Scouting Knowledge issue

After seeing this Video - it makes Scouting in places where the League isn't loaded completely useless - which in turn makes Scouting completely useless - kinda sad.

Just came here to post this if someone hadn't done so already. I'd had my suspicions about this as I'd been tracking my own club's knoweldge in a spreadsheet and seeing little to no growth in any region between the start of a season and the end, but didn't have the testing to back it up.

This has massive negative implications to how the game works. Clubs with access to signing good scouts absolutely should be able to develop that knowledge over a season. I'm sure if I was paid travel expenses to follow Nigerian football for a year, I'd gain significantly more knowledge in real life than these scouts are in the game.

The argument could be that you need to sign local scouts/scouts with pre-existing knoweldge of these regions to understand a region. This is all well and good... but without the knowledge of the region already, you can't find the staff of that region to sign them. There's also no staff search filter by existing knowledge of a nation/region. That, and it still doesn't address the fact that if you send a professional scout overseas to learn about a league, he absolutely would learn about that league.

Playable, view only or not selected leagues shouldn't make a difference to the rate of knowledge buildup either. The knoweldge should be simulated, to capture the suitable percentage of players available from a region in your player search as generated by the game.

Edited February 21, 2022 by Jamaicaman90

It has been an issue for a long time, and also somthing that was raised in the forums for fm 21.

 

I guess is was ignored, knowledge can only be gained for loaded leagues, it a shame, because it ruins a lot,

 

But SI probably cant fix it, since they have ignored for some years now.

 

 

I noticed this myself and have done the following to try and improve the scouting. 

When creating an assignment, do NOT create it for longer than 6 months. After 6 months it stops finding players. I do it for 6 months and then restart it. Also make sure you search for ANY player and sort it via age (so no older than 19 for example) and scouting potential as excellent or star. 

Then go into the filtering part of the scouting centre. Make sure to select the updates part to minimum once per week outside of the transfer window and once every 2 days during the transfer window. Get this sent to your inbox. 

Every week you should start seeing new players coming through that your scouts find. My scouting knowledge was stuck on 45% for about 40 years. After doing the above it's moved to 47% in two months. 

3 hours ago, GreatMarinho said:

After seeing this Video - it makes Scouting in places where the League isn't loaded completely useless - which in turn makes Scouting completely useless - kinda sad.

Seems like newcomers to FM fail or don't know exactly where to find information about how things working inside the game. Ok.

For start, take a look here. Secondly, if you have an English Scouter to Scout in Nigeria (if you have load the Nigeria in db); you have to send him "Until Finished", not "Ongoing". Apart from that, here a brief guide about scouting.

 

It will be really helpful for SI Developers to see examples (save games) about this, rather than a video; because everyone use the scouting in different ways and combinations. 

vor 2 Stunden schrieb fc.cadoni:

Seems like newcomers to FM fail or don't know exactly where to find information about how things working inside the game. Ok.

For start, take a look here. Secondly, if you have an English Scouter to Scout in Nigeria (if you have load the Nigeria in db); you have to send him "Until Finished", not "Ongoing". Apart from that, here a brief guide about scouting.
 

 

I'm not quite sure if you see the problem here, but please show us what Zealand did wrong in the Video. ^^
It's about Region Scouting. 

6 minutes ago, GreatMarinho said:

I'm not quite sure if you see the problem here, but please show us what Zealand did wrong in the Video. ^^
It's about Region Scouting. 

I can see where the problem is, but in his first attempt did not load the nation & leagues which affect things.

In second video, did load the things (database & leagues); but came after two years of processing; where the game reset things (to free up memory, like the statistics from a league etc).

Also, scouters with zero knowledge of a nation need to be setup in "Until Finished" to gain knowledge and since they have gained knowledge need "Ongoing". So, ongoing means that the scouter gonna roam-travel more rather that watching games. "Ongoing" is not optional to gain any knowledge.

JPA/JPP isn't as well for finding the best, but about the quality of reports for X player.

Edited February 21, 2022 by fc.cadoni

1 hour ago, fc.cadoni said:

I can see where the problem is, but in his first attempt did not load the nation & leagues which affect things.

In second video, did load the things (database & leagues); but came after two years of processing; where the game reset things (to free up memory, like the statistics from a league etc).

