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[Suggestion] Youth Intake Screen/Interface


Butlee

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I feel like there are a few screens in FM that could do with a bit of a facelift. I've made some mock pages (see 1 below) myself and would like to propose them as a Feature Request.

One such concern is with the Youth Intake. The original mail message is quite unappealing and even though you do get a "Youth Candidates" squad page for a while, there's not a lot of info there (as they're all new players).

I think Youth Intake is one of the most exciting parts of the game, and it's so underdone in terms of how interactive and how interesting it could be.

Issue
Basically there's a distinct lack of information for you, if you want to manage that part of the game.
I think most folks know a few of the things that go into Youth Intake quality (Academy, Recruitment/Coaching, Rep of club, HoYD to guess a few), but no one knows for certain. And that ambiguity is ok - we should preserve that - but right now what we have is the polar opposite. We have almost no feedback on what we can do to help our Youth Intake improve. 

Ideas
- Give the manager some appropriate, interesting and realistic feedback when Youth Intake comes around.
- Make the mail more appealing, accessible and modern/business-like.
 

Proposal

Butlee_Mock_FinancialPage.thumb.png.c8989505e3340e73dd6d532d0b1f2515.png

The overall approach here is to make it seem more like a "report". After all it's an email being sent to you by your HoYD. It's also (nearly) 2019 and your HoYD is a professional. I think the mix of lists, quotes and graphics helps keep the page fresh, interesting and most importantly useful.

Going down the page bit by bit...

The list view of players is much easier to navigate. I think splitting by positions give you a kind of quick glance at what your club attracts.
The top graphic on the right can be the current crop of players or of all time.
The 2nd graphic on the right could be changed, but I kind of like the notion of knowing how many localplayers made it versus ones that were born elsewhere or were brought in from other regions.

The Star Player is what we have now. A direct pick from the HoYD on who he thinks is the best player.
For Staff influence it's whomever is assigned to Youth Intake. It's still really what you had before, except with a comment on which particular feature of the HoYD helped attract players. If you're worried that you'll get ugly mismatches where your HoYD influenced a great attacker and a great defender, but the comments say defensive attributes attracted them - you can even scrap the player names and just mention what characteristics were roughly influenced by your HoYD. For example you could just say your HoYD influenced the defensive skills on a number of these intakes (only say this if it's true of course) and then whenever you find a good defender in the mix you'll have a good idea that your HoYD helped, even if you can't be 100% sure.
Then, as an extra feature, I think we could go with a Club Influence, where you get comments on location, or how your Youth Team influenced the Intake or just on your general reputation. Does United attract more than City for example? Are you struggling to get players because you're one of the 50 teams in London?

Then the last 3rd is just some interesting data. Make a comment on what the facilities are, maybe add how much they cost - I like the line graph showing investments, and if that extends over 2-3 years it'd look really interesting... and heck if you could click it and get a 10 year profile that'd be amazing!! The the text just says if you've improved things since last season. It just gives you and idea of the general trend - has it been a while since you invested an improvement here? Have you invested a lot and is the Intake improving to justify it? And questions and decisions like that...

Lastly is the overall advice from HoYD. I'd say it's quite realistic for a HoYD to understand the youth networks around your area and how your club stacks up compared to your rivals. This should be based on reputation mostly I believe - he's trying to say if you want to compete with clubs at your rep you need to do X. Maybe you're well ahead, maybe you're struggling, maybe you need to grow your club before your Youth Intake can practically improve its' market share etc... Whatever information you can give as advice.

 

Overall that gives managers at least half a dozen little threads to pull on if they want to action their Youth Intake. But it doesn't ever give too much information or make youth take too easy or boring, or give you quick fixes to solve intake issues. It's still up to the wiley manager to look through this, decide what areas he could improve and/or work with the Board to plan his Youth strategy long term. Giving more info to make those decisions on doesn't give-away the system, it makes it more interactive and even more exciting to play with.

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Fantastic idea, I really like the layout, it fits with the lately pursued change from just game information to "mails" and "reports". With how much youth intake means for the players and the game it's change in presentation is long overdue.

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Cheers, glad you liked the idea.  I agree with you; with the way some of the new things - the way Dynamics, Medical Centre & now Training to name a few - are presented, it would be good to ensure we go back and (both visually & functionally) touch up some of our existing features as well.

If anyone has any more ideas for this page let me know and I can make a few extra images with different ideas. 

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Yup! That's the main kicker - all this stuff likely exists, and sharing some of it doesn't give the game away for making Youth Intake too easy or anything like that. It just makes it more fun & interesting this way!

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