deantibbetts

Stockport?

retired_mgavlick

Stockport? </BLOCKQUOTE>

Close

retired_mekeesha

Stockport? </BLOCKQUOTE>

Close </BLOCKQUOTE>


You know when you sink a long pole through Wycombe, through the centre of the Earth to see where it comes out: you can see my house from there. Which means you must have secreted yourself on that mission to Mars.

retired_leslaydon1

Bugger, I live in Wycombe as well

retired_tpsmile

Great first post.

I like the idea.
This bit, particularly:


Would love to have that as part of a scout report.

retired_echater

The initial idea is a good one. I like the scouting options proposed

On the Fog of War issue, I agree with the basic idea, and that it would be good to (i) add more depth to the perception of player abilities - so they are not either unknown or perfectly known and (ii) add more differentiation between the relative abilities of scouts and more advantage to evaluating a player over time
On the other hand, I'd go about it in a different way.

I'm not convinced that a margin for error of eight points when judging certain attributes is likely for anyone, let alone a person who is paid to evaluate professional footballers. Even my mother could tell that Patrice Evra is quicker than Nicky Shorey after watching them play for a few minutes, and there are plenty of players I've never watched play that I can confidently predict will have certain characteristics higher than 12 or lower than 8 simply from the level they play at, general knowledge of how they have performed and what their fans think of them. (n.b there was a very good post a couple of years back... I think by Dave C... which outlined an approximate order in which the values of attributes should be able to be revealed by scouts)

Having particular players' abilities stored as variable perceived ranges is also unintuitive to look at and leaves unanswered the question of how the fog of war works for players who are unscouted but have moderately well known strengths and weaknesses (I don't think FM would work if most attributes for most players were hidden, but similarly it would be daft if your League 2 manager has perfect knowledge of the attributes of most foreign internationals, but only rough approximations of some attributes of the Conference star your scout has been watching for the past few weeks)


It would be much simpler to have attributes displayed as an absolute 1-5 star rating (a simple transformation of the 20 point scale, which FMM fans know is itself a transformation of a 100 point scale) for the many attributes of many players which are generally known but not scouted in detail. This corresponds to a four point range but is much clearer visually - you can tell at a glance whether a player who has most attributes represented as star ratings is possibly/definitely/not talented enough to step up to your level and where their well known strengths and weaknesses lie.
(It might even be made possible to have an optional view displaying the known 1-20 numbers as star ratings, with the use of colour and half/quarter stars to differentiate them from the approximate ratings)

It's consistent with existing FM interface conventions, and the five * ranges can be easily interpreted in text form for actual scout reports - (e.g. as a poor/below-average/average/good/world class finisher/tackler/passer/penalty-taker)

It would make scouting the lower divisions much more realistic - rather than taking the scattergun approach to finding little-known but established players to scout or take on trial you could actively look for ones with apparent speed/pace/tackling and then have them scouted over a few games to find out how more precisely how their attributes weigh up against the your squad. The ability to filter players based on approximate attributes (a player with a 5* attribute would show up in a search for 17 or greater in that attribute, but not in a search for 18 or greater). You'd find quick (5*), technical (4*) teenagers by filtering for pace/acceleration (&gt;=17) and technique (&gt;=13) - but wouldn't actually know how their pace compared with your own batch of youngsters until you'd sent someone to watch them or they'd become well known players in your region.
Better scouts would produce complete and exact evaluations more quickly, as well as continuing to judge CA better

Because the star-rating system would still allow some comparisons between one player and another, it would also be possible to hide a much larger proportion of player stats behind this thin fog-of-war (not to mention all the dreaded "greys") - making scouting more worthwhile


-

Scouts misrepresenting players viewable attributes on the basis of individual matches would be a major annoyance as well as requiring plenty of extra database space, especially if possibly erroneous assumptions by scouts weren't clearly marked from known values. Sometimes realism isn't such a great thing - since even the slowest player will play more than one season over the course of a real year, FM players will necessarily be more inclined towards snap judgements rather than evaluations of a player evolving over many

retired_halfshell69

Excellent post, i almost missed it (buried under the deluge of Some guy.. threads lol).

Scouting does seem far too precise at the moment, with the fog of war becoming little more than a light haze after a single scouting session.

Your suggestion for an intial report is particularly good. Similarly i like the idea of a degree of error when scouting players - i'm sure someone told ferguson that djemba-djemba was a quality player, so why don't we get similarly dubious scout reports? They're all far too precise at the moment, the only grey area we have is potential and hidden atts, which do make it a little harder finding a gem, but not hard enough.

Let's hope SI consider this.

retired_annbrigida

This is a simply brilliant idea. It may be time-consuming but the rewards be great. Great idea, do you have any more?

retired_mgavlick

Stockport? </BLOCKQUOTE>

Close </BLOCKQUOTE>


You know when you sink a long pole through Wycombe, through the centre of the Earth to see where it comes out: you can see my house from there. Which means you must have secreted yourself on that mission to Mars. </BLOCKQUOTE>

You ---&gt; Wycombe: 7231 km

Me ---&gt; Wycombe: 17260 km


Don't get to see them much as you might imagine



Thanks for the feedback. Hope it is something we can build upon.

@ arrogantio: I was actually only looking at the margin of error being so great for the opening report. Over time it would decrease and even the worst scout will be able to get a fairly accurate picture of a player. A really good scout would be able to unlock most stats to within a two point margin after a couple of matches. The poor scout would take 5-6. I do concede to your point that some attributes, such as pace, would be much easier to pin down than creativity or balance.