Also, scouters with zero knowledge of a nation need to be setup in "Until Finished" to gain knowledge and since they have gained knowledge need "Ongoing". So, ongoing means that the scouter gonna roam-travel more rather that watching games. "Ongoing" is not optional to gain any knowledge.

JPA/JPP isn't as well for finding the best, but about the quality of reports for X player.

I don't think fault can implied to be user error when the game lets you set up dead-end scouting assignments that any reasonable person would believe would provide returns. If region scouting is useless, it should be fixed, or removed from the game. Top quality scouts being paid a wage and expenses, to gain little to no knowledge of their assigned region's countries and with no reports made is clearly a game issue rather than a user issue.

The Until Finished/Ongoing aspect at best is a problem with making clear to the user what those options represent, but realistically should not exist in these two formats if your explanation is true. 'Ongoing' should mean a continuous focus on maximising knowledge for a region, and adding to their reports new players within their remit (e.g. players transferring into a region, newgens, players becoming valid within the filter parameters such as contract status).

JPA/JPP your explanation seems correct to me, but doesn't explain the wider issue being discussed here.

Overall, the percentage rating of scout knowledge should be independent of whether or not a league is loaded. The percentage should increase over time without being linked to specific games, and should impact what percentage of players the scout (and therefore your club) are aware of to appear in player search, regardless of if they have ben scouted further or have no reports to their name whatsoever.

This isn't a dig against you personally, and I acknowledge that a lot of what you've said in this thread is based on evidence. However, I can't agree that newcomers (and indeed more exerpeicned players) fail to find this information. The game is at times obtuse by design, which is a good thing for realism rather than being an exercise in min/maxing, but this issue makes no sense either in a gaming context or a real life representation context. It's either a bug, or otherwise a poor design decision that needs to be re-evaluated.

Perhaps in the scouting assignment options, an option should be included to make the scouts focus on gaining area knowledge primarily or obtaining player reports primarily, rather than (if you're correct) this confusion about 'Until Finished' vs 'Ongoing'. If there is a design choice at play to stop players absolutely maximising scouting returns, this would be a way of making the player make weighted decisions.

Edited February 21, 2022 by Jamaicaman90
Added final paragraph

3 minutes ago, Jamaicaman90 said:

I don't think fault can implied to be user error when the game lets you set up dead-end scouting assignments that any reasonable person would believe would provide returns. If region scouting is useless, it should be fixed, or removed from the game. Top quality scouts being paid a wage and expenses, to gain little to no knowledge of their assigned region's countries and with no reports made is clearly a game issue rather than a user issue.

The Until Finished/Ongoing aspect at best is a problem with making clear to the user what those options represent, but realistically should not exist in these two formats if your explanation is true. 'Ongoing' should mean a continuous focus on maximising knowledge for a region, and adding to their reports new players within their remit (e.g. players transferring into a region, newgens, players becoming valid within the filter parameters such as contract status).

JPA/JPP your explanation seems correct to me, but doesn't explain the wider issue being discussed here.

Overall, the percentage rating of scout knowledge should be independent of whether or not a league is loaded. The percentage should increase over time without being linked to specific games, and should impact what percentage of players the scout (and therefore your club) are aware of to appear in player search, regardless of if they have ben scouted further or have no reports to their name whatsoever.

This isn't a dig against you personally, and I acknowledge that a lot of what you've said in this thread is based on evidence. However, I can't agree that newcomers (and indeed more exerpeicned players) fail to find this information. The game is at times obtuse by design, which is a good thing for realism rather than being an exercise in min/maxing, but this issue makes no sense either in a gaming context or a real life representation context. It's either a bug, or otherwise a poor design decision that needs to be re-evaluated.

Perhaps in the scouting assignment options, an option should be included to make the scouts focus on gaining area knowledge primarily or obtaining player reports primarily, rather than (if you're correct) this confusion about 'Until Finished' vs 'Ongoing'. If there is a design choice at play to stop players absolutely maximising scouting returns, this would be a way of making the player make weighted decisions.

You have to understand how the scouting works, actually; rather than saying is clearly a game issue. Anyway,

Scouting Region: You send that scouter when has already knowledge in that region (all nations which include that region, the bigger the more hard). Region is a huge land and send him as "Ongoing" makes the scouters to ping-pong traveling; rather than scouting. The amount of games you set the scouter to watch is extreme high. Plus we have the memory reset, so; it makes perfectly sense to me that a scouter having hard time to produce any report from a generic region. What the best method for Scouting Region?

