Scouting Talents Without Judging Potential

Probably one of the best and most insightful things I have read in a long time took place in a secluded part of the SI fora. It's about how you can scout top youths without the use of the judging potential skill. Potentially, if you get this right, this means you can start your academy in the very first season, when the competition for the top youngsters is less fierce.

Apparently, it's all about setting up the right filters. As the world is quickly swamped with newgen players, you can't go trawling through long lists of players, so you want to set up good filters as fast as you can to start scouting.

One of the tips I picked up, was filtering on wage. Most newgens appear with a wage demand of 200 quid. The ones with higher wages generally have a better chance of becoming better players, if they possess the proper stats as well, so filtering on wages is a smart idea.

Naturally, wages alone are not an indication of a players potential ability. It could just mean his current ability is quite high, but his development chances are limited, which means you still have nothing useful to work with.

We also have to look at certain stats. As I stated in an earlier blogpost, players with decent values for Work Rate and Determination are far more likely to live up to their PA. There's less need of splashing loads of cash on top PA players if there's not a very big chance of them living up to that potential. Looking at these two mental attributes will give you a pretty decent idea if a player will be able to live up to his potential.

One last important thing to look at was basically natural fitness. I suppose that makes sense, especially if you're in the development business for the long haul. You don't want a youth with top stats but who tires after 45 minutes of football, so it is important they have the natural fitness to develop their other physical skills.

Summing it up, these are the things we should be looking at in a filter:

• wages: over 200 quid;
• determination: 10+;
• work rate: 10+ (preferably even 15+);
• natural fitness: 10+.

I put this theory to the test by looking at several teams who were signing the top youths very early on in Miller Beta. Teams like the Tallinna Piraaja and AZ Bruntsfield were reknowned for picking up the youths even in season one, before JP skills were unlocked and when I look at the players they signed who turned out great, they all seem to match the profile described above. So yeah, I think this might help out a lot of people.

Inflation Of The Youth Wages

As we all know, inflation has struck our merry little Miller Game World. For those of you with no basic grasp of economics, inflation is a rise in the general level of prices of goods and services in an economy over a period of time.

When the general price level rises, each unit of the functional currency buys fewer goods and services; consequently, inflation is a decline in the real value of money—a loss of purchasing power in the internal medium of exchange which is also the monetary unit of account in an economy.

Translated into FM Live terms, players are becoming more expensive, in both wages and transfer sums. You have to pay more money in wage auctions and more money in transfer auctions to acquire decent players, which means less transfers are taking place.

In a post on the Developer Blog, Rob Cooper stated the inflation levels for every Game World. Miller and Coppell are on an average of 39.78%, which isn't that bad considering the fact that we've started out with 1.2 and the stadiums, which brings extra costs from the very start.

Anyway, I'm trying to look at the cause of this inflation. I think it's generally caused by people who don't know how the transfer market functions or people who are desperate to have a certain player (generally a top real-life player, someone who plays for their real-life club or a highly rated youth). They bid excessive amounts to persuade the player to transfer or the contracting club to sell.

Naturally, this causes some inbalances, as some of the wages have gone insane. The senior wages have pretty much stabilised, but the youth wages are a disaster-area. Every four star or more Potential Ability newgen that has appeared over the last month, is now earning at least 10k a day, if not more.

People fail to realise how much money this is costing them in the long run. 10k a day means 70k a week, 280k a season... For a 15 or 16 year old player, whose future is highly uncertain, as you need to nurture and develop this youngster. He won't be ready for regular first team football before he hits the age 20, so you're paying 1,12 to 1,4 million for this youth.

And let's not forget we're still not sure if the youngster can actually live up the high expectations. You're taking a huge, huge gamble when you pay wages like that to such young players, which is, in my eyes anyway, one of the main reasons for the current inflation.

I refuse to shell out these kind of excessive wages for every player, my top youths earn around 8k a day, but he's already playing regular first team football and he's developing quite nicely, with a Market Value of around 850k at the moment.

