills from them here and there but nothing like that!!! at least you didnt just get destroyed 3-0 by Galatasary, should have been 5 or 6 too!!! The enduring appeal of the game is that season to season its just so varied. I had a great season last year and finished 5th, this year i cant buy a goal let alone a win, wierd huh? with the same team too. has anyone else suffered this, I thought i was supposed to be getting better not stagnating and going backwards, its strange. but also making every game much more engrossing? is it the same for you not greg. The excruciating hardness seems to make it all more enjoyable? ps. lovin the away strip! very retro!
Makershaker—Mostly I like it whenever the AI gets what I regard as a ‘proper’ goal against me. For all my moaning about the times when PES2010 sneakily sneaks the ball into my net like a great big sneaking thing, 95% of the AI goals against me are actually proper ones, i.e. attributable to my bad defending or something special from the AI like this goal above. Of course it could be argued that a goal like that is unstoppable, and hence just as scripted as the ones I complain about, but if we take things that far there’d be no point playing any game of any kind, ever.
PES2010 has been notable for AI goals. It’s scored a few humdingers against me from distance. I’ll have to start posting them more regularly. For a future season, I’m toying with the idea of recording every goal scored by all sides in every match I play.
Lord Stanley—As you can see from today’s post, I’ve hit a slump after winning the league quite comfortably last season. I’ll be honest—maybe to some extent I thought I’d just have to turn up to start winning things this season. I’ve been complacent. My possession stats have dropped sharply, down to an average of 40-50% per match, when it was mostly in the 55-65% zone by the end of last season.
Thinking back to my last long-term Master League in PES5, it was always the way that a god season would be followed by a bad or indifferent one. That could be down to the human player relaxing or the AI tightening up behind the scenes, or a mixture of the two. Whatever it is, I think it works really well.
Not-Greg,
Congrats on winning the league. I’ve finally won the treble, so I’m happy too (in the 2016/2017 season). I’m sure you can do it with the players you have currently. It’s just a matter of finetuning.
As far as AI goals go, my experience is quite different. I’d say at least half the goals I concede are scripted. I’m not whining, it’s just how I see it. Maybe it’s because I concede very few goals, so the balance has to be tipped more often than it should to seem “natural”.
The AI does score some remarkable goals against me sometimes, and it’s usually the unstoppable ones. I prefer those to the scrambled balls where you smash the buttons to clear the ball, but your defenders just watch as the opponent slots the ball past your paralysed goal keeper.
I haven’t had to struggle at all for the past few seasons. Even though I only won the Champions once, I had been winning the league and the cup every year for the past 3 seasons. As cool as the sliders are, I haven’t touched them for at least 2 whole seasons now. It does seem like I’m in the minority, though. Don’t get me wrong, the game is not easy (yet).
Adriano—scripting for me occurs whenever there’s a palpable sense of the AI forcing the ball towards, and/or into, my net. The nature of that forced sequence varies and is, I suppose, debatable, but for me it’s a definite phenomenon in PES and has been since roughly PES4/5 or thereabouts. The worst instances are when, trying to relieve pressure, I aim a pass at a player in midfield—who’s wide open and JUST THERE, in front of my defender with the ball at his feet—but he passes it sideways across the box instead, and presents the ball to the AI. I posted a replay of an incident like this a few weeks ago. These make me really fume. General, bog-standard scripting feels benign by comparison, and almost acceptable.
What is scripting? Whenever I’ve got good possession and I try to clear or play my way upfield and my players simply don’t react the way they react 99 times out of 100—then I know the game is up to its tricks. Whatever I do, the ball is coming towards my net for a shot, and most likely a goal. The forced pressure won’t stop and my players won’t be normal again until that AI chance or goal has been secured.
I’d say that I concede less of these goals nowadays, maybe my figure of 5% was a bit low. Actually around 10% feel scripted in this sense, for me. But I’d pack the game in if half the goals I conceded were due to such overt scripting! Do you have a different view on what constitutes scripting? A wider definition, perhaps? Like you say, conceding less goals means that a higher proportion of them will have to be forced by the AI. That could account for our differing estimations.
Re. the general state of play for me with PES2010, my next few posts will show different perspectives on the easy/hard debate with the game.
My estimate is as high as that because most of the times the only way the AI can score against me is by going into god mode. And it’s actually pretty obvious when it is about to happen. You know the signs, too.
