Poor Scouting? Maybe This Will Help.

[Gash Flordon]

So you have a highly rated scout, a good team and an excellent manager rating and yet you only pull in players rated in the 50s or lower? You may be looking at a bug in the game, my friend.

I was in my 4th manager mode season with Montpellier and my team had a 4 star rating. My manager rating was 7, and my level 5 scout was returning players rated in the upper 60s and lower 70s--not too shabby. I was going to upgrade my scout, but first I wanted to make sure I would actually get more for my money, so I decided to do some testing first. I saved my manager mode, upgraded my scout to 7 and quick-simmed a few weeks until the players started rolling in. I was surprised to see that they were all rated in the middle to lower 50s. I sent the scout to other areas looking at different positions--once again, poor players. I reloaded the manager mode and quick-simmed, but this time without upgrading my level 5 scout. The players he returned were rated in the upper 60s and lower 70s. As it turned out, any upgrade I made past 5 for my scout caused the game to return far worse players, and this effect continued even when I quick-simmed into and through a good chunk of the next season. Obviously I didn't upgrade my scout when I returned to my normal playing.

My version of the game is PS2, so this bug may not be present in the other platform versions. Also, I don't know if this effect would occur for the top-notch teams with already highly-rated scouts since I've never played with any of them. However, if you typically take a lesser team in the manager mode and have had problems scouting, it would be wise to not upgrade your scout past 5 without first doing a little testing.

[SteveP1tts]

My own experience of this is that it isn't totally consistent, and I wonder whether there is some external factor that plays into the equation. I did suffer similar problems when I upgraded my scout to level 7, towards the end of my third season with Wycombe Wanderers, but over time (I've now finished five seasons) they have started to find much better players (in the 60s, with projected growth into the 70s and beyond, unlike the 40s and 50s with little or no growth that I was getting for a while). I may even pluck up courage and spend some money on upgrading the scout above level 7 now that they've improved

[lakeyjordan]

maybe it could just be based on the results sometimes there good and sometimes there bad

[thuda1991]

i don't think so... my scout gives mixed restults... class players (Meshkov, Awere, Canning and a few others) and lalalala players... he's lvl 10 and has always been lvl 10...

[lakeyjordan]

they all get mixed results, thats my point!

[thuda1991]

ok... that's actually realistic...

[Gash Flordon]

The problem isn't that I was getting mixed results, it's that I experienced a very sharp drop-off in the average overall ratings of the scouted players after upgrading my scout past level 5. This drop-off did not occur when I reloaded the game and kept my scout at the same level. Additionally, the drop-off in quality persisted through an entire season and a half of quick-simming. I didn't keep simming after that point, so SteveP1tts could very well be correct in stating that the scouting will eventually come back around and be even better. Since the scout doesn't bring back very good players in the earlier seasons of the manager mode (when the manager prestige level and, depending on the quality of your squad, the team's star rating is lower), I'm just going to upgrade my scout very high early on and let the "lowering" effect I've encountered play itself out over the period of time when I don't get good players anyway.

[TattonG4]

Does your teams rating have a lot to do with the quality of players too?

I have a level 4 scout and a two star team, and all I get is players from 30-35. When I was in another manager mode, i would start with division 2 teams (usually 3-3 1/2 stars)from various countries, and they would have level 2 or 3 scouts, that would bring in players that were in the 50s-60s.

[lakeyjordan]

I have a 1.5 star team and the scout gets back to me with high 40's and high 50's

[rooney da best]

i think the statment about mixed results is very accurate
i have a level 9 scout and i used to get poor 60s and 50s but resently i have scouted 3 players that are all projected to high 80s and low 90s.
since these three players i have gone back down to 50s and 60s with no growth so it seems that it balences itself out in the end. i have another career with another team and the scouting follows this trend aswell so i thing it is verry random and works out fairly.

[Akaia0]

I have a 5* team, lvl. 10 Prestige and lvl. 10 Scout, and I usually get lalalala results. I've had 4 players I think who're decent, and around 70-80 who're pathetic.

[SteveP1tts]

Originally Posted by TattonG4

Does your teams rating have a lot to do with the quality of players too?

