This season I just found out that my previous favorite online football manager that was previously out of service while I took a few years break is now alive and kicking, so I've started a new club there.
This leaves me with even less time for Vman and may lead to potentially 'closing shop'.
Why I'm considering quitting?
Well, for the past 2 years (soon-ish), I've complained a lot about a lot of things, but mostly the part that annoys me is that Vman is more about trading than everything else. You cannot get to the top without it, PERIOD!
Not in this lifetime anyway. While other online managers are more tuned for slow and steady increase and curbing 'day trading', here it is the norm rather than the exception. I do see where this can be useful for a newbie and I've taken advantage from it, it's too time consuming for every new manager to partake in.
But this is just part of the problem. The real problem is not the focus on trading itself, it's the lack of focus for the 'Match engine' and the tactics aspect of the game. Lack of aerial/headers/corners makes it for a 'flat' unrealistic play. And the recent press release where this is just a note in a 'maybe' list of to-dos is not good enough, now that I've reached 1st division. The fast paces may make some managers to ignore detailed tactic tuning, or it may be the fact that the most effective one is:
Offensive/Shoot On Sight/ Reduced Intensity/Extreme Tackling... So no point in experimenting if the tactics that are supposed to, for example play 'long passes' see my defenders passing among themselves until they pass to opponent's forwards and have 2 goals out of 3 due to this. Or if the counter attack that is supposed to get the ball fast to the forwards and keep a lower setup sees all mi midfield high up the field and defenders again pass among themselves and the ball never reaches the forwards.
This are just two of the annoying little things that combined made me less invested in a game I was close to a 'fanatik' despite my constant criticism.
It also seemed that the more I tried optimism the team position and orders the worse effects I got so in the end, for the past 3 seasons I've barely changed the tactics just to rotate players and have enough training.
Limiting the number of players is another thing I constantly battle. While IRL and in other managers the only limit is salary and how many players can be registered for division/cup matches, here it's annoyingly low and this makes me loose on a lot of opportunities on the market. Increasing from 30 to 42 was good enough for a while, now seems not even 50 would be enough.
I understand the need to balance things out and wanting to give new player a chance but as proven in a lot of cases, one very active manager can do a lot more than a 'casual' player in 10-12 years, and that is not OK. There should be a natural progression from one division to the other, not start in 6th and 4 weeks later be in 2nd division, or having one youth that allows you to upgrade to LTF or higher while others have spent 6 months or 2 years for reaching the same level.
Also why do training facility work the way they do? Why not have rating limits they can be effective from? why force new clubs to sell their 15yo for very low prices when they could train them up to 10-20 rating without being forced to sell due to player loosing value?
I'm not saying that the other manager is perfect. But I do see a lot more changes a lot faster, more focus on building the tactics part and a lot more communication from the Devs. No need for manual intervention in training, you just tell them what to train, and have assistant manager to ensure they don't 'over-train, because yes, player skills have individual potentials, they are not all 100/100 robots ans here. There are personalities and there is a Form that payers go through just like IRL.
And with a match every few days it allows the slow pace of setting the right tactic and not stressing when it's the next day, when do I train, when do I need to fire or auction a player in order to have a spot and promote my youth.

They say a negative thing has 7x or 11x more impact than a positive ones, so the positives of VMan at the moment are overshadowed by the negatives which are personal for me. I expected VMan to be more like the other game, which it clearly not and I've run out of patience.
With a team just reached 300M there is enough for it to go on for a while longer and when/if I decide to pull the plug there will be cash in reserves to rebuild if ever this 'cry' will be heard and changes will be released to address at least the tactics part and make this game again interesting, at least for managers like me. If not, there are enough users that are happy with the current
status. I wanted to leave last year before the youth teams were release, even made a post about it and lo and behold, a week later they were release. Now it's the 3rd month of the year, no visible changes were seen so I'm not keeping my hopes high.
But a simple thing could be implemented at least to allow to play 'friendlies' with the 'experimental' changes to the match editor/viewer in order to see the progress and hanging on to hope. It's an easy thing to do, really, and it's already implemented in the other game that's 1,5 years old about.

I'm leaving you with this to ponder upon for a second:


Feel free to message me or reply in the comments below, community is what kept me going for so long.