[SUGGESTION] Tweak scout/coach reports and trials

[Weston]

I'm a bit confused by the combination of coach reports and scout reports. When looking at a player you have on trial, for example, why are they kept separate, and why do the coaches' reports just disappear once the trial ends (which there is no reason they should when they could just be filed along with the old scout reports)? Also, the scout reports show the percentage of knowledge they have reached, but a coach report does not, leaving you no way to know how complete a picture the coach currently has. You can see how much knowledge of your squad each staff member has, but it would be unfeasible to flip screens and extrapolate that into a guess on how accurate each individual reports are without it telling you.

This also brings me to wondering why scouts (especially those who have a higher "judge current ability" attribute than my coaches) are not able to give me a report on my own team on the squad depth screen - if you can force your assistant manager out on an assignment to scout someone else surely you can have your own staff hired specifically to judge players look internally as well. All of these seem like relatively easy things to tweak - just make scouting a little more consistent and clear across the board regardless of who is doing it and when or where - put all staff reports in the same categories, kept and sorted the same way regardless of the type of staff they are.

Trials are often a good way to work around scouting difficulties, though they used to be considered a bit of an exploit as players would suddenly become 100% scouted the second they came through the door. Now I feel like now we've swung the other way a bit too far and trials are a bit underwhelming... I mean, if you get a lad on trial for a week it's just that - you're trying him, meaning that after 7 days on your training ground and a friendly or two played you shouldn't still have absolutely no clue (even a range of) how pacey he is, for example. Surely when you are testing a new recruit you would intentionally make a point to have him go through the motions of determining his attributes, even if it takes the whole week to get a fairly complete picture, no? I'm currently giving a 6th tier side a go while I wait for the new release and so I'm pulling in a lot of trialists looking for frees and it's just a bit slower going than I anticipated, but perhaps it's only reflective of just how poor my staff are at this particular level?

[Weston]

And to be clear your scouts do in fact have reports on your players, they just aren’t visible. This is evident in the way when they scout a player you can see that player compared to your own squad members in the same position in the report, but you can’t see the reports of your own squad members being used for said comparison and there’s no good reason why that is unless I’m just completely missing something...

[Weston]

Another addition to scouting: On the player screen, allow us to highlight attributes for roles and positions outside of the few recommended ones and, likewise, have scout reports include star recommendations for roles and positions outside of the recommended ones as well. Essentially have all positions / roles and recommended ones.

If the color shade of the role is purely decision making in that position, and attributes are how the ME determines ability in that position, and a scout's star rating for that position is mixture of those things plus foot side, it seems strange, then, that scouts only tell you their estimated ability in positions they are familiar with. It could be amazingly helpful if a scout could also tell us "Hey, I know right winger is marked as a red, unplayable position, and the lad has never played there before, but I give him a 3* rec for that position based on his strong pace and crossing attributes and his right foot alone, you should try it out." Really every position should have an estimate and then there should just be a gauge of familiarity next to it to inform your choice, because how can we think outside the box if we can't even get the game to let us highlight attributes for different roles we're considering training for unless they're already inherent in the player? If I want to see if my center mid could make a good winger I don't want to have to flip between screens and try to do the math in my head or type attributes into some third party aggregator to get the same effect.

[Weston]

Okay I realize I'm just talking to myself here at this point, and this same thread is also going on as a discussion in the general forum, but this really needs to be fixed and I want to make it seen as a proper request for the future as well. Thought I'd try this out on the new game and hoped for the best, but there's still the same problem.

Once my trialists leave the club my staff seem to have inexplicable burned all the reports we compiled on them over the 4 week course simply because coach reports don't carry over with players no longer at the club. And because my best CA judging coach is only an 11 whereas my chief scout (you know, the people you hire for being best at judging ability but can't judge ability of players unless they are far away from your own training ground, even if they're still potential signings) is an 18, for some players I'm really interested in I actually terminate their trial and send them back just so I'm allowed to ask my more capable staff to judge them! I should not be able to get a better picture of a player away from home. Imagine my surprise when one of them wasn't even scoutable because, though he's Italian, they sent him back to Brazil where I'm not allowed to scout. So the only way I'm allowed to look at him is to ship him to my club, but then I'm only allowed to have a mediocre coach judge him. I get the living in Brazil bit, sure, but overall the structure and unnecessary differentiation of reports based solely on who made them, etc is all just so arbitrary and counterintuitive it's ridiculous. 

[Neil Brock]

Reviewed so locked.