Scouting Centre Notifications/Scouting Rating - more configurable settings

[Parmie]

My problem statement:

When the scouting centre news item arrives in my inbox, often with 30+ items, I look through all of them looking for players of interest but I discard the vast majority because they are not what I consider of value. In the most extreme case, I had 99 reports arrive in one scouting centre update.

I know the list option can help shorten the review stage but in the main I don't use that as I still find it unwieldy scrolling through players.

While not specifically a lower league problem, the lower leagues have a wider pool of players that scouts may think are suitable, so is worse for lower league managers. It's also made worse by the Borg collective approach the AI takes i.e. all AI managers seem to transfer list, set to release or loan list players en masse at the same time.

Specific example:

I was about half way through the latest scouting centre update, when this occurred to me. I have 18 loan list notifications left to look at, despite them all being highly recommended by the scouts, I found only 1 of interest and even then, still took no action. I'd term the 17 discarded reports as false positives, and the 1 interesting as a true positive.

Context:

League one, high up the table, with playoffs probable and automatic promotion possible. 

This is a false positive example of a report I dismissed with the others very similar to it. I'm taking this as a loan list notification as an inference I should be interested in loaning this player.

As a loan signing, I have zero interest here, presuming his current ability is even just reasonably accurate (let's assume they underestimate and he's a good league two player). His current ability is not high enough for the league, and he doesn't improve my senior squad, based on that current ability, I might as well use a youth team prospect.

On a permanent basis it makes a bit more sense on his potential, but still, that assumes I fail at promotion and keep failing at promotion to when he'd reach his potential to be useful in league one, and he's already 22 years old. I would more rate him as a C, certainly not an A-.

The one report I was interested in, the current ability was ready for league one.

Solution:

At a higher level, some basic settings could be set on notification types. For example, a loan notification could be current ability >= current league (or >= 3* current ability as a comparison to the current team). This should be configurable again for example, a newly promoted team might be significantly improved by a 'leading' level player at the league below and be interested in them. In my example that would eliminate all the 17 reports I found not of interest.

At a lower level, the FM manager should be able to influence what the scout rates highly, and this might mean different types of ratings required.

An example of a manager interested in youth prospects.

High importance for rating: 

• potential ability
• desirable hidden attributes (consistency etc.)
• personality types to be defined
• age

Low importance for rating:

• interest
• value/cost

Do not consider for rating:

• current ability
• work permit probability

A manager wanting a first team player is probably more interested in the inverse, current ability paramount, value/cost, willing to move and work permit all being very important.

This might create a scenario where extensive knowledge is required to generate a scouting centre notification, but if I can tune that to get the rate of false positives I desire, that's good. It's also important to keep this flexible, if people are happy with default settings, they shouldn't be forced down a more detailed setting path.

I'm overlapping into what feels quite like what we can define in a scouting focus, but even with proactive scouting, I'd still like to specifically tell scouts what I find important, rather than what they think I find important. I can't tell them 'don't recommend injury prone, inconsistent players who don't like big matches'.

The balancing effect would be setting tighter and tighter parameters would mean longer and longer to get recommendations back.

 

[Dutchy1983]

The whole scouting system is flawed. My latest gripe is with the delivery settings. None of them work. I'm sick to death of getting the same players reports no matter. What I select! Especially player x has been loan listed. I've turned them off, always click the x on the player card saying I don't wish to be informed, but yeah, it's flawed

[Zachary Whyte]

Thank you for the detailed suggestion. This will be put under consideration by the developers.