Scouting (Recruitment focuses) doesn't work

3 horas atrás, Thijsie disse:

I have a question for the fellow players in here: How do you even play the game with this broken? I haven't played the game for about 2 months now and am checking this thread daily, assuming it would be solved within a couple of days. But since it has been so long, I really want to play the game again. 
Do you all just go to the search option and manually click players to be scouted, and then come back after a while? 

To be fair I'm not playing that much as well, I'm waiting for the Winter Update. 

It's very very sad that we had to wait for 2 months for a fix (if that will happen). It should be a priority, but yeah, let's hope that they have it fixed.

3 hours ago, Thijsie said:

I have a question for the fellow players in here: How do you even play the game with this broken? I haven't played the game for about 2 months now and am checking this thread daily, assuming it would be solved within a couple of days. But since it has been so long, I really want to play the game again. 
Do you all just go to the search option and manually click players to be scouted, and then come back after a while? 

I haven't touched a long term save I had. Just been doing random saves. Actually went back to 21 for a while.

 

@zeza

Turns out all my optimism was for nothing. Most of the increase in scouted players was from my director of football scouting agent offers it seems. Almost instantaneous too. Such a strange, strange bug.

Agora, wazzaflow10 disse:

Turns out all my optimism was for nothing

Yeah, my scouting broke again. I've given up to be honest. We don't have an answer about our questions, Zachary's responses just made things worse because it shown that they don't have a clue about what's going on.

I'm very disappointed but I'll try a new save in the Winter Update, hoping it comes this week

3 hours ago, zeza said:

Yeah, my scouting broke again. I've given up to be honest. We don't have an answer about our questions, Zachary's responses just made things worse because it shown that they don't have a clue about what's going on.

I'm very disappointed but I'll try a new save in the Winter Update, hoping it comes this week

I'd be shocked if they left the module broken after this. I really would. I can see how you miss it initially, especially during the summer window when lots of agent offers appear. Its very strange to me that when a player "becomes available" you have 100% knowledge of them but they don't show up as scouted until that event occurs. Something is definitely happening on the back end that doesn't make it through to the UI parts of the game.

19 hours ago, Thijsie said:

I have a question for the fellow players in here: How do you even play the game with this broken? I haven't played the game for about 2 months now and am checking this thread daily, assuming it would be solved within a couple of days. But since it has been so long, I really want to play the game again. 
Do you all just go to the search option and manually click players to be scouted, and then come back after a while? 

I am playing Youth Academy only. That scratches the itch a bit.

Otherwise you can use this method, it works, but takes time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfiuDXLNbhs&ab_channel=Ironowl

Hey everyone. Patch just came out, let's hope scouting is fixed.

Anyone been able to test it yet? 

This actually comes at a good time for me because I'm coming up to a major rebuild of my squad in the summer, so I would actually like to be able to buy some players the scouts recommend. 

No. It has not been resolved

 

1 minuto atrás, Nick_CB disse:

No. It has not been resolved

 

Yeah, it feels very weird. @Zachary Whyte It's possible that this update didn't fix this 3 MONTH issue? Even we explaining and sending dozens of save files?

I know it's mentioned in the patch notes of sorts but dont forget this is a "DATA" update plus can be different with different saves. 

I asked a friend today after the update and it seems he's getting a reasonable amount but still a little less than the start of the game's cycle engine thing or whatever you call it. 

Not fixed for me as well. Tried a new save for a couple of hours today. But players are still disappearing from the 'In progress' tab without giving any notification of a scouting report. 

https://community.sigames.com/forums/topic/579205-football-manager-2024-official-feedback-thread/?do=findComment&comment=14341275

This is definitely still a issue, I have 13 focuses set up looking for 3.5 star potential after a month I don’t have a single recommendation and getting the message “appearing to struggle to find any recommended players may want to widen search parameters” 

Yeah, I knew that would happen just based by Zachary's responses about the issue.

I'm gone boys, won't keep playing as I've waited 3 months for a fix for such a simple thing but yeah.

I'm sorry for the rant but unfortunately this is too much. I wish we had a response on this since Zachary's clearly didn't know what the issue is and the update reflects on that.

Hello everyone, following extensive testing, we can confirm that the average the number of recommendations and near matches has increased following the tweaks we made in the Main Data Update.

We’re sorry that some of you are still not happy, to clear up some misconceptions. We made no changes to Scouting between Full Release and our first Major Update.

Another important thing to note is that when creating a Recruitment Focus you have to factor in the quality of your squad.

For example, if you are a top Premier League club with a very talented group of players, your scouts will obviously have a harder time recommending players that they feel will make a significant impact on your team.

So, say instead you are a mid-table team in League One, your scouts will have a wider selection of players to look at and recommend to you.

I hope this information was helpful, please do continue to leave your feedback, thank you.

1 hora atrás, Zachary Whyte disse:

Hello everyone, following extensive testing, we can confirm that the average the number of recommendations and near matches has increased following the tweaks we made in the Main Data Update.

We’re sorry that some of you are still not happy, to clear up some misconceptions. We made no changes to Scouting between Full Release and our first Major Update.

Another important thing to note is that when creating a Recruitment Focus you have to factor in the quality of your squad.

For example, if you are a top Premier League club with a very talented group of players, your scouts will obviously have a harder time recommending players that they feel will make a significant impact on your team.