The one exception in my team is a Brazilian newgen, but his stats are so good that I don't consider him a youth player anymore, even though he is only 18 years old. He has proven that too, by getting 6.9 averages in the senior games he has played so far, in which case 14k isn't an excessive amount to pay.

Is there any way to curb this inflation of the youth wages? Can we stop this madness? Unfortunately, I don't see any way how to achieve this goal. I have actually thought this through (for a change...) and this is what I came up with.

Wage caps initially sounded like a good idea. Restrict the maximum bids. But these salary caps would be unfair, as it would be a matter who gets the maximum bid in first. Even with a more random distribution of youths time-wise, this would not work.

SI tried to hide the number of bids in the 3337 build of the Beta, but this didn't really help as people just bid high anyway to ensure they get the player. In a way, this measure was even restricting some teams. If you don't have a lot of cash, it's useful to be able to see how many bidders there are so as to decide where to spend your pennies, so in that sense it's not very friendly to weaker/poorer teams.

I considered removing all money from youth competitions, but I quickly realised most teams are not in the youth business for the prize money, since this is generally very very low and hardly worth the effort.

Most teams seem to be in it for the development of players and the chance to sell on their talents for huge fees. I have to admit that this is a lucrative business, as I have recently sold two youths for a combined value of 1,4 million quid. Since their combined wages were a mere 7k, they are cheaper than any of the newer newgens, which probably drove the price up.

Many other managers fail to realise this and they think these players only went for such excessive fees because of their superb Potential Ability. They therefore assume that signing top PA youngsters will guarantee them a lot of money in the future, when in reality it's the combination of superb PA, decent stats, chance of development and normal/fair wages that makes transfer sums sky-rocket at times.

The Demise Of A Generation...

With the wages for 15 and 16 year old players rising to absurd figures, I have decided to retire the Fortuna Aeternitas U17 team. The best five prospects, those being the ones who might realistically develop into first team assets, are added to the U18 selection, the rest of the squad will be sold in auctions starting at one pound.

I feel sad I have to break up an entire team, but with the current inflation, I don't think I can afford to replace the current U17 team come next season. Well, I could replace them, but it would either be a squad full of extremely expensive talents (10k or more wages pro player...) or cheap dross no-one else picks up.

This season, I experimented with that last option in the U17's. A team full of relatively cheap Africans and Asians was able to do okay, but not as good as the other Academy teams I have. Also, I have noticed the wages in the regions rise to well above my acceptable level as well. I refuse to shell out excessive wages (5k or more) for average players who are used to fill the squad and even more excessive wages (10k or more) for the top stars of a generation.

The current inflation of the market has prompted me to disband the U17's. This decision is effective as soon as the tournaments they are currently in, have ended. Most of the current squad members have been placed in auctions, which end Friday. I'm sad to see the lads go, but I just cannot afford to keep hold of them.

It is sad that I have to break away from the tradition of home-growing my first teamers, right at the same moment that the first Academy graduates are being induced into the first team. Players like Marko Damjanovic, Jack Cleverley, Angelo Antonucci, Carlos Amaro and Velimir Jovanovic were all part of the academy for three or more seasons, but this proud tradition of training my own youths will end in a few seasons, as there are no new Academy teams coming.

Newgen Distribution and Generation A Bit Unfair?

Seeing as I consider myself a talent spotter and developer, I invested quite a lot of time into developing my scouting skills. These skills increase the amount of players you can bid for in the world by 5% per level.

Without this skill I would not be able to approach some players in order to sign them. Players you don't have the scouting skills to sign aren't visible on the player search panel. You can also click on links posted by someone else, but the approach button will be greyed out. If you hover over this button it will tell you the reason, like you don't have the required skills.

Within the scouting skill-set, there are area specific skills that improve the amount of players you can see by 5% in specific regions. Famous players can be seen by all players regardless of their scouting abilities. This means that the main benefit of scouting is the ability to find regenerated young players who enter into the gameworld as older players retire.

