FM08 is to me, the worst si release for several years, and the support (in the form of patches and/or responding to the forum) has been equally lacklustre.Personally i cant help but feel this is related to the development of Fm08.
I know this issue has been discussed before, and responded to (Si tell us that Fm live hasnt reduced the number of staff that work on football manager.)

I however am looking at this from another angle. I suspect that the staff at si are tending to play fm live in there spare time, when in the past they would have just played fm. This means that they are not playing it enough to noticed problems in the match engine, registration issues etc.
Essentially a layer of the testing is being lost.
Maybe they need to hire more in house games testers!

I dont think the development has slowed down. It has been like that since the beginning. We always get 2 patches released at about the same time. There are always bugs that never get fixed. And there are never any major changes to the game. I agree that some of the changes they have made were bad and that fm08 is in a sense a step backwards (new skin, pointless match flow).

Maybe Fm09 is gonna be different

There are apparently two completely seperate teams working on FM and FM live. So while there are some issues with the game it in my opinion has absolutely nothing to do with FMLive.

Great bit of unproven speculation there! The daily mail would be proud of you!

i am not saying that it is the amount of people working on fm team that is the issue. I am arguing that maybe a problem has been created inadvertantly - everyone at si spends their spare time playing fm live instead of fm, thus they are not noticing the bugs as early as they would in the past, and hence we get a sloppy release.

Did they not advertise Q and A vacancies a few weeks ago for more testing?

Great bit of unproven speculation there! The daily mail would be proud of you! </BLOCKQUOTE>

its just the impression i have, from various things that have been said. They are playing fm live alot an loving, it is supposed to be even more addictive, and you cant readily play two games at once.

If you think all we did in our spare time before was play FM then you are sadly mistaken! Unless your name is Graeme Kelly.

i would have thought Kelly's spent all his spare time in eating? no?

Pretty sure you can eat and play FM at the same time