wazzaflow10

Hi Zachary, Found the same issue in a new save. This time I'm Chelsea and I'm basically following Wolves. Uploaded as "Chelsea Schedule Issue".

Other keys is making sure who ever is in the DLP and Left CB position are athletic enough to cover the hole created by Chilwell pushing forward. In an ideal world the LIF is more of a playmaker type player than Sterling. I often put him on the right. If you're generating chances and not scoring try dropping the mentality, and upping the tempo and give balanced width. Or if teams are really sitting back (i.e. playing a 3-4-2-1) you can push the DMs into an SV role and make it more like a 3-1-6.

Luke Littler right on cue then.

My post was already long so I didn't want to add more but I have saves from 2023 where as Man Utd I had over 2500 players scouted. When I stopped playing that save because of the scouting issue that seemed to appear in December I had 1600. Where did those reports go? I know there's a 1 year filter on the reports but it's not like I stopped scouting. I used to have 100+ report cards to review, to the point it was almost way too much to check acknowledge on there. Now? There's nothing. Literally nothing. I know they say nothings been changed but something related to scouts finding players has broken. I'm utterly perplexed as to what has happened. I don't own 23 because I hated how badly away teams were nerfed but I really wish I could go back and compare over a longer save.

Hi Zachary, Thank you for your team's consideration for this bug report. I have a few follow up questions/comments for you and the team. Apologies for the length in advance. I think we've covered in here the function for IF a player is recommended in a focus. Your note above makes perfect sense if recommending a player for Derby County v Manchester United. In the quick tests I've conducted since 24.3 release I've seen that recommendations are much easier to come by if your team is of a lower quality. I'm 100% on board with that concept. Could you shed some light on the process that covers IF a player is scouted and/or how the game chooses what players to scout? It seems odd to me that if I have Derby county with all 5 of their scouts and Manchester United with their 30+ scouts, both have scouted the same number of players over the same period of time. More scouts + more budget should equate to more reports - maybe not perfectly linearly, but certainly the advantage of being a large club is the scouting network is much more extensive and comprehensive. Attached screenshots below show the same number of players scouted for both teams. Just to put it concretely - If Derby County has one scout assigned to scouting England and Manchester United has two or three or four scouts assigned to scouting England the number of players scouted for Manchester United should be significantly higher than that of Derby County. It seems to me that there is some ambiguity between what the recruiting focus concept is and what the recruiting focus UI is instructing the game to do. Below are two prevailing thoughts I've had on how it works or supposedly should work. I hope this clarifies some of the pushback myself and other have provided. What it sounds like you are telling us: When creating a focus, the min CA and min PA and Age applies to determining IF a player is scouted then clearly there are fewer players for Manchester United to scout based on default focus values. It should stand to reason then if I am playing as Man Utd and set the min CA and min PA to 1/2 silver stars I want to scout the entirety of the region/competition that I've selected. However this does not happen. No matter my CA/PA threshold the number of players scouted is unchanged. Thus, the intense frustration of not being able to find players. We know they are there but the game will not uncover them for us with the tools we have been provided. We don't have a good explanation in the game as to why our scouts appear to just be sitting around. What I believe to be the intent of the recruitment focus mechanism is below: If the assumption of min CA and min PA does not factor into if a player is scouted, but rather IF a player is recommended, then Man Utd should have a significant and sizeable scouting database advantage over a team like Derby County. Ultimately, the number of players recommended would be much smaller due to "failing CA checks" or "Lack of interest due to playing for rival teams". This assumption is in line with your statements in my opinion. Assuming this is correct the following is the disconnect between what we experienced prior to one of the patches and 24.2. In this situation, ALL scouted players who fail a recommendation check (for any reason) would go into the scouted players tab but not be designated as a match for a recruitment focus. This to me makes more sense from a technical and strategic perspective. If I am Derby County - do I waste time scouting the Premier League? I'd likely get zero recommendations for transfers but maybe a handful of hopeful loans. Or if I'm Man Utd do I bother scouting the Championship and below hoping to uncover a gem for cheap? Again very few recommendations due to failed CA checks but maybe I find an interesting breakthru prospect with good PA. If I do scout those leagues I should have comprehensive of knowledge of them whether they generate recommendations or not - provided I scout the league long enough or have enough scouts to warrant comprehensive knowledge. To level set all this - the expectation for me isn't that the human manager would have complete or perfect knowledge of every single player in the game or an area. In fact I think we should have more imperfect and asymmetrical knowledge of external players (for another day). To use a previous example, if playing as Man Utd we would know that someone like Haaland is likely not interested in joining at game start. If we are extensively scouting England or the Premier League, however, a lack of interest on his part should not preclude us from having minimal or marginal scouting knowledge of him. I don't have an expectation that he would ever be interested in joining during the save. Along those lines, who would have ever thought Neymar would be interested in joining PSG until he did. The main point I'm trying to address is if I'm looking for a striker I want to know as much of the universe as I can given the resources I'm allotted in both scouting manpower and monetary budget. If I'm told no by Haaland's agent and no by Osimhen's agent and so on until I get to Rasmus Hojlund that's more realistic to me than the game "pre-filtering" who shows up based on a black box algorithm. I can sympathize with the idea that the black box would prevent complaints of "why is so in so not interested in my team when I've won the Champions League 5 years in a row. Everyone should be interested in my team." Sometimes ignorance is bliss. By no means am I trying to game/hack the scouting system or ask you to make it insanely easy to spot and sign wonderkids. There's the player search tool for people who want to play the game that way. My interest is keeping the game somewhat realistic in the sense of as manager I have a network of scouts who build a repository of players that I can then ask to further scout or discard. I sincerely appreciate you and the rest of the SI dev/qa team's hard work to address these challenges given the magnitude of changes happening in the next 6 months.