Now allow me to quote a piece of text from the FM Online manual.

If everybody has a certain skill there is no advantage in having it – think about learning something obscure such as the Oceania region scouting skill, which would give you a unique advantage.

Source: FM Live Manual

I followed SI’s advice, as evidenced by one of my previous blog posts.

I'm changing my strategy to keep my wages low but maintain a certain level of quality. I've noticed that most these high wage players are either European or South American. Most managers have focussed their scouting skills in this region. Admittedly, it's where most talents originate from, so it makes sense too.

It also means that most managers have not bothered scouting in Asia and Africa. Admittedly, there's less talent originating from these regions, but they are there and they're still fairly cheap because they're not spotted by most managers, meaning the competition is less fierce and the wages are fairly normal.

Source: my own blog

But looking back on that decision, I can’t say it has paid off. The main reason for this is an unfair newgen distribution by the game itsself. Both in quantity and quality, the game heavily favours South America and Europe.

I’m not saying there are never any decent African or Australian newgens, but for every African four star newgen, there are six or seven South American and six or seven European newgens, so the quantity is not balanced.

The same can be said for the quality. Almost all of the top youths PA-wise are European and South American, there are barely any four or more star African or Asian youths in the game.

To a certain degree, I agree that is realism, as there aren’t that many Asian and Australian superstars, but surely Africa deserves a more worthy faith? It’s not like they haven’t produced anything decent, some of the worlds best players are African or of African descent.

In total, I feel the newgen distribution and generation isn’t quite balanced and even a bit unfair. Learning the African and Australian regions for scouting takes the same amount of time as the European and South American regions, but the pay-off is considerably less in quantity and quality of players.

The one advantage I have noticed is that the competition for these players is less fierce, because not every player is visible to all managers. Unfortunately, the moment a top African newgen appears, he is visible to everyone with five star scouting, so I would still have to shell out 20k wage offers.

Perhaps this is something that can be looked at by Sports Interactive?

Newgen Renaissance?!

Or not, but the title is certain to draw some attention... As the latest Miller build was installed yesterday morning, I got a pleasant surprise when I did my routine survey of the newgens. For the past week or so, I hadn't noticed anyone remotely decent appearing and all of a sudden, there were like 20 or more five star newgens in the Game World, all 15 or 16 years old and almost without any exception with superb stats.

It seemed like SI were making up for a barren week of barely no decent newgens by showering us with lovely new talents. The abundance of players would ensure that almost every team would be able to sign one or more of these precious young talents.

At that moment, when witnessing the abundance of youthful talent, the mercantile part of my brain kicked into overdrive. I was figuring out how many of these gems I could snap up without facing bankruptcy. In the end, I decided to stay away from anything South American or European, since most people have focussed their scouting there. I opted for two Koreans, a Japanese and two Ivorian newgens, gambling on the fact that most people had not developed their scouting skills sufficient to see these gems.

Sticking 10k bids on the lot of them meant I had not much left, but I really wanted them and I couldn't see how many other users had made bids for them. Sticking a 10k bid on a five star newgen is a calculated gamble in Miller, where some newgens go for much much higher wages, though these guys are mostly European or South American.

I decided to invest my remaining cash into some other guys who I thought would fit my academy teams rather nicely, before logging of to do some work around the house and prepare for the evening quiz in Miller. I was very content with the new situation, even if it did look a bit peculiar that SI pumped so many newgens at once into Miller, instead of gradually releasing them to ensure a more fair distribution.

As I subconsiously feared, this whole situation was too good to be true and during a chat in the lobby, SI's Rob Cooper burst my bubble by stating there was a problem with the newgens that would have to be fixed. I'm pretty sure I wasn't the only one who was a bit disappointed. When the new 2333 build had installed and I logged back in, I found the following message waiting for me...

