AI Scouting is still a mess

[ike121212]

First off, I have to admit that I'm angry to hear there's only 1 more patch and scouting is still in it's current condition. It feels like it's half implemented. The screens are poor and confusing. The regions, areas, and assignments are awkward. OOTP has evolved over the years, away from such a granular system. I wish they learned from this. The worst problem though, is that the AI is just so bad at it.

I started a new game with the current patch, to see if anything has improved. I put the AI in control of everything on my team, except drafting.

Year 1:
8 5 star prospects. 6 are A scouted. 1 is B. 1 is E, from the QMJHL. Disappointing, the AI is still terrible with this region. It doesn't matter how many scouts you hire based in this region.

Year 2:
37 5 star prospects. 5 A. 2 B. 30E. Most of these are from the Q or second rate European leagues. It's not fun to play like this.

If my scouting director identifies someone as a 5 star prospect, they should be scouted. I think it's common sense.

[Hadehariast]

Originally Posted by ike121212

First off, I have to admit that I'm angry to hear there's only 1 more patch and scouting is still in it's current condition. It feels like it's half implemented. The screens are poor and confusing. The regions, areas, and assignments are awkward. OOTP has evolved over the years, away from such a granular system. I wish they learned from this. The worst problem though, is that the AI is just so bad at it.

I started a new game with the current patch, to see if anything has improved. I put the AI in control of everything on my team, except drafting.

Year 1:
8 5 star prospects. 6 are A scouted. 1 is B. 1 is E, from the QMJHL. Disappointing, the AI is still terrible with this region. It doesn't matter how many scouts you hire based in this region.

Year 2:
37 5 star prospects. 5 A. 2 B. 30E. Most of these are from the Q or second rate European leagues. It's not fun to play like this.

If my scouting director identifies someone as a 5 star prospect, they should be scouted. I think it's common sense.

I disagree with a lot of your opinions, but there are several problems with scouting that do need to be addressed to improve the scouting system-- both for human users and the AI.

I control all of my scouting manually. I don't think there is anything confusing about the scouting screens. The only thing counter-intuitive about them is that you can't click on a scout's profile and assign them a new assignment from within their profile. The smaller window for assigning a scout a task is remarkably simple and lays out almost every option you could ever want, and it's superior to any other sports management sim that I've played in that regard.

Granularity is a good thing. OOTP's scouting model is awful because you have such limited control over it. You hire a scouting director, allocate your budget to different areas, and *POOF*-- magic happens! New players are located and brought into your international complex, every player in the majors and minors has a somewhat accurate scouting report already drawn up for hitting, pitching, and fielding, and you even have the BNN report to give you an immediate insight into the player's mental ratings. It's the laziest scouting model I've encountered since the early Baseball Mogul games, where you just poured money into scouting and got more accurate scouting reports on every player.

Football Manager, the most successful sports management sim franchise in the world, gives you a great deal of granularity for scouting, and you get rewarded for taking full advantage of the ability to scout overlooked corners of Europe and South America for new talent. FHM should be the same-- you should be rewarded for taking the time to set up your scouting network properly and doing a thorough job. If you want to let the AI take control of it, you shouldn't expect results on par with what a human can accomplish. However, I think that all of the players on your initial 'Top 30' list for the entry draft should be automatically assigned for scouting at the outset of the game. However, I think that any fluctuations to the list, and any loss of scouting knowledge from an A to a B, and the scouting of any players not in the Top 30, should be the user's responsibility to scout for. Remove any sort of user responsibility and you're left with "Finish Today Simulator 2015" as you just simulate games, day after day. Even just the automatic scouting of that initial Top 30 would have reduced your thirty 5* 'E' players down to almost none, as most of those players would have been revealed to have been 4.0* or 4.5* players.

Now, to the things I agree with you on: the game itself has bugs that prevent both human and AI from scouting Quebec with some degree of success. Any scout on my team who has the "USA & CANADA: All of USA + Canada" region does not have Quebec assigned as a 'green' region, however they do have both the QMJHL and the QJHL assigned as 'green' leagues. Scouts with their scouting region listed as "Quebec" in their profile do not have "Quebec" listed as a 'green' region in the assignment window. Several Canadian scouts on my team with regions like "Ontario" and "Quebec" have the "Danish 1. Division" listed as their 'green' leagues. If the AI assigns scouts to regions rather than leagues, they're going to miss Quebec every time. It's really bugs that are the problem, not the AI. However, even as a human player, these are things which are going to hinder your ability to scout that province to the fullest extent, unless you know about them and pay attention to them.

