[Suggestion] Scouting - Ability to handle Pressure situations

[CosmicCreepers]

Hello,

So I know scouts are able to determine and make comments on certain hidden attributes already (such as consistency, adaptability, versatility), however I have never seen a scout report that tells me how well a player performs under pressure.

It seems like this is a really important stat for when you're recruiting for a team that is competing for trophies, and is the sort of thing that teams would use to inform their recruitment decision, I've had a number of signings I thought were perfect for my team turn sour because I've found after they get to my club and play a few games they can't handle pressure.

It should be easy to add this, as it is very similar to scouting consistency...

What's the verdict on this, or is this already a feature that I just haven't seen clearly?

[Michael Sant]

Well it would help to ensure a full understanding of what you're referring to explicitly. 

So under what situations do you consider it to be pressure for a player in game currently @CosmicCreepers?

[CosmicCreepers]

Well I think in game it can be a bit unclear as to what is high pressure, but i'll try my best to explain. I'll start with the general situation...

I have fully scouted players, I am quite careful to avoid signing players that have any negative relating to Big Matches, so I have teams that are at least average in that stat. Scout reports don't say anything about the ability of a player to handle pressure situations in my experience (the hidden pressure stat).

I have been noticing that some of my players who scout reports and attributes would suggest would adapt quickly and dominate the league are struggling to get ratings above a 6.7 and have any impact. I also noticed that whenever I use "demand more" shouts or suggest an importance in performing well they display as nervous, even against weak opposition. To confirm that the problem was what I suspected, I opened the hidden stats in editor and found them to have a Pressure stat of 3. I feel like scouts should be able to identify players that are affected this much by pressure rather than recommending them to me so highly with no mention of it.

As I understand, pressure is also related to how they might perform in what the game considers high pressure situations... and this is somewhat unclear to me as it feels like there's a blurred boundary between Big Games too. As i understand a pressure can be influenced by my shouts, the scoreline of the game, the mentality of my tactic, and the position on the pitch (i.e. last defender/goalkeeper one on one, clear cut chance falling to the player), however i also gathered (perhaps wrongly) it is exaggerated by things like playing away from home, the reputation of the team you're playing, the reputation of the competition you're playing, and the perceived importance the match has on the standings (all things that i know also influence "big game" stat).

In instances like this, I notice how i can be playing an away game in Europe and comfortably controlling the game for 60 minutes, leading 1-0 with high possession, and then suddenly there's a switch and a domino effect of mistakes leads to me losing 3-1 with all goals conceded late on. I've had more extreme examples of this, and not just in europe, some in games against high rep domestic opponents. The only understanding i have of this is that pressure calculations get exaggerated late on in these games and suddenly defenders lose the ball, goalkeepers fumble the ball and attackers can't hit the target.

Now my point wasn't really related to what the pressure stat does, because to me it's a stat that has some effect on how reliable a player is, and it's a stat that seems reasonably scoutable in the real world (we all know those strikers who miss those important sitters at 1-1 in the last 10 mins of the game, and we all know those strikers who find the back of the net when its really important to win a game *cough* Cristiano Ronaldo). So my Suggestion is more that a scout is able to make some comment about a players' ability to handle pressure situations, turn games around and be a match winner.

Edited December 17, 2021 by CosmicCreepers

[CosmicCreepers]

NB: I did just look this up further, and it is suggested any of my comments about opponent and competition reputation is a big matches thing, so I guess ignore any comments related to that. I don't think it takes away from what I'm trying to say.

I guess another example would be, John Stones when he was younger used to love to try and play the ball out of defence but when the opposition put players pressing him he'd regularly get confused, have a bad touch, stumble etc. He seems to have developed out of it now, but I feel like that's something you would want your scout to tell you when you are signing a player.

[gergo fmstories]

The  “pressure” hidden attribute is taken into personality and media handling stlyes as far as I know.

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Michael Sant]

On 17/12/2021 at 11:27, CosmicCreepers said:

NB: I did just look this up further, and it is suggested any of my comments about opponent and competition reputation is a big matches thing, so I guess ignore any comments related to that. I don't think it takes away from what I'm trying to say.

I guess another example would be, John Stones when he was younger used to love to try and play the ball out of defence but when the opposition put players pressing him he'd regularly get confused, have a bad touch, stumble etc. He seems to have developed out of it now, but I feel like that's something you would want your scout to tell you when you are signing a player.

Well concentration, decisions and composure would cover this kind of area. A defender with low concentration is less likely to be switched on to things and have a poor first touch or misjudge it entirely. A player with low decisions is more likely to try and play it out when its more appropriate to just boot it and low composure means if being closed down they're more prone to mistakes. 

For those who can turn games around, well determination comes into play there. 

Part of the reason I asked is that a lot of these aspects are replicated in game already, just at a more subtle level than you might expect. Consistency, Important Matches, Professionalism and Pressure lend themselves to leveraging the other attributes more consistently. 

