Alright mate, what are using as the source material towards modding teams? World Soccer mag, match reports, match highlights, live games etc?
Seen first hand most teams in the championship and premier league play and have always took an interest in other leagues outside the uk.
I have been editing the game for years starting of on the pc where people make global stat changes using 3rd party editors to apply changes to all players in the game. Over the years editing has progressed as peoples understanding has got better, but majority of people just make wholesale changes to things like speed and shooting in all players. Over the years I have moved away from this type of editing and started concentrating more on how the opposition play as well as how your own players move and fine tuning the balance of game.
When I moved to the PS3 I didn’t set out to create option files but because the first version on the PS3 were poor, I found myself trying editing it and before long realised I could edit one league in few hours. Because I need to edit each player individually on the PS3, I end up with a much better option file than blindly apply global stat changes to all players.
The changes I make are more designed to make the game play realistic and enjoyable rather than to perfectly represent every player in the game. There is some people who will spend ages coming up with stats that they think accurately reflects a player, but this often doesn’t take into account how the game interprets these stats and even if it perfectly did, unless they then go through every other player and make the same level of changes the effect on the game play of that team is very small, let alone the game play to the entire game and after even doing all that, they is no gaurantee that the game play will improve,
I set out to improve the game by changing what I think it needs which in this version is to balance the gap between small and big teams ( as it is every year), improve responsiveness, give fast attackers the ability to stay ahead of slow defenders and to increase the difficulty of top player and finally to then balance the speed of the game.
Along the way the vast majority of players will be given much more accurate stats as the majority of players in the game who are not at top clubs are unresponsive, don’t have AI that will make them a challenge to play against and if they are a striker, they will be painfully slow and unable to shoot, which makes then rubbish to play with and against as they cannot score against you.
As well as this the players at top clubs who I think have been given wrong stats are changed with some being improved and some super human players being brought down.
I then test the game a great deal with games between teams in each league and then between teams from different leagues and fine-tune it. This takes the most time as having a one player running or passing the ball too fast by as little as 1 or 2 can unbalance games.
I work in software production for a company that has major releases of world wide available products and know how surprisingly little concentration is given to very big annual releases that the company depends on as they think adding a few new features will keep people interested. Because of this and looking at the changes to player database in the game each year, I honestly think that I spend more time each year editing the actual game play of this game than anyone in its development and its annoying as the game could wipe the floor with Fifa if they just concentrated on the balance of the game and not use how much control you have over players and their physical attributes to define their ability.