Stromson — Afan Lido: Rewind!

Howdy folks, and welcome back to our Afan Lido tale! Last time out we had a dandy squad introduction, and the team was shaping up rather nicely for a (hopefully) top 6 finish (thus qualifying ourselves for the Championship group).  We got off to a bit of a shaky start, and our lack of a blended squad showed in our incredible inconsistency. Still, I wasn’t too bothered by that, and I’d expected it would be the second half of the season where we played our best football. Everything was going hunky doorie, until one fine Sunday afternoon I received the following urgent letter:

Well my, my! I have to wonder where offers like this were two years ago when I left Seattle, but regardless, the offer sat in my inbox now. I’d be lying if I said that I wasn’t tempted, and I decided to check out their squad and their standings in the Premier League when I noticed something rather odd:

The first thing to catch my eye was Manchester United sitting in the relegation zone, and it was then that I realized they’d only played six games (and this was pushing into November)! Now I naturally wondered what in the blazes that could be all about, so I went to check the Man United fixtures to see what the frack they’d been up to all this time:

Level 9 cup, Level 10 cup, the FA Vase!? What the h-e-double toothpick was that all about? I checked Chelsea and Liverpool’s fixtures and saw the same general run of results:

Now this is just bizarre…I had to stop and think for a minute before it dawned on me that some time ago (April?) I’d installed a custom database on my desktop that took England down to Tier 10. When I created my Seattle (now Afan Lido) game on my desktop, I was sure not to load any of those leagues but evidently not turning off the database had an impact regardless of my loading them into the game or not. I did a bit of searching, and discovered that this is a side effect of these custom databases. If you have the DB turned on, you MUST load all the leagues it makes available lest you end up with a situation like this.

Initially I wasn’t overly concerned about this little bug as I didn’t have any real plans of managing in the Premier League anyway, but after a few minutes I started to think a bit further on the issue. The only teams really effected by this are the big boys — Arsenal, Liverpool, Chelsea, Manchester United, and this season Everton and Blackburn, which coincidentally are the teams that usually qualify for the Champion’s League. I started to get nervous that with England’s best now playing somewhere in the neighborhood of 80-90 games a season, that their CL performances would start to suffer. Sure enough, an English team hadn’t made it to the finals since my first year of the save, and this season only Arsenal and Man United managed to even qualify for the knockout rounds. The year before Chelsea made it to the semi finals before being handed a very lopsided defeat.

I became concerned — the pattern was already becoming evident. From my first year on, English teams were steadily declining in their performances, and the Premier League table started to look more and more bizarre with each passing week. Now as a Welsh manager, I normally wouldn’t care about what’s happening to my east, but my goal is to turn the Welsh League into a European contender, and the competitor in me simply cannot accept this challenge if I know the English are going to be severely weakened by a database bug (where’s the glory when you didn’t have to earn your way through the best league in the world?).

As a result, I’ve decided to role back the clock a bit. I’ve created a new save (sans database this time), and have simulated the first year in order to get Afan Lido back into the Welsh Premier League. I then created an International Football rep manager to ensure I landed the job when they did get promoted. I’m absolutely loving Afan Lido and the Welsh story, but I need to do this without any absurd database quirks if I’m going to find the challenge acceptable.

VIDEO TO BREAK UP THE WALL-O-TEXT: Afan Lido Database Bug of Doom!

So where does this leave us? We’ve rolled back the clock to June of 2011, and I’m the new manager (again) at Afan Lido. Thankfully we’re only losing a single season, and I doubt you’ll see too much of a difference from a reader’s perspective. I’m going to try and manage similarly to how I did the first time around to ensure our results are as similar as possible to the first run through. I apologize if any of you are disappointed by the loss of progress, but I had to do this for myself as much as anything (I just can’t accept a watered down challenge, it’s not who I am).

In traditional fashion, I’ll leave you all with another game video from our now defunct season (be sure to watch it though, as there is an important shout out contained within that I want you guys to be sure to check out!):

Afan Lido vs The team with no vowels

Thanks for reading everyone; we’ll get this puppy back on track in the next update!