Game flow is going on as it usually does, then all of a sudden my players start missing the simplest passes and going on awkward runs CONTRARY to where the ball is going or to where I’m pointing them; sometimes the AI players, who had been playing sedately as usual start running like Superman, and pinballing the ball around at hyperspeed. Players who were asleep up to that point in the match start dribbling around my players as if they aren’t there, even though I’m timing my tackles perfectly and sometimes even straight in the MIDDLE of the opposition’s legs to stop a breakaway. You know how collision detection is a joke in this game. I could go on and on.
If I was conceding goals to a “proper” team with decent players while I was playing with a bunch of donkeys, I wouldn’t consider it scripting, but when I’m playing Wearside or one of the lowest made-up teams coming out of D2, and they start doing those things, I just know it’s time to concede. Sometimes I manage, by sheer determination, to avoid the goal for a while, but it usually comes one way or another, and then the AI goes back to sleep.
When inexplicable illogical things like these start to happen, it’s pretty obvious to me that the AI is going to force a goal upon me. I know football is not logical and sometimes inexplicable things happen, but this game is not that good yet.
I have made countless experiments with this kind of thing, and now with the possibility of simulating matches it’s even easier.
In one of my past seasons, I already had a pretty good team, and was up against one of the lowest of the lowest teams in my league in the cup. I played better than ever but couldn’t score. Had a zillion shots on goal, some off the crossbar, had at least one penalty not called by the ref, and in the last minute the AI went into god-mode and scored. I was distraught enough to reload. I played the same match again. This time the AI played like Barcelona. I didn’t have a chance, they scored right from kickoff, and held me off for the rest of the match. Disgruntled, I reloaded. No good, lost again.
Then I decided to do a little experiment, suppose Man U played, I don’t know, Leeds a 100 times, how many wins and draws would result? If real life was like PES, Man U would lose all of them, since that’s what happened to me. I simmed this match God knows how many times, and my team lost ALL of them. I had never seen scripting as evident as this. The only way I could have won this match would be to turn the level down to beginner, and even then I bet the AI would still score at least once.
Anyway, rant mode off.:)
It’s appalling how the goalkeepers legs sail through both players as if they weren’t there. Terrible old-gen engine… I really hope PES2011 upgrades the general feel of the game… not to FIFA10-levels, because obviously they didn’t get it right, otherwise you would be playing it
But it’s Febraury 2010 and you’re playing PES2010 with a lot of excitement, and so it seems that on not-Greg’s turf, EA lost this year.
Adriano—I had a similar experience with, I think, the PS2 version of PES2008 a good while back. Like you I found one match in particular, when I was the giant team taking on a comparative minnow, featured an utterly ridiculous amount of handicapping of my team. I made a separate save, and reloaded the fixture about 8 times before I squeezed out a narrow victory. (This was all on the blog, but I forget exactly where. Of course I went back and reloaded my original save where I’d been defeated, and continued from there.)
TareX—yes, the collision detection is atrocious and insulting in this day and age. Even in the PS1 days I’m sure the programming nous existed to make a true collision detection engine. It seems the phased player bodies are an intrinsic part of this PES game engine. Will things change, ever? Vague rumours emerging about PES2011 indicate they might—but we’ve heard it all before.
I’m not very much into the PES vs FIFA aspect of things—who ‘wins’, who ‘loses’, etc. etc.—but I appreciate that for many football gamers it’s a very significant issue (perhaps the only issue), and of course I am nterested to some extent.
February is still only a third of the way of the way through the football game year. There’s 8 months to go yet. But, yes, I’m surprised that I’m still playing PES2010.
I have to admit that when I started ML I expected to get the usual next-gen 5-season career, and then to spend the rest of the year sulking about it. Things have not worked out like that, happily.
Whatever happens from here, PES2010 is a success in my eyes, and this ML career has got to rank as one of my all-time favourites. I can’t see anything beating the experience even if I eventually go back to FIFA10 (as I will at some point—surely?!) and enjoy it.
@Adriano,
Regarding your scripting issue about how you couldn’t win no matter how many times you played, I came across it playing aginst Inter in the CL final group game. I couldn’t win, so I tried 2 more times and the AI scored pretty much straight away. I also tried simming it and I always lost. Then, I had the idea to change my kit to the away kit. I won, easily. It seemed so odd at the time. Also, I noticed that the other results were not pre-determined, which was also odd.