Definite mistakes

• Pls rember and Dead Womb sharing a playstyle
  • Goal Poacher is probably the best playstyle for their respective position (CF and SS): a mix of agressive shot taker and set up player when necessary,.
    However, that is only true when only one is on the field, the two of them both having the playstyle essentially made them cancel each other out, they would both act too agressive or too supportive with no one to fill in for them missing at the front, leading to offenses that went nowhere.
    We tried finding different ways to get them to stop cancelling each other out with no avail as you may have noticed (though it sometime worked in testing which is why we ran the things we ran). Players sharing playstyles is something I swore I'd never do and I'm not sure why I went ahead with it.
    This was probably the biggest mistake of this whole export, we'll make sure they have seperate playstyles next time.
• Tengu Thursdays having the Destroyer playstyle
  • This was something I noticed in testing, but figured would be ok.
    Destroyer playstyle, in theory, makes a player go for hard pressing and tackles. Essentially a torpedo in tengu form meant to take the ball back very agressively and pass it off to other players. That should be it.
    However, it also makes them go for shots and messes with the forwards player's AI (Pls rember, Dead Womb and sometimes Burning down the thread). They seem to consider her as another forward player when she's actually a midfielder and randomly move out of the way to let her receive the ball and shoot, when she shouldn't be doing that in the first place because she's bad at both.
    We'll definitely take it off next time and find something else. Yukari played as expected and I was very satisfied with her, so without having them match playstyles, maybe I'll go for something that comes second closest.
    In the testing before the league, the formation we intented to primarly use (343) had her behave correctly and didn't mess with the forwards, however this wasn't true on other formation that we ended up having to use as the 343 was ineffective against the opponents we received. This also leads to the next point...
• 343 was the primary formation and it was badly setup
  • This formation can be pretty decent, if set up right. Unfortunately this wall of text exists so it wasn't. We had tested against a handful of teams for whom we had tactical exports for, and it performed well there. Against the opponents we got though, it was a bust. On top of the other problems in this list, the non-medal SS with the dummy runner playstyle (only played in one game) was both a waste of sub players and didn't do their job very well.
    As the playstyle indicates, they are meant to draw the defense attention to create space for the other forwards to get clear runs into the box.
    The dummy runner were unfortunately both not doing that and instead acting like a regular forward more than anything, which is very bad because they have terrible stats. But even when they were trying to distract the defense they were pretty bad at it and would just lose the ball. I think an all medal forward is just for the best and will be doing that next league.
• The /kfg/ game and in game changes
  • I don't think I need to say much, I had made a lot of mistakes. First, I had accidently erased the 343 we were meant to start on. Oops. Second, I got too confident in slider changes I had done. The biggest mistake was probably the switch to conservative defense against their possessive playstyles. What I had observed in testing is that conservative makes the defense go for more interception and are generally set up to force bad passes from players.
    When I noticed /kfg/ was running possessive, I figured that if I used the aggressive defense style, they would just pass the ball away once our defenders became aggressive, essentially cancelling out our whole defense. What conservative actually did was just give them all the space they needed to pass between each other without our team doing anything about it. I believed they would do something eventually in the match but never did. A lesson was learned: don't run conservative defense against a possessive offense.

• Relying on the long ball offense style too much
  • In this version of PES, long ball is essentially a coinflip. Your offense either outruns the defense or they don't. As we couldn't wrangle our players to do what we wanted, most of the testing ended up settling on using a long offense because we got some winning games in tests as opposed to barely any on anything else. However, we believed in that coinflip a little too much and held on to the long ball playstyle to the end of games where it clearly didn't work.
    A good example of that I think was the /vn/ game. You can notice Pls Rember ALMOST gets the ball and ALMOST manages to get a shot off fairly often, but she always was getting beaten in the defense. I believed the ALMOST would turn into WOULD eventually, but what I should have done is switch to something else.

Probable mistakes

• Burning down the thread: Hole player and AMF SUCK in this PES (personal opinion)
  • Hole player, in theory, does what its namesake says, it finds a hole in the opposite team's defense and rushes in to score easy goals. However in this PES version, not only do silvers seem very weak in terms of shooting, but AMF players seem a lot more sheepish and supportive than anticipated.
    She would sometime do well in testing, and I figured that meant she would mostly show up when needed, I never really paid attention to how she played outside of standout moments.
    In my PES 19 experience, an AMF is a must have, but in PES 17, the playstyle I liked using on an AMF (creative playmaker) cannot be used on them. So I slapped on hole player as the next best thing and forgot about it.
    Next league, I might get rid of having an AMF all together or really set their stats up for pure set up play, as opposed to the goal taker and setup player I thought she would be. It'll mostly depend on if we want two forwards or three next time.
• Fullbacks (Left Back and Right Back) having no playstyles (blank).
  • I don't think this is necessarily bad, if the rest of the team is set up right, I think FBs being blank could be good, a mix of offensive and defensive fullbacks. However, the fullbacks played defensively more than offensively which is the opposite of what I wanted. We wanted to experiment with having one of the FB be agressive and the other having none but I forgot to fix that. This is something to tinker more with, but the general safe option is to pick the offensive fullback playstyle.