My extremely long-term @FootballManager save got thrown a huge curveball today when a new board came to the club and cut my budget to the point where I couldn't operate the way I've done for literally decades of game time. 1/

I ended up having to resign, because as frugal and savvy as I am, a wage budget of $1.5 million per week for staff and players combined isn't compatible with title-winning talent. 2/

And it's frustrating, of course, but I think more than anything I'm impressed. Because someone on the development team had to account for this situation. I don't think @milesSI was deploying any deep machine learning in his football simulation game back in 2013. 3/

Someone wrote an algorithm, and code to run it, to simulate a leveraged buyout of a highly successful multi-billion dollar organization. And in hindsight it makes perfect sense. It's certainly happened in real life, so into the game it goes. 4/

The real-life timing could be better. I was enjoying pretending to have a job while I'm laid off due to the pandemic, but now I'm sending job applications in real life and in the thing I use to escape from real life. 5/

(but hey, at least the FM applications are a single button click and people write back to tell me I'm not hired at Real Madrid. The companies I apply to in meatspace could take that example) 6/

The thing that's prompted this thread is that I've been playing video games for a very big part of my 39 years on this stupid planet, and this was by a wide margin the most realistic and unexpected thing I've ever seen in a game. 7/