Hello folks,

As you may have noticed over the last couple of days some extremely rubbish, and some extremely good youngsters have been generated, with little or no players in between. This is down to a bug in the player regeneration code which has now been fixed. However, in the interests of keeping the game world balanced, and so ensuring that this world is as close to th live worlds as possible (to ensure fair testing) we have rset the player's PAs to where they should have been before.

Those players who were on trial will remain on trial, but all bids on players have been removed. Those players who have been signed on full contracts remain on full contracts because, by a bizarre twist of fate, they are all at least as good now after the fix has gone in, as they were before, so congratulations to you guys who have snagged a bargain!

To everyone else, there are now plenty of regens available to buy with reasonable PAs, and plenty more incoming in the coming days, happy shopping!

Cheers,

Rob
Chief player Progression Breaker

Deep down, I had expected this. Naturally, that didn't stop the more opportunistic side of me from sobbing and being jealous at the few managers who had managed to snare one of these top players, but that's just human emotions.

As I pondered the situation further, I realised that SI had probably done the right thing. As they said themselves, Miller was designed to be a realistic test environment for the 1.2 build. The realism would be compromised if they had allowed the new situation to run its course.

Alternatively, I could already see the casual weekend managers going into a frenzy when it turned out this was a one-time wonder and they had missed it. The amount of angry mails towards the poor mods (Andrew, Jeremy, Simon, Alec and myself) would have probably swamped us with quite a bit of work, explaining what went down and all.

All in all, the short-lived newgen Renaissance was nice for as long as it lasted, but it was probably unrealistic and would have distorted the balance of Miller. SI took the right actions by fixing the newgen code and removing the bids of the other players.

Looking at the bright side of it all, at least they fixed the code so we have new talents to fight over every day... I wonder if the new code in 1.2 will make the wages drop or go up even higher... I suppose that's something for another day...

The New Newgen System

Apparently, the latest 1.2 build has a few nice and pleasant changes in store for us, especially regarding newgens and signing these newly created little wonders. Allow me to talk you through all of the new options.

First of all, when a player is signed on trial, his visibility to other users on the player search page remains subject to their scouting skills. This means that if you are no good at scouting for example South Americans, you won't be able to see South American trialists. A nice move forward from the old situation. Now it actually pays off to trial players to see if they fit your squad, since it doesn't necessarily mean you expose them for the whole GW to bid on.

Secondly, the first bidder in a wage auction is now informed of any second bidder making a bid, which balances out the fact that the second bidder was either notified or can see clearly that at least one bid has been made. This relates to recent changes to hide the number of bidders in a wage auction. Ergo, you can't go trawling through the list to see which player has the most bids on him.

Some managers used this method to find good players, even without the Judging Potential tool. In all fairness, this was a pretty effective tactic, but it was very harsh on the guys who did have Judging Potential and invested time and effort into getting that skill.

In the new situation, you can't see who else made a bid, which also makes it harder to determine the height of the bid. Are you really the only one that bid? Can you afford to go low or should you lock down your money for 24 hours in a high stakes bid for a player that may or may not even be worth the effort. Life's all about decisions and this latest addition has just made everything more interesting.

I also noticed that newgens are released on random times. They're no longer released into the Game World at midnight GMT, they are released in batches, all day long... In my honest opinion, that's more fair towards all the users in the Game World, especially considering the many different time zones people are in.

How this will affect the Game World in the long term is hard to say right now. The new build has only been effective for less than a day. After the first wage auctions end tomorrow, we can see if the wage wars for newgens will intensify or not...

They Said It Would Never Work...

They were sceptic about my ideas. "You can't be the Diane Fossey of newgens," they said. They may have had a point there, since I am not female, but I meant that in a metaphorical way... Anyway, they also said my new marketing campaign wouldn't work...

Looking back on recent developments, it's GLOATING TIME... Since the FML motto is "play, win, rub it in," I intend to do some rubbing... Allow me to start off with the bit I find the most important bit, the newgens.