1. Send the scouter to gain knowledge for A,B,C nations (in the region which interested to scout later) which don't have knowledge. Duration: 1 year or 6 months or Until Finished. When that scouter gain 100% knowledge; then go to other nation and so on.

2. When the scouter knows the region, send him as ongoing to maintain that knowledge.

So, for me it's more user "error" (more like a wrong assumption how a thing works). I had similar results as Zealand before with the game (following "guides"), until tested things myself; which in most cases what I have followed is completely wrong from how actually working.

There is no point for SI to dictate of how to scout, but it can be more clear the manual; agree with that.

Scouting Region is not broken, need a different approach and understanding.

25 minutes ago, fc.cadoni said:

...

Scouting Region: You send that scouter when has already knowledge in that region (all nations which include that region, the bigger the more hard). Region is a huge land and send him as "Ongoing" makes the scouters to ping-pong traveling; rather than scouting. The amount of games you set the scouter to watch is extreme high. Plus we have the memory reset, so; it makes perfectly sense to me that a scouter having hard time to produce any report from a generic region. What the best method for Scouting Region?

...

I've filtered down your response to this section, as it's the only part I take issue with. The rest would all be fine, if the context of this specific paragraph wasn't problematic.

The game makes no effort to explain this to the player, and that's assuming you're actually correct - you might well be, but equally you might be incorrect due to the above-mentioned opacity of how the game functions.

So let's say that the region is so big that the scout moves around too much to gain any real insight into any one nation. Surely they should still be building a few percentage points, even if in the single digits, to represent that they have actually visited that region?

And surely even without building much percentage knowledge of regions, they should still be gathering reports of players they see out on the random matches they watch?

Also, the game makes it incredibly difficult for you to know what countries are contained within a region without looking at external sources. If you click on a region from the 'Knowledge' tab, you get a highlighted map - that's not of much use without either cross referencing another map yourself or just searching for a list.

I understand a design decision to limit the effectiveness of regional scouting to increase game difficulty and realism, I really do. On that general point, I agree it makes sense. What will never make sense to me is how members of staff on thousands of pounds a week can gain effectively no knowledge and produce no player reports and the game does nothing to educate you on the fact that it is happening and what you can do to change it. It's poor UI and completely unrealistic to real life, because if you paid me let's say £5,000 a week to scout all of French, Spanish, Portuguese and Andorran football I promise you that I'd do a better job of it than supposed professional scouts in the game, simply by being able to tell you a brief overview of the best players at most of the top two tiers of clubs with their general strengths and weaknesses after a year. As it stands, the scouts won't even give you that basic level of being able to name a couple of up-and-comers from each nation - that's indefensible from both a gameplay and simulation perspective.

Your solution might work, but it's incredibly unintuitive. So I still contest that scouting regions is broken, but it's partially by not working as it should and mainly by failing to convey important, basic information to the player.

And again, just in case my tone comes across as confrontational, I'll reiterate that I'm only arguing a counterpoint and have full respect for you and your input and I'll certainly be trying out some of your tips. I just don't think this is how the scouting system should work going forwards. 👌

Edited February 21, 2022 by Jamaicaman90

1 hour ago, fc.cadoni said:

You have to understand how the scouting works, actually; rather than saying is clearly a game issue. Anyway,

Scouting Region: You send that scouter when has already knowledge in that region (all nations which include that region, the bigger the more hard). Region is a huge land and send him as "Ongoing" makes the scouters to ping-pong traveling; rather than scouting. The amount of games you set the scouter to watch is extreme high. Plus we have the memory reset, so; it makes perfectly sense to me that a scouter having hard time to produce any report from a generic region. What the best method for Scouting Region?

1. Send the scouter to gain knowledge for A,B,C nations (in the region which interested to scout later) which don't have knowledge. Duration: 1 year or 6 months or Until Finished. When that scouter gain 100% knowledge; then go to other nation and so on.

2. When the scouter knows the region, send him as ongoing to maintain that knowledge.

So, for me it's more user "error" (more like a wrong assumption how a thing works). I had similar results as Zealand before with the game (following "guides"), until tested things myself; which in most cases what I have followed is completely wrong from how actually working.

