Scouting has been heavily reworked, with an emphasis on allowing more precise assignments and providing better feedback.
Assignment of Scouts:
Scouting assignments are now set via a new screen, opened via the right-click menu on a scout's name:
The scout's target can be set to a region, league, specific team, or the user's shortlist. Scouts can also be given short assignments to watch an individual player from the player's right-click menu.
The basic assignment can then be further filtered by in a number of ways: age, position, eligibility for a specific draft, whether his rights are available in the user's team's league, ability and talent ranges (useful, for example, if you want to scout a better league for its weaker players). The methodology of the search can also be specified: looking for current ability vs. potential, and developing accurate reports on the best players available by scouting them repeatedly (quality) or doing minimal evaluations on a larger number of players, trying to avoid looking at the same guy twice (quantity).
Scouts can "watch" a certain numbers of players in a week. The exact number depends on a few different factors, like the scout's location and the team's finance, but will generally be in the range of 1-20 players per week.
Scouting Levels:
The scouting level is indicated for each player as a lower-case letter beside the talent/future talent numbers, e.g. a player scouted 3 times with a talent of 5.0 and a future talent of 9.0 has those numbers displayed as 5.0b and 9.0b. Scouting levels affect the accuracy and amount of information displayed for a player:
e: unscouted, only talent/future talent displayed for player with no reduction in the inherent error (each player has a number to indicate how much he is over/underrated by default)
d: scouted, attributes displayed, error reduced slightly by an amount dependent on the scout's skill
c: scouted twice, error reduced moderately
b: scouted three times, error reduced significantly
a: scouted four times, error reduced heavily, maximum level
The level has to be be maintained: players will eventually regress to the next lowest level, the chance of a regression getting increasingly larger as they go unscouted.
Who Gets Scouted:
The scout will start at the highest-rated player (by ability or potential, depending on which priority is set) in the target group that meets all the priority criteria. If the scout's ability would allow him to look at more players than actually meet his priority list criteria in his target, he'll look at every other player in the target, starting with the best-rated ones and working his way down the list. So, for example, if he can scout 10 players a week and you send him to watch a team but include criteria that only 5 players on the team fit, he'll also scout the five best players on the team that don't meet that criteria. If there still aren't enough players to scout, the excess 'speed' is wasted.
Reports:
Scouts will report back weekly, listing exactly which players they looked at. The "Respond to Message" button allows the scout to be reassigned. Feedback from the testers on the reporting features so far is mixed; we're looking at ways to make it a little more configurable and less spammy.