Ok I thought that was the case - It seems to appear in the focus but hard to track in the players scouted tab. If you want to move this to the UI section that is fine by me since it seems to fit that category better.

Yes this is my fear. I can already picture a RCB will bolt for an IF immediately after a change of possession and allow way to much space for a CF to run into. In real life its much easier to coordinate the timing of when the man marking should happen obviously. I'd like to think that when facing a front 3 that you could coordinate a sort of defensive back 4 that accounts for each player and provides defensive cover with an extra man. Appreciate the theory and tips in this posts. I've already incorporated a good deal into my save and am seeing some fantastic results and patterns of play.

We've all been through this. WHo are you playing as. I did some testing on 24.2.1 where I took Derby County, Newcastle and a Man Utd and simmed a month for recruiting results over the same time period. Derby County had bucket loads. Newcastle had a good amount. Man Utd had virtually nothing. I'm trying it on 24.3 now that I've updated it. But I really hope this isn't some issue that the size of the team is pre-filtering results or the CA/PA buttons are broken.

From 10/10 to 11/10? Is that possible?

The difference is that one is a legitimate bug and the other is a preference about if you should ever be allowed to score on a throw in or corner. There were definitely issues on release in November. Those have since been fixed. But I've yet to see a direct free kick go in, and no one seems to complain about that. It does get a bit annoying when the same group of people fill the boards with "ME sucks, games broken, only GGPress works" constantly despite being told there's other ways to play. The whole scouting module is/was actually very broken - not just who got recommended. I went from having a pipeline of potential recruits and alternatives like most teams to there's only one left winger known to my scouts. I once needed a replacement goalkeeper after the December patch and my scouts found no one in a top priority focus. Not a soul. That's a huge deal. I had to sign someone who was already in the scouted players tab prior to the module being broken. Even my DOF couldn't recommend someone for a transfer. I'm not crazy in the need to find and sign every single u18 wonderkid on the planet. I started a save with Chelsea a months ago and you wouldn't know that anyone on Man City or Arsenal existed let alone players from other leagues. Its crazy to think that a team like Chelsea doesn't have a pretty extensive network and at least aware of the vast majority of top level players or players who could potentially make it. In 3 months of scouting I only knew of 120 players in the whole of England and that was starting with 75 when I joined. How do you play a save longer than a year or two unless you're doing a youth only or DOF signings only game? The crazy part to me is that I don't recall scouting even being touched in any update. I don't know what they changed to cause it to break initially. If its still broken (haven't played yet) I'm hoping its not cover to stop you from signing players to give the AI more chances to be competitive or snap up wonder kids before you. I doubt that's the case but it's a thought in my head.

I'm a couple hours away from being able to play and try it out. Wish there was a way to save 24.1, 24.2.1. and 24.3 and run a scouting report in each and compare. Wonder what it would take for SI to release let you play different versions of the same game (understanding issues from older patches won't be fixed if you have a bug).

have you had a chance to play yet?

Is asking one of your CBs in a back 3 to man mark an IF and have the wingback on the opposite side mark the other a bad idea? I wouldn't want both to do it so that I still have a +1 advantage in the back. I generally think the game lacks a bit in terms of allowing you to set up effective zonal marking or coverage areas.

