Autoscouting is Still Broken

[VeronicatheCD]

I tested it once again by having my scouts seek out prospects all season.  They spent the entire season simply verifying what type of player each player was: sniper, power forward, playmaker, etc; I had maybe 10 players that got any sort of potential revealed and all but one in the first round of picks was listed as UNKNOWN potential.  When you clicked on it, none seemed to show any knowledge of their strengths, weaknesses, personalities, or skills - we just made damn sure to know the player type.

This is a broken system and one that needs fixing and with an error like this that has been around a few years, it should be fixed in a patch as it was not fixed after more than one opportunity between games.

Now, I can still use the individual scouts well if I sink a long time into doing the highly repetitive task of telling the scout to seek out potential of each player in rank order down the list until they hit the part of the year I want them to stop.  The problem with that is that it takes a long time and is just doing the same action over and over and over, trying to remember where  you stopped if you have more than one scout looking at a league.

This system is in dire need of being able to give complex directions to scouts.  For example, I should be able to tell scouts to work as a team (within the one league they're scouting) and find the potential of the top 220 draft picks in that league, then move on to find their skills or weaknesses or go clarify on the best players who have a high margin of error.  Or I should be able to tell a single scout to scout everyone in DEL for potential and then move on to find potential of people in Extraliga.  My scouts should be finding out what I need to know in order to draft appropriately when set on their own, not verify one stat that we already get a decent idea of when just looking at potential.

[Beauts90]

This times a 1000. Scouting is such a tedious task that needs to be changed and simplified. In my opinion there is too much useless information that the scouting report gives and manually getting what you want is such a chore. For example, I go out of my way to not completely uncover potential as I feel it adds realism and a challenge to drafting, but in order to do that I have to manually assign all my scouts 4 or 5 times each year.

At the very least they need to let us assign our scouts for the entire year all at once, so saying scout this first, then this, and so on.

[VeronicatheCD]

And oddly - I found a work around for this.  In my recent attempt to create a league prime for a new team in Franchise Mode, I forgot to turn off complete autoscouting, whose description suggests that you have no control over your scouts and they'll just be moved wherever the computer wants them to be.  However, after advancing a day to get have the scouts where they all needed to be before I assigned them, the computer did competently assign scouts - specifically in the manner you would expect them to do when you "find prospects."  So, it isn't that autoscouting is completely broken but that options are just extremely poorly explained and the find prospects option is broken. 

[IrishOwl]

I like the way scouting is done, in general, but I agree. You should be able to tell your scouts to do thing in order. Like I want one guy scouted in the USA East, scout him three times... Don't make me stop the sim every three days (2 seconds) to tell the scout to scout again).

Maybe set some type of function - Scout Defensemen with Pinch/Cycle Top 6 D or Higher, in your region type thing. Or make it so you can set up monthly scouting.

[CheapTent84]

Only way I found to make the whole thing less tedious is to break it down into a couple segments. After a couple seasons and getting a A+ scouts in all the areas of prospects, Late Sept to Dec is find prospects. This finds the gems and bust. Then just down the whole list from Dec-March for skills. Usually get the top 20-25 players. After that, Potential all the way to the draft.

Basically the only way I've been able to get through it. Be nice to have a select all feature or a feature to eliminate players that you can see are not worth scouting. But yeah its a second job.

[IrishOwl]

The first 3 season scouting us rough, but once you get all B scouts, you can set Potential Comparison Searches.

The key thing is to get 3 scouts in OHL, WHL, And QJMHL, 2 Scouts for USA Central, with 1 who can do East and 1 who can do West, then transfer them back and forth, 2 Scouts in LIIGA, SHL, and Russia. That leaves 2 scouts for Europe (who can help some place else) and 1 pro scout (to track down leads on better line fits.)

What I tend to do is to Scan Pot/Comp for all ares as long as I can. Send the pro scout to look at the talent I want. Rinse and repeat until everyone is scouted.

Also, write down your coaches Line Schemes. Don't scout players who don't fit the schemes.

Pinch/Cycle, Pinch/Balanced, Balanaced/Balanced : Don't Scout Elitr or Top 4 D with Shoot, you'll end up trading them.

Got line 1 shoot, and 2,3&4 are all cycle? Don't scout any player with shoot that isn't top 6 or better. Same goes for dump.

Its all about being tactical. Its IMO the best part of Franchise. Build the best team, scout the best players, hope to win the cup. The sim doesn't make any sense and playing each game yourself... well come on you're better then the computer.

[CainR90]

• So far my entire franchise mode experience feels broken. Finally finished a season and made it to Draft day, and my scouts can only tell me how many games they scouted a player. Scouted for 46 games, ZERO information! Strength and weakness? Blank. Potential? Blank. Just a date for when they submitted the report 🤬

[VeronicatheCD]

I thought I had already posted this here - but I found out that if you have autoscouting on, and assign them to the league but don't tell them how long to scout for prospects - not taking that logical step - they will do a decent job of scouting most of the time.  If you tell them to scout prospects you are going to learn nothing - but if  you do nothing they will scout competently.  It is completely counterintuitive and it is clear that the scout prospects feature is still broken.

I think all of us came to the same conclusion here: that we should use that generic option rather than the more fine-tuned scouting or doing nothing to get good information.  It is what is logical.  However, that is not what is accurate at all.  If we do nothing but assign them to the league we get some decent scouting.

[davoz28caboose]

All I see are engineers. Aren't teammates supposed to show up here too? I still don't see one to recruit...