As a human player, you're also going to be occasionally rewarded for scouting in areas that are normally going to be overlooked by the AI because they're not prime hockey areas-- especially if you neglect to hire many scouts from Europe. In my current game, there are a couple of potential superstars from France that are going to come through the draft in the next couple of years, a couple of interesting Belarussians, and I'm keeping an eye on an intriguing 14 year-old LW from Ukraine with 5.0 potential who is labelled as a 'grinder' while putting up around 2.9 PPG. If you don't have enough scouts with the "Former USSR" or "Central Europe" regions, I doubt the AI is going to pull someone away from Canada and send them over there. The question is-- should they? Would a real NHL team pull someone from Canada and send them to Ukraine, or would they hire a network of European scouts to do the work?

[ike121212]

I understand that some people like the granularity. OOTP did have similar granularity in the past. They evolved through several iterations, and they always had the option to turn scouting off entirely. I like where they ended. Personally, I don't want any kind of advantage over the AI for setting things up well. Part of the reason I prefer having the AI set up my scouting is because I want to be on even footing.

Some things I find confusing (as a life-long hockey fan and OOTP vet):
-The regions on the personnel free agent screen don't match the assignments. Is there an advantage to having scouts from these sub-regions?
-The 'green' regions don't show anywhere on the personnel free agent screen or on the scout detail page
-My QHJML Draft Region Scout is assigned to the former USSR, my QHJML Canada Draft Region Scout is assigned to Nordic Europe, my Northern Europe scout is assigned to assigned to Midwest USA...while Quebec goes completely un-scouted. I can have 50 scouts and there's still holes.


Obviously some of these are bugs. They've been identified on the forums from day 1 and they are a big deal for any type of career league. I get a little worked up when they continue to go unmentioned and the team starts talking about working on the next version of the game.

I expect a good draft experience, and right now it just doesn't deliver. Scouting the top 30 would be a good start, but coming from OOTP, my expectations are so much higher.

[GlennN]

I'm with Ike. I don't really want the human to have an advantage over the AI. I would like the ability to delegate this, and have the scouting still done competently. Unlike OOTP, if we don't like how scouting is implemented, we cannot just turn it off (which, I would like the option to do).

[ike121212]

Any chance these issues are getting some attention in the last patch?

[dave1927p]

Originally Posted by ike121212

Any chance these issues are getting some attention in the last patch?

Though I don't know the answer to that question, I will say that you have all raised some valuable points in the scouting/draft area of the game that have definitely been noted. With that said, I don't believe it to be a fair expectation to expect such large additions/changes in a patch.

[ike121212]

Originally Posted by dave1927p

Though I don't know the answer to that question, I will say that you have all raised some valuable points in the scouting/draft area of the game that have definitely been noted. With that said, I don't believe it to be a fair expectation to expect such large additions/changes in a patch.

I suppose that's true. If the bugs with the QMJHL were fixed and the AI always scouted the top 30, it would be a big improvement. These issues stop me from playing the game.

[JeffR]

Good news first: the Danish assignment thing was a bug, Malte's fixed it and it's working OK in our test builds now, so it'll be working properly in the next update.

Less good: the QMJHL "black hole" is baffling; I can't figure out what's going on there. I've dug through all the relevant entries in the FHM database and the world database, looking for some misconfiguration that would leave Quebec out, and there's just no reason for it to behave like that; everything is set up exactly the same as it is for, say, the WHL or OHL. It still has an active bug report open, I'll give it a bump and see if Malte can find anything that I've missed.

The deeper issue: I think I made a bad design choice when setting up the geographical aspects of the scouting system. When you're looking at a scout's preferred region, that's chosen from the list of regions in the world database we share with OOTP; there are 227 of them total (some are exclusive to baseball or hockey, since Markus and Matt don't need, say, a region-by-region breakdown of Finland and we have no use for one that specifies which countries don't play baseball.) It seemed like a good idea at the time to use those regions to specify where a scout was based, but as it's turned out, we're using the regions list for a variety of different things, and there's a stupid amount of redundancy between different types of regions (if I want to represent a scout that lives in Washington State, for example, I can think of a half-dozen game regions to assign him that would all be technically valid.) That makes the system a breeding ground for little incompatibilities where a scout won't watch an area he should be looking at because the region used for him didn't have, say, a particular state or province included in it. That's why my first guess as to the Quebec problem was an error or mismatch in the database, and not finding one was a surprise.

Complicating things further, the list of scouting assignment options also uses the regions list, but one that was deliberately cut down to ones that made more sense as scouting assignments, which is an ugly little bit of hardcoding I'd like to do away with. It should probably just be using indidivual-team-league scouting only, with the possibility of multiple assignments in those categories.

