[Discussion] Scouting update - Terrible...

[pointyhat]

I cant wrap my mind around the fact that you decided to remove the attributes from the scouting update. Why mess up something that was working alright (It was a nightmare to stay in the attributes tab when changing cards). 

How on earth do you decide to remove the best indicator of how good a player is and now you only have in that place a black and blank space for not a single obvious (to us) reason. Why do we need to make more clicks, to see if we are interested in some players. When your team grows you have 20 scouts and maybe 100 reports in the weekly meeting. You expect us to spend an hour clicking back and forth through screens to see the basics???

Please, AT LEAST, bring the attributes back and also let us know how many reports are in the stack...

Edited November 10, 2021 by pointyhat

[sporadicsmiles]

Agreed, it is one of the more bone headed design choices that SI have made in quite some time. The rationale is to make you rely on scout reports rather than attributes in deciding if you are interested in a player. 

There are a couple of reasons why this is current a slightly absurd notion

- Scout rating is skewed by transfer value, wage demand, and interest in a transfer. Also things like "needs to learn a language", etc. 
- The scout reports give you very little useful information on a player.
- Scouts of all qualities will often return bizarre targets.

As of this point all that has been achieved by this change is that I will automatically go to the top left and check the attributes of the players before I decide on any further action. I have a couple of internal triggers that means I do not do this (for example my current save I cannot sign anyone over 21 because I have not got room to register the players, so those reports can be ignored initially). But even so, it is not working.

In order to try to stimulate ideas on how we can make this better. Here are some ideas.

1. Keep the design as is, but have a drop down option to view attributes if desired. This makes the most sense to me in the short run. The idea of the change was to make scout reports more relevant. They are now considerably less relevant and much more annoying. 

2. Make scout reports actually tell me something about the player.

I mean a lot of the time the scout reports are so stupidly generic. "possesses great pace", "strong" etc. Great pace by what metric? Strong compared to whom? This needs to be much more detailed if you want me to be able to use it instead of attributes. Indeed, it has to be linked to attributes in an obvious was. Whether liked or not, attributes are at the core of the game mechanics right now. So tell me how well he rates for pace vs my team. Or vs the league. Both of these averages are already in the game. Use them. Hell, tell me he would have top 25% in an attribute. Or top 10%. The scout remarks need context. Obviously this is not so much true for hidden attributes. Being told "does not enjoy big matches" and "injury prone" are enough on their own. This would be my preferred long term solution, because it would be nice to be able to tell if a player is worthwhile without attributes.

3. Change how scots evaluate players.

Scouts should not give a player a C+ rating because they have a high wage demand, or they are not gonna get a work permit, or they are only slightly interested, or their value is too high. That is not for the scout to decide (in my opinion). that is my call as a manager. If scout reports are to replace attributes in this manner, then the scout has to judge a player on his attributes primarily. There needs to be a clear demarcation between players who are for the future and who are not. You can leave notes about work permits etc in the report, but they should not affect the rating of the player. In fact I would suggest a double rating system. One that rates the player, and one that gives a suggestion on whether to make a move for the player, and why. So a player could have A+ for football, but a D- for whether he should be bought. Or a C+ for football, but an A+ for being bought with the note that this is for the future. These things can then be separated nicely in the report. So I can decide that player X is worth following because he is a good footballer, but I cannot really sign him right now. 

I understand this is quite similar to the current rating plus star system. But it is much more direct, I feel. This would be another longer term goal.

I am actually fully supportive of the idea of making scout reports driven by the reports, The major issue, as I said, is that the reports are currently absolutely not fit for this purpose. 

[Abdullah Patel]

Thanks for the suggestions, your feedback is invaluable to us, the feature requests you've given will be considered and may be rejected or may yet make it into a future iteration of FM