So, say instead you are a mid-table team in League One, your scouts will have a wider selection of players to look at and recommend to you.

I hope this information was helpful, please do continue to leave your feedback, thank you.

And why doesn't "ongoing" work?

Scouts after not finding players that fit the squad, should continue looking for players and that doesn't happen.

I played around only for a little bit last night, but I think it is maybe working better. It's still not right though. 

I set up eight different focuses. Three of them came back with 20 recommendations after the first update-- this is good! Some of the others were less than that, and then I tried setting up three that were focusing on certain positions, and those came back with nothing, and getting the dreaded "appearing to struggle to find any recommended players; may want to widen search parameters". They were all set for the same CA and PA star indicators except for one which I was trying to wonderkid hunt for. 

I am also still getting the same issue where setting analysts to "auto" assigns the same analyst to all of the focuses, so I still have to manually do that. 

I have nearly 200 million in my transfer budget just waiting to be splurged because I legitimately haven't bought many players in my save since this issue has been a thing, but my scouts can barely find any players above 3.5 star. I don't need players in the same CA range as what I currently have, I need upgrades, but my scouts cannot find them. 

2 horas atrás, Zachary Whyte disse:

Hello everyone, following extensive testing, we can confirm that the average the number of recommendations and near matches has increased following the tweaks we made in the Main Data Update.

We’re sorry that some of you are still not happy, to clear up some misconceptions. We made no changes to Scouting between Full Release and our first Major Update.

Another important thing to note is that when creating a Recruitment Focus you have to factor in the quality of your squad.

For example, if you are a top Premier League club with a very talented group of players, your scouts will obviously have a harder time recommending players that they feel will make a significant impact on your team.

So, say instead you are a mid-table team in League One, your scouts will have a wider selection of players to look at and recommend to you.

I hope this information was helpful, please do continue to leave your feedback, thank you.

Hey there Zach.

Maybe the Ongoing priority is glitched then, because even with very wide parameters I can't find players, at all

Hello zach!

In my pov your post misses the point. IMO scouting should be about building up a team-specific database.

For example theres a player tearing up my division, there should be a report of some sort on him. "Yeah he's good because of x and y, however he doesn't want join us because he wants to play on a higher level".

As of now, I am one of them who doesn't get any fruitfull feedback from my scouts. I didn't play fm23 because of various reason but what I liked about fm22 was that I could see what teams had been scouted and how many times.

 

I'm rambling on but in general scouts should watch games constantly so that one would have team specific database as all the teams nowadays work around.

I'm hugely disappointed and I will retire this game once a release I'm waiting for is out. Sadly I can quit totally, this game have been with my my whole life but all these sweeping answers in this thread have pushed me over the edge.

 

Good riddance.

 

Players are still being stuck in the "In Progress" stage in my saves (new and old ones)

I haven't played the game in a month, but as I said earlier, I was having much more success finding players by sending my scouts to individual games. I could assign four scouts to scout Norway and not get many results; but if I individually sent sent four scouts to scout particular games in Norway, I would get a lot more results. 

I have not changed my scouting methods at all from the past; they just stopped finding players. I always used the "ongoing" focus, FWIW. Maybe the scouts just don't know where to go. Maybe they are spending too much time in the third division instead of the top division, haha. I don't know. But I found I had a lot more success by individually assigning them to watch certain games. It's really not a big deal because I only have four scouts, so it doesn't take up much time. But if I had a lot more scouts, I'm sure it would be more annoying.

At any rate, I'll fire up a test save this weekend and see if anything has changed for me. I appreciate the team looking into the issues.

4 hours ago, Zachary Whyte said:

Hello everyone, following extensive testing, we can confirm that the average the number of recommendations and near matches has increased following the tweaks we made in the Main Data Update.

We’re sorry that some of you are still not happy, to clear up some misconceptions. We made no changes to Scouting between Full Release and our first Major Update.

Another important thing to note is that when creating a Recruitment Focus you have to factor in the quality of your squad.

For example, if you are a top Premier League club with a very talented group of players, your scouts will obviously have a harder time recommending players that they feel will make a significant impact on your team.

So, say instead you are a mid-table team in League One, your scouts will have a wider selection of players to look at and recommend to you.

I hope this information was helpful, please do continue to leave your feedback, thank you.

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.

 

 

 

12 minutes ago, wazzaflow10 said:

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.

 

 

 

Well put. You enhanced what I was trying to say but in a much better way. 

Ok, I've messed around with a save. I've got four scouts with full knowledge of Norway scouting the top division, with four analysts as well. Scouting for any position for any tactic. Minimum 3-star PA, and I've flipped around on the minimum CA to be 1-star for two weeks, 1.5-stars for two weeks, and 2-stars for two weeks. Ongoing priority. My scouts have come up with exactly zero recommendations. In fact, it tells me that I've scouted 73 total players, but when I scroll through them not a single one of them are playing in the Norwegian league, which I know isn't accurate because there are currently three players in the "in progress" tab. The 73 players that are scouted are either in Denmark, or free agents (I assumed they are there due to previous knowledge of the scouts I hired). But not a single recommendation from my scouting focus, and not a single near match. I used to get plenty of results when I used this method in FM23, and when I transferred my FM23 save into FM24.

I've uploaded the save called FC Nordsjaelland - Norway Scouting to the cloud.

Edited March 2 by StatboySpurs