Making Scouting Less Painful (When you control it.)

[Kirkus Octavius]

I would like to see the Scouting department rebuilt from the ground up, because when you manage scouting yourself this thing has problems up the yin-yang.

 

First, we don't have a way of seeing a list of scouting assignments. The UI says we do, but we don't.

 

Instead we get a list of scouts. The list gives us their ability to judge current and potential ability. It does NOT give us their tactical knowledge, which I find useful for deciding who to assign to matches. I don't want a scout coming back and saying "They had 4 guys standing up near the keeper, I'm not sure why."

 

For scouts who have an assignment, we see a little bar which presumably shows how far through the assignment thus far. But if we want to SEE what those assignments are, we have to hover over each one, one at a time. And even then it doesn't give us the full information. In all of my assignments I set an upper age limit of 25 but I will NEVER see that in the hover-over. I only see it if I go into each assignment and edit it.

(The summary does mention age (as per the screenshot below), but not what that age is,

 

The next problem is that you are getting BAD information on supposedly unassigned scouts. I reported this as a bug in FM 21 as well, and it's still there in FM22. (I don't know where that thread has gone; I may have raised it in Stream.) If you assign a scout to scout a team or to scout a match, it NEVER shows up in the assignment list. The scout will certainly DO the assignment (although when I say "Scout a team" I also intend for them to come back with more data about the team's individual players than "Yes, they have some"), but they will at least give you the one page "Strengths and Weaknesses" summary. However they will STILL show as "unassigned" in the list, so you need to manually keep track of what your scouts are doing so that you don't accidentally assign 3 team scouting missions to an "unassigned" scout and none to two scouts who REALLY have no work to do. (I'll raise this as a bug later.)

 

Next, if I have taken charge of scouting assignments it would be nice if the scouts would actually DO their assignments instead of wandering off and doing whatever the heck they want as a result of "a recent scouting meeting".

 

Example: I tell Zinfollino to find me an Italian, 25 or under replacement goalkeeper. I give him 6 months to do that.

 

Instead he brings me a 30 year old Spanish striker.

 

Wrong end of the field, wrong end of the Mediterranean, wrong end of the career.

 

Also, at the moment the scouting assignment has what I'd regard as an odd granularity.

- I can handle scouting meetings, which I don't really want to do. I've left that with my director of football until I decide to sack him.

- I can assign scouts, which I do... except that I only partially care about which scout does the assignment. My interest is in setting all of the assignment tasks. In some cases I will want one of the best scouts on the task. In others, like scouting matches, I really don't care who it's assigned to.

- I'm also not interested in taking over any of the three reporting categories which to me are fine as they are.

 

What I would LIKE to be able to do is have the option for me to be responsible for

- "Setting scouting tasks", which can be me, the chief scout, the DOF, etc, with a second setting for

- "Assigning scouts to unassigned tasks", which can be the same. I'd give that to my chief scout.

In that way I can say "This is what I want you to focus on, now go away and do it."

 

And ideally don't bring me 30 year old Spanish strikers when I ask for 24 year old Italian GKs. That should be a sackable offence without a payout for any scout right there.

[Orion_]

59 minutes ago, Kirkus Octavius said:

Next, if I have taken charge of scouting assignments it would be nice if the scouts would actually DO their assignments instead of wandering off and doing whatever the heck they want as a result of "a recent scouting meeting".

This. I have ALL of the scouts set manually to look for 'U-21 players that I can get for free (ending/unprotected/youth contract)' and yet in every scouting report most players I see are 23+ yo with year+ remaining on their contract with expected transfer fee around half of my annual budget (we are small club). I'd rather not see those advices at all than have to skip trough them. They just waste my time.

[Zachary Whyte]

Thanks for the suggestion and the detailed feedback. We appreciate it this idea may yet be rejected or may end up in a future FM.