In short, it's a pain to use, and makes the game experience confusing. So I think it'll be out next year, and replaced by something a lot more intuitive to understand - right now, I'm think something like specifying a "home city" for the scout and then a range in kilometres. That should be a lot more effective and consistent, and it'll be easier to represent in the game - we could, for example, just show you a map that displays the exact areas he can cover at peak efficiency. It'll also make building scouting AI a lot easier; that's very difficult under the current system. We can't, unfortunately, make the change now, though, since the database work involved would break saves, so it has to wait for the next version.

[ike121212]

Can you do something with AI scouting 5 Star prospects, regardless of region? When the top 30 list is dominated by 5 Star E scouted prospects from lesser regions. This just isn't realistic. The regions this volume of great prospects is coming from doesn't make sense. But the bigger problem is, if the scouting director identifies them as 5 star, they should be scouted.

From my last sim, detailed above, 30 of 37 5 Star prospects fit this. I run through a quick sim each patch. When I see this is still happening, I just stop playing.

[JeffR]

I think I know what the problem might be there, there's supposed to be a cap on how much the player potential can be overestimated in those second-rate leagues, but it sounds like it's either not working properly or not getting applied as widely as it should. I'll do some investigating.

And an update on the Quebec black hole situation: Malte thinks he has it fixed, I'll be testing it a little later this evening (or morning, I guess, as it's 5 to midnight.)

[ike121212]

Good news.

I hope you give some thought to having the AI scout those that do happen to have high potential. If they are identified as 5 Star (even 4 star), they should be seen. Right now, it doesn't matter how many scouts you have, the AI doesn't scout them.

I'd still love the option to turn off scouting, just like OOTP has.

[ike121212]

Started a fresh sim, and see all the same issues with this patch. The trade deadline and patch had me excited to play.

[JeffR]

Originally Posted by ike121212

Started a fresh sim, and see all the same issues with this patch. The trade deadline and patch had me excited to play.

The AI-related fixes aren't in yet, that'll be the next update. You're still getting mismatches between scouts' home regions and the target leagues/regions?

[ike121212]

Originally Posted by JeffR

The AI-related fixes aren't in yet, that'll be the next update. You're still getting mismatches between scouts' home regions and the target leagues/regions?

I'm not sure how to answer that. A European scout is assigned to Atlantic Canada, an Eastern US in Nordic Europe, and a Europe at large in Atlantic Canada. I'm not sure if that's the mismatch you're alluding to though. No matter how many European scouts I hire, my draft still has many 6e prospects from third tier leagues I've never heard of before. I should have coverage of these regions, but I won't guess if that's a mismatch or just bad AI.

[JeffR]

Originally Posted by ike121212

I'm not sure how to answer that. A European scout is assigned to Atlantic Canada, an Eastern US in Nordic Europe, and a Europe at large in Atlantic Canada. I'm not sure if that's the mismatch you're alluding to though. No matter how many European scouts I hire, my draft still has many 6e prospects from third tier leagues I've never heard of before. I should have coverage of these regions, but I won't guess if that's a mismatch or just bad AI.

Yeah, that's all AI-related stuff, it's coming but not in yet. I just meant the actual green highlighting you see when you assign the scouts manually is now indicating correctly which scouts consider which regions home.

[MXD]

You probably already checked that, but...
Are you sure the Quebec issue isn't simply due to somebody using an "é" somewhere and the engine not recognizing the character (or just thinking it's an entirely different region because Québec isn't exactly like Quebec)?

[JeffR]

Originally Posted by MXD

You probably already checked that, but...
Are you sure the Quebec issue isn't simply due to somebody using an "é" somewhere and the engine not recognizing the character (or just thinking it's an entirely different region because Québec isn't exactly like Quebec)?

No, it was something else. The actual name is only cosmetic, everything in the database is tied to the internal ID numbers.

[ike121212]

Originally Posted by ike121212

Year 1:
8 5 star prospects. 6 are A scouted. 1 is B. 1 is E, from the QMJHL. Disappointing, the AI is still terrible with this region. It doesn't matter how many scouts you hire based in this region.

Year 2:
37 5 star prospects. 5 A. 2 B. 30E. Most of these are from the Q or second rate European leagues. It's not fun to play like this.

If my scouting director identifies someone as a 5 star prospect, they should be scouted. I think it's common sense.

Seems like some improvement with this patch.

Year 2:
24 5 Star prospects. 18 A. 6 E. Of the E's: 1 from QMJHL. 5 from lesser leagues.

[ike121212]

Year 3:
24 5 star prospects: 24 A, 2 B. 3 QMJHL were A scouted. Lesser European league prospects were A scouted. I did add 3 additional Europe at large scouts. This is encouraging.

[ike121212]

Had some brief hope that the Q bug was squashed, but it isn't. Are you content leaving this broken in this version?