Earlier, I promised to get to the bottom of the whole newgen-affair. Over the past week, the number of 16 year old newgens coming into the game world has decreased. The quality of said newgens has also decreased, as I am yet to find a newgen with a PA over 1.5 star. There are a few semi-decent newgens in the age category 17-19, but again no-one with really high PA.

I promissed to harass and annoy if necessary to find out what happened. Apparently, the good people at SI are very customer-friendly and no harassing or annoying was needed. All it took was one forum topic and a wee bit of patience. This was the reply I got by SI's Rob Cooper.

At the moment in Miller only 3.9% or so of players are under 18, whereas ideally the game would like this to be closer to 10%. This means that the game is creating more youth players. However, at the moment it is only creating 50 per day. I hqave recently made a change to this code so it can create more players per day if necessary so you should see a sudden burst of new regens arriving soon! Source: SI Games forum

People said I couldn't pull it off, that I couldn't get to the bottom of this... Well, I could and I did, so teehee, in your face, et cetera. The newgen situation should improve in the near future, maybe today, maybe tomorrow, but it will improve. I came, I saw, I nagged, I got what I wanted... Without nagging even...

Now about the second topic of gloating. My new style advertising campaign is currently enjoying a 66.67% success ratio. The current bid on Salvador "Sal" Lahera is 70k, whilst Brazils new Dunga Clodoaldo will probably go for somewhere over 400k. I haven't had any bids on Alain Bell, but he wasn't in auction in the first place.

Either way, that's a pretty decent success ratio, not even counting the countless positive responses of people responding I had written a nice ad or I had made them smile. Goodwill goes a long way in a community like FML, so yeah, it does work, even when you don't sell your players (and I sell my players as well as scoring goodwill...).

So yeah, I feel I have the right to gloat. For now. Just for a short while. Until I have to think back about my beloved Fortuna anyway... But that's the topic for another blog post.

The Diane Fossey Of Newgens

For those of you who don't know who Diane Fossey was, watch the movie Gorilla's In The Mist. Gorillas In The Mist is a 1988 film which tells the true-life story of naturalist Dian Fossey and her work in Rwanda with Mountain Gorillas.

Fossey is inspired by an anthropologist to devote her life to the study of primates. Travelling into deepest Africa, Fossey becomes fascinated with the lives and habits of the rare mountain gorillas of the Rwandan jungle. She becomes so preoccupied with her vocation that she loses the opportunity of a romance with National Geographic photographer Bob Campbell.

Appalled by the poaching of the gorillas for their skins, hands, and heads, Fossey complains to the Rwandan government, which dismisses her, claiming that poaching is the only means by which some of the Rwandan natives can themselves survive. She rejects this, and dedicates herself to saving the African Mountain gorilla from illegal poaching and likely extinction. To this end she forms and leads numerous anti-poaching patrols, and even burns down the poachers' villages and stages a mock execution of one of the offenders.

You could say she was a bit obsessed by gorilla's. I'm sort of like that with the newgens in the Miller Beta Game World. You see, quality newgens are becoming sort of an endangered species in Miller. Over the past week or so, the number of 16 year old newgens coming into the game world has decreased. The same goes for 17 and 18 year old newgens.

The quality of said newgens has also decreased, as I am yet to find a newgen with a PA over 1.5 star. There are a few semi-decent newgens in the age category 17-19, but again no-one with really high PA. For over a week now, no 3 star or higher PA newgen has appeared in the Miller World.

I'm not sure why this happened, but I don't like this development. The current batch of U17's I have is pretty much average, and I can't bleed new players into the team when no decent new ones seem to appear.

So therefore I have decided to become the Diane Fossey of the newgens, only without the patrolling, burning down SI staff homes and staging the mock execution of the programmers. I will do my best to get to the bottom of this situation by asking as many people with SI as I can. Expect more updates as this story unfolds. The plot thickens...