If you're losing a game in Football Manager, there's an easy fix. Simply quit the application before the result of your defeat has been saved and just reload.
We've all done it before: in an interview with the Quickly Kevin podcast, Miles Jacobson – studio director at Sports Interactive, the team behind the game – addressed so-called "save-scumming".
If at first you don't succeed, try and try again, they say. Well, now it's harder than ever do that…
Football Manager 2023 could bring an end to traditional "save-scumming", where you quit the game and reload it to play again
It's easy to know how you should have played in retrospect. Perhaps you expected your opposition to sit back and conceded a sloppy early goal: never mind. Reload, re-prepare accordingly and make sure you don't drop those silly points.
Not anymore. One of the brand new features in Football Manager 2023 is that managers will react to your in-game tactical tweaks, meaning that it becomes harder to know exactly what your opposite number is doing.
FM23 Erling Haaland is already causing bugs on Football Manager 2023, say the team behind the game
"It’s important to make those changes and alongside the AI changes to the managers, it reflects better what managers do from the start but also how they react in-game," Miles told FourFourTwo exclusively. "If you are playing a gegenpress all the time and your players get tired because you don’t have the players to do it… the other teams are going to notice that."
So the big question… is it harder to cheat in Football Manager 2023 than ever before? Quitting and reloading won't just be a simple fix if opposing managers can guess what you're going to do next.
"Look, if people want to cheat, they can cheat," Miles says. "We make the game and people can play it however they want to. The changes in FM23 don’t make it harder to quit the game and reload – it’s just pressing a button – but they make the game itself harder.
"It should be challenging: you should be looking to make changes 20 minutes towards the end of the match."
Do you hear that, you bunch of cheats? You're only being dishonest to yourself. Us elite managers welcome that extra competition.