There is no point for SI to dictate of how to scout, but it can be more clear the manual; agree with that.

Scouting Region is not broken, need a different approach and understanding.

Are you certain that if you send a scout to a region "Until finished" they will have 100% knowledge of the region within 2 years? While learning the language in the process, considering an adaptibility of >15.

While this may seem to be a valid discussion, it isn't a bug report. The devs need gamesaves for them to respond to. Now I for one agree that obfuscating information doesn't help new users. The distinction between ongoing and finished for scouting assignments seems stupid. Any user would think that both should lead to increased scouting knowledge. 

However, for leagues to generate realistic transfer activity and newgen distribution, these need to be playable. That's been the case for many years now.  I would recommend that if anyone wants attention to be drawn to this, or if they are hoping developers respond then please provide game saves, even if its for a perceived bug or a FR.

Thank you.

There are a lot of considerations when it comes to scouting. Ideally we need people to be sharing saves at each instance an issue happens. At a broad level, is scouting knowledge not going up over a prolonged period of time an issue - yes. I feel like as players of the game you will all have your own thoughts on what exactly scouting knowledge encompasses - I certainly do - but it would need a more informed individual about this area at SI to say exactly what it encompasses. It doesn't benefit the discussion for me to offer up hypotheticals. 

As @Rashidi mentions, save games are essential here. There's been mention of different issues that seem to contribute to this overall and narrowing down where people are encountering particular problems can only ever be a positive. 

It's well worth reminding that some of the points being made do kind of fall under feedback as well. If you're finding something with the scouting system feels a bit "meh" to you or unintuitive or how you see a new player could struggle, feel free to make some posts in the feedback thread over in GD. Getting things seen by the right eyes always helps and those who collate feedback to pass onto devs are different from QA who look into issues in this section.

Just to provide some info on this, as Michael has said above, it's often really useful when providing information on issues in game, to try and provide save game examples if possible. That allows our QA team to step through issues much faster than having to reproduce them directly themselves. Details on how to provide saves can be found here - https://community.sigames.com/bugtracker/instructions-and-notes/how-to-upload-files-to-us-r98/ - Remember to come back and let us know any files names if you do. 

Looking at the general theme of the video above, the issue in relation to scouting knowledge is an issue we're already aware of, having been flagged on these forums previously and is in our internal bugs database. Due to the nature of software development, every issue raised is assigned a priority based on the number of players who would encounter it and how much affect it would have in game. These are then addressed depending on the available developer resource, the complexity of the issue and potential knock-ons elsewhere. This specific issue when logged was deemed a medium/low priority issue when first logged. Whilst scouting knowledge is useful, it really is secondary to the scouting packages. If you acquired the world scouting package for example, that would provide you more visibility than scouts gaining knowledge on a specific nation or region. 

In relation to some of the other points raised specifically in this thread:

21 hours ago, GreatMarinho said:

After seeing this Video - it makes Scouting in places where the League isn't loaded completely useless - which in turn makes Scouting completely useless - kinda sad.

Whilst as said above, the scouting packages are more important than the knowledge, only when scouting a nation will specific players and their abilities be unearthed fully. So it's far from useless and still the best gameplay method of finding high quality players.

21 hours ago, Jamaicaman90 said:

The argument could be that you need to sign local scouts/scouts with pre-existing knowledge of these regions to understand a region. This is all well and good... but without the knowledge of the region already, you can't find the staff of that region to sign them. There's also no staff search filter by existing knowledge of a nation/region.

You don't need the regional knowledge to find the staff and you can filter by existing knowledge as shown below:

As always in terms of raising issues, the best place to do so is via these forums as it's actively monitored by both our QA and Community and Customer Experience teams, making sure anything new raised within the community is logged and prioritised for the development team to investigate further. 

Thanks. 

Took a new job, in Brazil with FLU. World Knowledge was 5%, now 9% within a month.

Here an example of Uruguay Scouter, Until Finished in Uruguay (no other filters). Uruguay is not loaded in my save. Within a month, 3 reports.

Here an example of Brazilian, Argentinian, Colombian Scouters, Until Finished in Brazil, Argentina, Colombia (no other filters). Brazil is loaded in my save. Within a month.

How it looks those reports

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