The scouting and person discovery section of the game has received an update over the weekend. The point of these changes was to make it easier for managers to discover the undiscovered potential. Especially in the staff section there are much better staff which never end up getting a job since it's too difficult for managers to find them.
Scouting gameplay changes
The blue stars got their introduction in a recent update. They are used to indicate how good the potential and current rating of persons are. If the "Known" statistic is not at the maximum level, then the stars will be blue. The known statistic can only increase, and increases by competing in races for drivers, or by being assigned to a position for staff. There are some small other parameters that play an influence to that, but that's the general idea.
There have been two changes in this area. First of all, from now on scout reports also play an influence in the known stat. Each time a scout report is generated, the known stat will increase slightly. The idea is that people talk, and some information will always be exchanged between teams.
The second change is that before the known stat would play an influence on the (blue) rating stars in an incremental way. This means that the person would always get low stars when he was unknown. They would increase as he would become known. This was kind of annoying, since it meant that all only-slightly-known persons would be low in stars. This has been changed so that it can work in two ways. Each person has an offset factor which reduces as the person becomes more and more known. How big this factor is depends from person to person. So some people can start off as a big talent, and reduce in rating big time. Or others could be a bit under rated, and increase in rating slightly over time.
If someone isn't known yet, then there are no stars to display. So I analyzed the flows, and it was quite clear that scouts keep rotating the same persons all the time. The only chance that fresh blood would enter was when a team would hire an unknown person. The original idea was that you can only scout someone if he has a job, but that restriction has been lifted now to open the market all the way for undiscovered potential. This means that from now on scouts will also be able to file scout reports for staff which are not contracted to a team, or to those who are contracted to a team but not assigned to a role.
The changes above should open up more staff talent, but driver talent suffered from similar issues albeit not that big. A small change has been made so that more driver talent should appear in the scout reports. Before youth or guest drivers without a team who competed in a division in the same season before would get preference when youth or guest drivers are invited to participate. This restriction has also been removed. This means that guest and youth drivers who are without a team will always be decided on a random basis.
Scouting page changes
The scouting page used to be a page with lots of panels crammed together on one page. The information that was shown was also quite generic and didn't offer that much information and still required you to click the person to see details. Because it's a vital tool in discovering new talent, I decided to make some changes to the scouting and market pages.
The scouting page is now split up into several tabs, and more scouting information is shown on the knowledge tabs. This should make it easier to spot great talent.
As a quality of life improvement it's now also possible to re-scout persons which were recently scouted, so that you can get more information about a person. And it's now also possible to easily decrease the number of requested reports.
Finally, the scouting page also allows the manager to specify that scouts should only scout staff which are teamless (free staff). This works similarly to the free driver only check box.
Some changes that are planned but that didn't make the updates yet are a redesign of the scout settings on the top of the page, and the removal of a news item each time there is a new scout report. These will be changed by a daily grouped scout report message.
Job market page changes
The job market page offers a lot of details on persons at a single view. Or at least, it should, but you could only really see the experience statistic before. This is not that great information wise, and therefore this page also received a long overdue update.
First of all, the table which shows the information will now also resize depending on the screen size which should be better for mobile devices. And due to that change, I could also implement dynamic columns to be shown. This means that skills per person are shown. For example: designers will get their skills shown, while drivers will get the average of each skill category shown.
Some columns which didn't offer the most critical information have been removed, and the talent statistic has been added. The contract expiration is changed into a more readable format, and youth drivers get their actual role shown instead of the generic "Youth driver". From now on it's also possible from this page to quickly add a person to the scout queue, without requiring a page redirect.
The age options have also been changed so that they make more sense. Each youth age has been replaced by the minimum and maximum age per series, so that the eligible drivers can be listed.
Other changes
Some small but handy changes as well on other pages. The cars page quantity and tyre type fields now default to a default value, which should save some clicks.
And the loophole page has been slightly tweaked so that it offers a bit of a better overview. More changes are coming in that area in a later update, so apart from the layout not much was changed.
If there are any questions, let me know in the chat.