So if you have a defender with low concentration, decisions and composure, but also has low consistency and low important matches it means in many instances the player will be performing as though those first 3 attributes were even lower. They don't guarantee the player will perform poorly, a lot of that rests on your opponent capitalising on it but all that information would be there to see beforehand the player is a liability and its down to you to either cater for that elsewhere or realise he's not the player for you.

[CosmicCreepers]

So what you're saying to me is: "Because there are other attributes that also determine this, we shouldn't be able to scout how well a player can handle pressure situations" ? Because I mean like you say with consistency, that only determines how often they use their full stats, but if they have really good stats then it doesn't matter if you know how consistent they are. So maybe we shouldn't be able to scout consistency either? Or in fact any hidden stat really by this logic.

What I am actually saying, is in the real world, people can look at players and they can determine how well they handle pressure situations. As part of your game you determine how well a player handles pressure situations with a modifier that is a hidden attribute. If you are going to use this as a method to calculate how well they handle pressure situations, and it's a behaviour that can be observed by scouts, does it not make sense for a scout to be able to comment on it rather than us just having to guess? I mean we are able to determine plenty of other hidden attribute by scouting, we're even magically able to know if an 18 year old south american would adapt to moving across the world to Europe by scouting them apparently (which seems like a load of nonsense), and you consider that fine? But you think somehow scouting the pressure attribute to be something that shouldn't be allowed and we should rely solely on the other attributes? And when there is uncertainty built in to any of these calculations, you as a player need to spend a lot of time watching an individual player to actually work out that this is happening, possibly even requiring you to sit and watch comprehensive/full match highlights and focus on that player. I don't think that's really how you intend for the game to be played or else we would barely complete a season before the next year's release.

And in the case in the OP: I have a player who has strong attributes in all these areas. High adaptability and good consistency. Yet he cannot play at a consistent level, because the role that his stats are geared towards (DLP) is one that is going to put him in more pressure situations, There is no way of me knowing what is wrong with this player from any of the scoutable stats.

EDIT: I guess another point related to this is, it seems like if you are deliberately hiding behavioural traits that a scout would be able to determine, then you are being deliberately misleading. I accept that there's an element of uncertainty in scouting and determining a player's ability, that's fine. But when you're saying "Hey this player is on paper perfectly able to handle things with good concentration, composure, decisions etc", and then they magically can't because they have a pressure modifier of 1... and my scouts can say nothing about it despite the fact that they must have observed the player in those situations, then you are literally just having scouts lie to me. That's not a game feature that is rewarding or adds any sense of realism, it's literally just messing with the players' brain. Yes I can minimize how much this happens by going real deep on picking players with personalities that definitely exclude these worst cases (but this rules out pretty much all personality types and media handling styles), and i can minimize it by waiting until they play a chunk of senior games so i can see their match ratings, but that doesn't really feel like a satisfying or realistic way of dealing with it.

 

EDIT 2: Sorry if this sounds curt, I'm trying to make it clear exactly the point im making and why I think in the current state of the game it is something that should be added. It's not clear to me what the resistance to adding it is...because if the resistance is "we want some degree of uncertainty" (which i don't mind), I think then there are other hidden traits that you allow to be scouted that scouts shouldn't be able to scout.

Edited December 31, 2021 by CosmicCreepers
clarity of argument/tone

[Michael Sant]

Well in the original post you asked if you were missing this, and if you meant that in the sense of there being a single binary indicator, then no there isn't. But all the information is there through a scout report and a players profile for you to ascertain that side of their game. 

If your suggestion is that the scout report should be distilling the particularly relevant attributes for their position into a singular indicator then that's an idea that can be put forward. If its just that through the information provided by the scouting system and what you can know of a player makes it possible for this to be inferred - then its already possible. My posts are just to provide additional context so that you can in turn better frame/present your own idea and assert where it fits into the game. 

Changes to how scouts deal with things like consistency, adaptability etc are perfectly valid for another discussion/idea. I can see the point and there's nuance to be had in that discussion too - spent a lot of time thinking on consistency in particular with young players but I've never personally gotten to the point where I had a satisfying idea for how it could be revamped and passed on (ideas from SI staff get logged in the same way as those of forum users).

[CosmicCreepers]

Quote

Well in the original post you asked if you were missing this, and if you meant that in the sense of there being a single binary indicator, then no there isn't. But all the information is there through a scout report and a players profile for you to ascertain that side of their game. 

I don't understand what you're saying here. What you have said to me is that a scout report can show me things about Composure, Decisions, Consistency, Big Games and other related stats. Not the particular stat I am talking about (Handling Pressure). This appears, from what I can tell of my reports, and from what you have told me, to be something that is emphatically not in the scout reports?!

I am talking specifically about the Pressure hidden attribute... that as I understand is used as a modifier to determine how well a player performs certain tasks under what the game decides is a pressure situation, a modifier which makes my scouts assessment of all those other stats moot if it is very very low.

Quote

Changes to how scouts deal with things like consistency, adaptability etc are perfectly valid for another discussion/idea. I can see the point and there's nuance to be had in that discussion too - spent a lot of time thinking on consistency in particular with young players but I've never personally gotten to the point where I had a satisfying idea for how it could be revamped and passed on (ideas from SI staff get logged in the same way as those of forum users).

