Scouting suggestions

[Vossenoren]

I've been playing this franchise for ages (off and on since CM 01/02) and, as usual with these sort of things, I'd like to start by saying I love these games and am very impressed with how in-depth they are.

 

That being said, I've always been sort of baffled by scouting, because I never feel like you can interact with your scouts in a way that a manager at a club would. Your choice is to send them to a region, and to either turn youth on or off, and then they come back with a few random players.

 

I work my scouts to death. Whenever I join a new club, I always clean house, offering **** players to clubs for free to open up some financial room for new signings, determine my tactics for the club, and evaluate my squad, then target the biggest weakness. Usually, the club will have already wasted it's loan options by loaning players that are not good enough to start, and the occasional gem, so I have to look to free agents or free transfers if the window is open. So, I'll go to player search, select "expired" contracts, interested only, deal with any restrictions to do with work eligibility (which also sucks because there is no UK and Ireland option in nationality, so that hurts when searching for transfers, though free agents you can use based in UK and Ireland), select a position, and then I tell my scout to individually scout every single name that pops up. Sometimes it's 4 people, sometimes it's 104. Once I've done this for every position I have an immediate need at, I'll filter to expiring contracts, and scout every available player in every position that I use in my tactic (this because you find a lot of good future potential this way). Then at the beginning of a new season I'll do the same for potential loan signings at weak spots, available free agents, and maybe a purchase of a transfer listed player.

 

This system works for me, but it is rather labor intensive, which is at odds with the general vibe of FMM, which is meant to be casual (tbh, I'd rather play the full version, but I don't have a working computer at this time), but I think it could be streamlined. If I took over a real team, I would think I'd be able to tell my scouts "we're weak at left back, can you look at players available for free and suggest an upgrade?" and possibly indicate whether loaning is an option or not. So, if you could send a scout out with the same search parameters as you can use to narrow down search results in player search (and maybe use sliders to get more accurate results, so rather than him scouting 834 players who cost 500 to 1500 quid along with the better ones I want to know about, have a minimum and maximum cost, or wage. Plus, the current wage divisions are too loose, because my board will allow me to pay up to 1.5k/wk, but I have to filter by either 1k or 2.5k, which means I either filter out top candidates, or get a bunch of results for players I can't afford. It's a minor inconvenience, but seems like something that could be addressed easily (speaking as a total layman when it comes to game design).

 

I hope I didn't ramble too much, and I'd be happy to clarify, but I find that I never send my scouts out to scout, because it is wildly ineffective compared to the way I do it. On the other hand, I don't know if this affects my available player pool (i.e. my scouts "discovering" players).

[ElliottMS]

Are you playing FMM21?

Because scouting has been much improved on FMM22 - there are much more filter options available.

I feel some filters are missing still, ideally it should be all the same filters available for the player search.

That said I still also do what you do with the manual scouting as that's still quicker to get results.

[StephenFMT17]

I do wish you could perform searches of your scouting results much rather like the player search filters.

[Vossenoren]

50 minutes ago, ElliottMS said:

Are you playing FMM21?

Because scouting has been much improved on FMM22 - there are much more filter options available.

I feel some filters are missing still, ideally it should be all the same filters available for the player search.

That said I still also do what you do with the manual scouting as that's still quicker to get results.

Yeah, still on '21

[ElliottMS]

4 hours ago, Vossenoren said:

Yeah, still on '21

Well, whenever you get round to upgrading you should be pleased as it addresses many of your points. Feedback others including me have given before, and had answered.