I've been playing Top Eleven for over two years now, which is a long way ahead record for a FB game for me, so something about it is keeping me playing long after other on-line games have outlasted my interest in them.

As Nik says, you have to understand how it works, and take the occasional Troll game as something that you will encounter and you can't do anything about it - once the game engine decides you're going to lose this critical game against the bottom team in the League, that's it...

It's got to the stage now where I can tell, 90% of the time, in the first 10-15 minutes of the match I'm not going to get the result I want. Their defence is too over the top in blocking/intercepting/tackling, the previously deadly goal scorers are firing into row Z, my defenders who are picking up yellow cards for the most innocuous challenges and the opposing players are kicking lumps out and just getting warnings, the previously absent opposition player who suddenly shoots from 30 yards and scores - that's it. Sometimes I can be wrong and the team suddenly goes back to status quo and pulls the match out of the bag, but that's a rarity in those types of match.

One thing you can't do is take that sort of result personally - my main reaction to the OTT vent threads about adverse results is 'ho-hum, so what? Get over it and deal with the next match'.

The other thing that is perplexing to me even after all this time, and is more pertinent to the subject of this thread, is the unexplained loss of form for a run of matches, and the subsequent return to 'normal'. Ponzu has suggested that it coincided with a reduction/ceasing in spending tokens. To a certain extent, I agree with the suggestion. I've found that spending 10T on morale boosters has done the trick, or buying an auction player, or even a Scout player - on a couple of occasions there's been nothing I've done has resolved the issue - witness Palace Casuals' 'three seasons of hell' recently (although one thing that I did that possibly ended the crisis in the third season was to re-sign all the players whose contract would expire at the season end). I'm trying to work up the courage to experiment with a season where I don't renew contracts until later in the last season (as I had been prior to the 'hell') just to see what happens...