Without further ado — my final Season 6 table:
I only pulled clear of 5th and secured that all-important top-4 place in the final few matches. It was nip and tuck until that point, with a Europa League spot looking likeliest.
In last Friday’s post, I said that I needed to stop drawing so many matches and start winning them instead. That’s what I went ahead and did. My record since last Friday is Played 23, Won 17, Drawn 3, Lost 3. That’s top-4 form, easy. Perhaps not quite Treble-winning form if translated to a season-long campaign, but it’s getting there, and it’s been good enough to secure me a shot at the Champions League next season.
Note as a curiosity how I’m 3rd in almost everything in that table. 3rd in position. 3rd in games won. 3rd in games lost. 3rd in goals scored.
I was happy to see some of my players among the honours at season’s end:
I doubt I’ll ever score enough goals with one player to match Cavalcanti up there. Wow.
The Assist Ranking makes for encouraging reading:
As well as Castledine (my Player of PES2016, without any doubt), my soon-to-be-ex-striker, Cavani, made a great showing here too.
Now for my promised end-of-season highlights reel, which is not as lengthy as it was meant to be, for reasons I’ll explain. There are still some decent goals and a couple of comedy moments here and there. Enjoy the music:
I had a ton of season 6 goal snippets saved up on the PS4 HD that I exported to USB to make this video. After the export was done, I made a mistake: I deleted all the clips on my PS4, assuming I had them all safe and sound on USB.
When I plugged the USB into my PC, there were tech issues with some of the vids. About a third were corrupted when I came to examine them. The ones that survived are the only ones in the above vid.
Ehhhh. I shouldn’t have deleted the originals, I know. It’s not my usual practice. I’m usually a cautious curator of my own digital stuff. Multiple copies, multiple redundancies, is my modus operandi. Except for this time. Oh well.
Anyway, it’s still a decent slice of Season 6’s goals, with some of my favourite moments on show.
One of the comedy moments is at 0:59 in the form of a blatant foul I committed on the AI that should have been a penalty. PES2016 is a mutiplayer game at its heart, and thus ‘interruptions’ have to be kept to a minimum, and thus we have a physical modelling system that doesn’t register even 1% of the fouls it should register, and it doesn’t in this instance as in so many others. PES2016 is an ultra-arcadey edition of the series that will never take a high place in the PES pantheon because of moments like that.
Which leads me onto something of an announcement. This coming season, Season 7, will be my last on PES2016’s Master League. I expect to win the title, possibly the Treble, and it will be a fitting finale either way.
For the record, I don’t have any real dislike for PES2016. It’s a good football-based computer game. It’s not a PES classic, but few are.
Instead it’s all very reminiscent of PES2013, which came to an early end at a similar stage (8 seasons). I didn’t abandon PES2013 in disgust, but simply recognised it had reached a natural end (and I even half-heartedly started a non-dev ML), and so it is with PES2016. Getting out of PES2016 while I still have a mostly positive view of it is probably for the best,
And so to Season 7. I’ll be going all-out for that Treble.