Option to turn off the CA and PA star ratings

[pdjacks]

Please forgive me if I'm missing this and the possibility is already there.

It'd be really nice to be able to turn off the star rating system that shows you a player's current and potential abilities. I used to love how this wasn't in the game and that you as a player had to work out for yourself how good your players were based on their match performances, and by monitoring their changes to attributes over the season. I feel like the game is presently making identification of the best players all too easy for us now by just giving us these ratings in the form of star ratings within coach and scout reports. 

I'm aware that I could just never scout a player, and never ask for a coach report, but I do think it was/is a nice thing to get your staff member's opinions on different players, I just wish it was a text based and subjective opinion rather than an absolute rating that for makes it too easy to select the best player for each position/match and to always find a new player that is going to be better than the existing players in your team. I don't feel like I'm needing to make any effort to figure out these things, I'm just reading reports and then grinding. To which I'd like to have the possibility to turn the whole star system off from within the main game settings somehow and see if I can still spot the best players in the game for myself by inference of their match performance and by actually watching what they do during matches.

I guess it'd be what you'd nowadays call 'ironman mode' 

[Maaka]

It's not possible to "turn off" the stars as of now, if I'm not mistaken, but you could (easily) edit the color of the stars for the skin to show nothing but black (so you can't tell what the rating is), or there are custom skins that can do this for you (ask in the skinning forums).
But also remember that the stars are not necessarily equivalent to the CA/PA, it's the scout's (or coach's or AM's) perception of the players potential and ability (so they can be wrong), with regards to your current squad (so that's an important factor as well), meaning that a player with a three star (***) potential isn't necessarily rubbish, he might be a great player.

[Brentford Alan]

I wouldn't read too much into them, they have a fair degree of inaccuracy and are based on lots of factors include coach and scouts opinions iirc. Perhaps view them as additional data to help with decision making but I would not use them as an exclusive guide to a players current or potential abilities. I totally ignore them!

[pdjacks]

On 16/11/2017 at 07:31, Maaka said:

It's not possible to "turn off" the stars as of now, if I'm not mistaken, but you could (easily) edit the color of the stars for the skin to show nothing but black (so you can't tell what the rating is), or there are custom skins that can do this for you (ask in the skinning forums).
But also remember that the stars are not necessarily equivalent to the CA/PA, it's the scout's (or coach's or AM's) perception of the players potential and ability (so they can be wrong), with regards to your current squad (so that's an important factor as well), meaning that a player with a three star (***) potential isn't necessarily rubbish, he might be a great player.

Can the scouts/coaches still be wrong once they have 20 ratings for judging player ability and judging player potential?

Thanks for the advice about skins, I'll give that a try, though I think the players would still be ranked in order of ability when you look at a particular position wouldn't they?

I know that you can get some variation from scout/coach ratings, but taken as an average (and especially at a top club where you have a plethora of scouts) I do feel that they give me far too much information, and leave too little for me to do as the player. I like the idea of a scout gradually revealing a player's stats and attributes, to that end I like how scouting works in the game now, but I want the judgement of how good a player is to be my own, not something that is just given to me without me needing to do any work.

In older versions of FM the part of the game that I most enjoyed was those decision you had to make over whether player A or player B was the better choice to play, now it just feels too easy to go with the player that has the higher rating.

[Maaka]

2 hours ago, pdjacks said:

Can the scouts/coaches still be wrong once they have 20 ratings for judging player ability and judging player potential?

Yes, they can.

[santy001]

I have underestimated how wrong staff with high judging potential can be on FM2017, I've had some really highly rated youngsters by my staff come through that I've given a couple of years to and they aren't improving and I've realised they were a lot more limited than the staff member still thinks.

I would say that perhaps the scope of doubt (black star) needs to be more than just a flat star, maybe half (perhaps it is and I haven't seen it) or perhaps even more. So sometimes there may be something such as "I don't think this player has much but potential, but because of X or Y maybe he does" 

The star ratings are useful though and should stay because its an "at a glance" metric. What would probably help is a bit better presentation. Perhaps a bit of "In my opinion, compared to the current squad he is a X star player and I'd rate him just ahead of player Y, and just behind player Z. Potentially he could be better than player A but unlikely to surpass player B"

I think there also needs to be a bit more context for when you reach the top of the game as well. When you're a side who's winning the league year in year out, and you've got great players 1.5-2 star players now should really be your go-to guys for squad rotation slots if you're after a cheap back-up. The current scout reports & star rating system dissuade you from signing these because normally they aren't players you'd be looking at when on the up.

[Neil Brock]

Reviewed so locked.