March 28, 2024

FF1M

Fantasy Formula 1 Management

Why did FF1M stop?

Hello everyone and welcome back. Its been an interesting few weeks and its been wonderful to reconnect with people from the old FF1M and to meet some new guys who have joined us. I’m going to try and write a column, a behind the scenes type thing, every now and then. Like so many of my plans it will probably get forgotten but we will see. I’m also planning on getting Gui to write some of these as he always has a unique perspective on things.

So anyway, for this first column I thought it was important to discuss why FF1M ended and in another later column i’ll go into whats happened to make me want to bring the series back.

TLDR the reasons basically boil down to time and prority.

In the early stages of FF1M, I didnt really play other games. It was the PS3 period and I wasn’t really into that many games that came out on that system. I kinda fell out of love with console gaming in general, and so I had a lot of free time for FF1M and gradually it took up more and more of my life with many different feeder series and ever more complicated rules that I came up with based on other games like technologies (Civilisation IV).

Somewhere along the way I got a job and started working full time, 9 to 5 with 2 hours travel time either side. Around that time I was running probably 3 races per week and about 3 seasons of Ff1m per year. At first I decided to make only one video per week, which would be a compilation of the weeks races. After that season it became one race per week and that had the effect of stretching out the seasons and reducing the amount of breaks i had between seasons.

One thing that also complicates matters is that I’m not really a “Formula 1” fan. I haven’t been since around 2004. I’m a Motorsport fan and most of my enjoyment of the sport has come from other series like GP2, World Series, Indycar, Formula E. I wanted to reflect this in FF1M by having feeder series and to be able to see a driver progress through series to FF1M. Of course this is all more work and in essence I am a masochist that enjoys making himself more and more work.

However, I also don’t like redoing things I’ve already done and therefore it was a real problem when, around the end of the 2010 season, that my laptop died. My laptop contained everything I used to make videos, all my resources, and it meant I had to start from scratch again. It was a lot of work to put things back together again in such a short time. The previous stuff had all built up over several years there was some stuff I simply couldn’t replace.

Due to this I decided that, if I was going to start anew, I would also switch to using the GP4 software because I could run this on my new laptop and save a lot of time that I had spent transferring files between my creaking Windows XP desktop which ran GP3 and my powerful modern video editing laptop. Unfortunately GP4 isnt as fun to watch as GP3 and it became hard to focus on races, and there were other technical difficulties which meant i had system crashes in the middle of races and i grew disillusioned with having to start from scratch all the time.

I had also fallen back in love with console gaming when the PS4 was released, particularly an MMO called Final Fantasy XIV, and as I got more and more disillusioned with FF1M I was spending more and more of my free time in Eorzea, the world of XIV.

Eventually I decided I needed a break and during this break spambots invaded the forums. I switched the forums off whilst I tried to fix this but ended up losing the database, twice. In the end I finally decided it was time to quit. I think I had been putting off stopping for a while at that point and so I wasn’t particularly sorry to put ff1m to bed. I felt a little guilty for not finishing off the season but each time I tried to return I found more and more problems to fix which put me off.