This statement was only as an example, because I don't understand why reasoning was given to me about other attributes that are not the Pressure attribute and could only assume it was on the basis of not wanting players to be able to see or scout certain hidden attributes. And I think if you don't want players to see certain attributes, then there would be more clarity and understanding of that as a player if you didn't allow the scouting of other hidden attributes such as consistency and adaptability. I'm not going to raise this as another discussion right now, because I think that is an alternative to this situation that fundamentally changes the games' view on how you should scout players. What I am saying is: under the games' current mechanics of how you scout players, it makes very little sense that you cannot scout the hidden attribute "pressure", particularly when the extreme ends of the stat seem to have a dramatic impact on the ability of a player to perform well. I appreciate that you can determine the value of this attribute in other ways by knowing personalities and media handling styles, but most personalities and media handling styles don't actually narrow down the range this attribute can take, so you can only determine it within a couple of attribute points of range for a very small number of players. And that requires a reference manual or spreadsheet to do anyway which doesn't seem a great requirement for players who aren't familiar with the game.

So i guess to to be very clear about what my suggestion is:

My scouts should be able to make a statement about a scouted players' ability to handle pressure situations. This needn't be something that allows me to know the exact attribute value, but should allow the scout to make a negative comment when someone reacts very poorly to pressure situations ( < 5) and a positive comment when someone reacts very well to them (>15), as in my experience of playing this game this stat has a very large impact on players in certain positions when it sits in either of those ranges so it seems reasonable to expect a scout to be able to comment on it.

Edited January 4, 2022 by CosmicCreepers
grammar

[JRHaggs]

I agree, CosmicCreepers. You're asking a perfectly reasonable question. I don't understand why our friend from SI is acting like you're asking a weird or confusing question.

Responses are like, "Why would you want to know someone's acceleration? You have access to their pace, strength, and work rate attributes already." If Handling Pressure was not its own attribute, that would be one thing. But it *is* its own attribute. We know full well at this point that logically-correlated attributes are often completely divergent, so the suggestion that you should be able to infer or deduce this seems a little disingenuous.

[Michael Sant]

On 04/01/2022 at 15:59, CosmicCreepers said:

My scouts should be able to make a statement about a scouted players' ability to handle pressure situations. This needn't be something that allows me to know the exact attribute value, but should allow the scout to make a negative comment when someone reacts very poorly to pressure situations ( < 5) and a positive comment when someone reacts very well to them (>15), as in my experience of playing this game this stat has a very large impact on players in certain positions when it sits in either of those ranges so it seems reasonable to expect a scout to be able to comment on it.

That is something we can work with and taken on board as a suggestion.

The reason why I ask questions is because its of the utmost importance I and anyone from SI can understand your idea so it can be relayed internally and in turn to developers. Keep in mind one of the earlier examples given was this:

On 17/12/2021 at 11:27, CosmicCreepers said:

I guess another example would be, John Stones when he was younger used to love to try and play the ball out of defence but when the opposition put players pressing him he'd regularly get confused, have a bad touch, stumble etc. He seems to have developed out of it now, but I feel like that's something you would want your scout to tell you when you are signing a player.

The pressure attribute being low or high, with a scout commenting on it, wouldn't given you much of an indicator as to whether or not a player is more likely to make blunders like this or not. 

These are two very different things, the change you've suggested in the first part I quoted there wouldn't give you this information you said you'd like to see in the second. But if the first were to happen then through the use of the wider information through the scout report then of Pressure, of Consistency, of Important Matches, reviewing the attributes of Decisions, Concentration, First Touch, Composure, Technique - and they're all scoring poorly you can sit there and think "Hey this guy is going to be pretty bad more often than not if I ask him to do something complicated at the back" and make judgements from there.

You had also questioned if you hadn't seen this clearly so explaining how you can work it out currently in game at the least gives you a chance to offer a critique on that process and factor in whether its adequate or not. 

[CosmicCreepers]

Ok so to be very clear about my understanding of the game mechanic beyond the suggestion: if I have a Ball Playing Defender with good Decisions, Concentration and other Ball Playing Defender attributes, and I am asking him to play out from the back. Even if he has a Pressure attribute of 1, I would expect him to be able to appropriately play the ball out from the back in most games without regular mistakes? And if the player's attributes were high enough to make him a top quality player in that division I should expect him to be able to match or exceed the ratings of a player with average stats for the division over a long sample period (say 2 seasons) in the same position and role when they have similar levels of consistency?

If the answer to both those questions is yes, then I think that's something that probably needs to be reviewed in the match engine also (specifically the impact of very low handling pressure stat on these roles), because from what I was interpreting from FM21 this wasn't happening. I'm not sure how much of this will have been carried over to the FM22 engine.

I appreciate the extra information I tried to give seemed to mislead the conversation, but I think now we have a clear suggestion! Thanks for your help and patience.