Exclusive FM2011 blog with Miles Jacobson day 19 extra: the new data editor revealed

By Miles Jacobson in Football Manager 2011

Published 20:00 03/11/10

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As you may, or may not know, Football Manager 2011 also comes with a data editor that lets you change, or add, information about any of the 440,000+ players and staff in the game, all of the clubs, stadiums, competitions, or even add ones that aren’t in the game, and share them with your friends.

There’ve been lots of changes and additions to the editor this year, and I asked Michael and Neil in our QA team to write about some of them for you. So it’s over to them…

Last year’s version of FM saw the addition of a new and improved Editor, giving the user the ability to add your own customisable leagues to the game. This year we’ve gone a step further and expanded it after listening to feedback from our community.

The biggest addition to this year’s editor is the ability for people to add in their own continental competitions. We felt what better way for a user to conquer a football manager world than by taking on a wider spectrum of teams in a format of your choosing?

Fancy re-igniting the excitement of the Anglo-Italian Cup? Personally I probably wouldn’t, but now you have the option to create competitions like these or create those that are brand new from your imagination, that can either run alongside preexisting competitions or replace them entirely.

Also included are the options to tweak your own individual league transfer windows and transfer rules; change the rules required for work permits or even expand various leagues play-off rules. We’ve also now enabled the option for users to be able to set up their own youth and reserve team leagues, either revamping those leagues however you want, or editing them to mimic their real life counterparts.

The creation of cups has also been re-designed allowing users greater freedom, giving them the ability to micro-manage their competitions by setting the format of the cup from round to round. If the user sets a custom competition format they’ll now have lots of features available for each round including selecting dates of rounds, stage names, stage venues and number of legs.

One of the things that has been long requested by users of the editor has been the ability to do mass editing, so we are delighted that this has made it into this years version.  Users can now make mass changes to both players and clubs simplifying this process and making it quicker for users to make their own custom databases.

With past versions of the editor it has been difficult for people to keep track of all the changes they make, which could prove troublesome if a user makes any kind of error.  This year’s editor has seen the implementation of screens that keep track of all the changes for you, as well as a more than helpful undo button. 

We also have added a few small features/tweaks just to make editing slightly easier, such as the ability to search by the unique ID’s of players or teams and the ability to easily swap teams divisions. This means if you want a big club in the Conference, a couple of clicks and you could have multi-million pound players suddenly playing in the bottom tier!

The editor also features new additions that go alongside some of the new features in the main game such as you can create your own agents and assign clients to them that will appear in game.

As always with the editor it’s a case of the more you put into it the more you get out. A whole new football world is available to any user who wants to take the time to create it. So if you want to turn the European Cup back into its old knock-out only two-legged format you can. If you want ten teams to be relegated from the top flight in England the choice is now most definitely yours.

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