Indirectly, perhaps. This is another one of those areas where only the development team could accurately tell us how things work, but my interpretation of the entries in CAREER.INI is that there is a percentage chance of a 'find' after each game, which is boosted somewhat by sending the scout on a deeper search. The default value would seem to be a 15% chance, and the duration then adds 10% (for a good scout) or 20% (for a deep search), although whether those are added to the percentage chance of finding, or some other factor, is not apparent. The parameters suggest that once you have a find there is a percentage chance that this player will be worse than the other players on your team, and a percentage chance that they will be better, and that those percentages vary according to the staff level of the scout.

If my interpretation is correct then what we are seeing may well simply be the effect of the randomness, because the difference between a level 5 and level 7 scout is fairly small (the level 5 has a 12% chance of finding a higher rated player, as against 17% for level 7, and a 16% chance of finding somebody worse, as against 11% for level 7). Simple maths tells you that there is therefore a greater than 70% chance of finding a player no better than those you already have. We also have no idea whether or not the over/under is based on the scouted player's current rating or their projected peak (or some value in between), whether the players on your team that the ratings are compared against includes the youth academy or players that you've loaned out because they need more time to develop, nor whether there are other factors involved.

[Gash Flordon]

First of all, I should emphasize that my version of the game is for the Playstation 2. The effect I'm describing may differ or not occur at all depending on the platform version. Second, I don't see much randomness in my scouting. For example, let's say I save the game progress before I send my scout out (in this case on a deep search for any player in the rest of europe). I quick-sim many weeks and re-send out my scout until about 5 players have been returned. When, I reload the game and repeat the process keeping the scout at the same level, I will find those same 5 players in the same order (sometimes one of the players will be different, but this is rare). A different region will bring a different batch of players, but they will be the same even after reloading and re-simming. So basically I know what I'm going to get ahead of time If I "save and sim" first.

Moving on, then...

I send my level 5 scout out over the course of a couple of seasons and get players ranging from 65-75. There might be a 50s rated player thrown in once in a while and some regions are better than others, but overall the quality is good.

I reload the game and upgrade my scout to level 6 or 7. I send him out to the same places as before on the same type of searches but the range is now consistently 50-55. I will not get a single higher rated player even if I quick-sim a couple of seasons.

I reload the game once again and upgrade my scout to level 10. Now I'm getting players in the 40-50 range. Consistently. For several seasons. Not one high-rated player. Zippo. Nada. I can just imagine my new, expensive scout out there in South America spending my money on women and booze before realizing "Hey, I better do some actual scouting while I'm here!" and then sending off a report on some random guy he found lying drunk in a gutter (who, needless to say, will not be roaming up and down the wing for me the next week against ManU).

The effect I experience on my version of the game is so obvious and so profound that it is almost certainly a bug. God knows my game is full of them. Hopefully you folks out there with a different platform version or a PS2 version that isn't crappy don't have this problem, but if you do, you may be in the same boat as me.

[SteveP1tts]

Originally Posted by Gash Flordon

The effect I experience on my version of the game is so obvious and so profound that it is almost certainly a bug

It might be a bug or it might be a deliberate feature (for example, some relationship between your manager prestige and your scout level, or the difference between your scouting staff and the levels of the other departments) but it is certainly annoying.

[AlchemyForever]

At the moment I'm at Man Utd and the scout is already at Level 10 and if I scout the Americas for Fowards I get players 65-75. Same results with France, Spain, Italy, even England.

[Akaia0]

Ok, so has anyone actually scouted anyone with an OVR or 80 or higher?
I for one never have

[lakeyjordan]

i havent but i have come out with good results, well not very good but still, the first scout in the first season with cov came back with a 69, 54. not bad for starters hey?

[Hofflenosh]

I think you really need to remember is there are alot of defined players when you're scouting. Not all of them are going to be of the class that will match your team. Just try not to overscout certain areas or all the major talent will be gone, and all you'll be doing is dredging the bottom (if you get my meaning) . There are lots of countries to pick from so switch around.

[lakeyjordan]

does the bigger the contry mean the more results? or is it just based completely on the depth of the search?