It feels a bit wasteful when your opponent is only playing with 1 striker but you do manage to keep possession a good bit and recycle attacks more easily. Typically I do a narrow so I can control the midfield and muddy that down a bit. Plus that just opens up space for the wingbacks. Benefit to that system is fewer moving parts to create the 3-2 build up so for me its more effective at nullifying a team that is much better than you since your players don't have to move in critical areas.

yeah you'll need an athletic left CB and DLPd to make it work for sure. I haven't had to play any of the big clubs yet. For that I have a 3-4-2-1 I think I'll employ to sit and frustrate them and hope for some counters.

PIs: LIF: Sit Narrower AMC: Pass shorter, dribble less, roam, get further forward DMCR: Dribble more, Shoot Less often IFB (for James only): Dribble wide, Cross More Often, Cross from Deep I'll often switch Sterling to the RW position and put someone slightly more creative in the IFs spot Lukaku has scored 7 goals in 4 games for me with this tactic (3,2,0,2). You should be able to switch this to the right side if you want/need. Kind of a waste using James as an IFB but Chilwell isn't as great as an IFB and the lack of left footed wingers kind of necessitates playing down the left flank this way. Putting a right footed winger out there isn't the end of the world though.

It's probably one of the issues with the IFB/LIB set up that your wide players almost have to be wingers or inverted wingers so you don't make your attack so narrow. I've had some success going about it in a slightly different manner using this AF IFs AMs Wa DLPd DMs CWBa CB BDP IFB I'm sure it's lacking a bit of solidarity down the left flank but hasn't cost me yet.

He said toffee, 16 year old, and scoring in a sentence. There's only one place to go with that one!

Do you not remember the name Wayne Rooney? (sarcasm)

@Rashidi For a 3-2 rest defense formation with an initial set up of DMd HB WBa CB CB IWBs Can you cover the flanks better by checking the stay wider when team in possession PI on your CBs? Assuming the HB goes into the middle though I vaguely remember a HB will rotate with an IWB if on the same side. If that is the case we can switch the DM and HB so the rotation occurs where we want.

Maybe its my own narrative but I've seen tired/fatigued players be a little looser in possession (poor touches/bad passes) or lose their mark a little easier (not tracking back/not in the right position). If I get a few highlights of a tired player in those scenarios I usually sub them off unless they're having a storming game or don't have a good replacement.

I played a sequence of 3 games with Chelsea the last few days that I used 3 different base formations. So you don't need peak familiarity to do well. Game 1 I used a 4-3-3 with a high intense press winning 4-0. Maybe a bit lucky as I forced 3 errors from Brighton as they built out of the back. Game 2 a 5-2-2-1 or 3-4-2-1 and drew 2-2 away against Newcastle (who's leading the league) where I sat back and countered. Should have won this one but for a injury time goal. Game 3 a 4-2-3-1 and won 4-0 again with 3 of the goals coming while using a low block/LOE and cautious mentality. Went up 1-0 after 25 mins and survived a 20 min fightback before halftime where I was perhaps lucky to not concede an equalizer. I was actually behind on xG. 2nd half though was pure dominance after the mentality/LOE switch. No shots allowed ended up being 3-1 in xG. All morphed into a 3-2-5 in some way in attack. I find the 3-2 to be the most stable unless you're expected to dominate and need an extra body in midfield to break down a low block or have world class CB's that have some pace. Also consider what roles you're expecting to make up the 3-2 or 2-3 and the tempo you're playing. Doing a 3-2 with two IWB and a HB requires time to set up in possession due to how far each player has to move to get into position. Playing fast and direct would result in your players running in and out of their starting position and never really settle. I try to minimize how many "moving parts" I have in a tactic if the goal is to play fast and direct.

I usually go by if that 6.6 is coupled with a bunch of poor passes or bad highlights. A 6.6 alone isn't enough to pull someone off - they might get a "I think you can do better" at halftime talk though. Also if they made a mistake and got down to 6.2 or something and came back up to 6.6 then obviously its just one error pulling them down. So the journey to 6.6 matters to me.

That's every online interaction in existence though. It doesn't mean the game is broken for people who are trying to play a normal, non-exploitative way. There's always been exploits or a meta theory in the game. That also exists in real life. Pep's tactics are the meta theory for most of Europe. Winning the ball higher up the pitch gives you better odds and not conceding. That's the real life "meta." Should the game make it harder to press high up the pitch either in terms of performance loss due to condition or number of injuries or attributes needed? Probably. But I don't think the problem is really that widespread unless you're trying to defeat the engine instead of the other player/AI tactic. But why play that way or play with people who want to play that way online?