Continuing our look at the bigger changes coming to football manager live in v1.4 with the player assessment system, for those accustomed to using the judging potential skill to find good youth players for them this might come as a bit of a shock. A major shift in the relevance of this skill sees the removal of instant player assessments on all regens as soon as they appear in your gameworld. Instead a more thoughtful system that requires both time and individual selection of who you want to assess.

Aimed at working alongside the addition of Youth Academies the introduction of assessment lists and time based assessments will have a dramatic effect on youth wages and the current system where the stronger (more financial) clubs have the best chance of scooping up high potential players. So how does it all work?

Judging Potential

First a quick look at the current system, under 1.3 and before if you had managed to “learn” the Judging Potential skill it would give you an automatic potential reading on all youth players (23 or younger), the level of skill you had attained would affect the accuracy of that reading. Part of the problem of this system was it made it very hard for new teams without the skill to have an opportunity to acquire any high potential youth players. Further increasing the imbalance between new subscribers and those who had established themselves in a gameworld, literally the very minute a new youth player was generated in the database those with high levels of JP would know how good that player was to become and make a wage bid on them accordingly.

So what’s new? Well the biggest fundamental change to the system now means regardless of skill level, regardless of how long you have been in a gameworld, any new youth players generated to the free agents list (note:Youth Academies will affect this) will not have any indication of their potential revealed for a minimum of 48hours, giving all managers an equal opportunity to assess them based on attributes alone and to decide whether to bid now or wait for further assessment (based on JP) to kick in.

Under the new system it will take anywhere from 56 days to 7 days to get an accurate potential indication on a player depending on the level of skill you have learnt.
• Without Judging Potential Skill – 56 days for 60% accurate
• Level 1 Judging Potential Skill – 28 days for 70% accuracy
• Level 2 Judging Potential Skill – 21 days for 75% accuracy
• Level 3 Judging Potential Skill – 14 days for 80% accuracy
• Level 4 Judging Potential Skill – 10 days for 85% accuracy
• Level 5 Judging Potential Skill – 7 days for 90% accuracy
The level of skill learnt will affect both the accuracy of the assessment and the amount of time it takes to get that assessment.

A note on the accuracy indicated above, although it’s expressed as a percentage here the game uses a variable rate based on the players PA. A Slight adjustment under 1.4 sees the lower levels made more accurate but the highest level (JP5) less accurate than it was previously, to provide less of a guarantee, with the new range being +/- 30 at level 1 up to +/- 10 at level 5. An old post on the Cloughite.blogspot.com although based on the range (50 – 10) should give a good indication of how this works for anyone new to the concept, Undercover: Judging Potential

Partial Assessment

As discussed above the level of Judging Potential skill you have will affect the time taken to assess a player, anywhere from 56 – 7 days, and the accuracy of that assessment. In addition to this partial assessments are produced during that assessment period, once you have completed 25% of the time an initial assessment is given based on the percentage completed versus your accuracy level.

So at JP level 4 you would get an initial assessment after 2.5 days based on a 20% accuracy rate (25% of your overall accuracy), as the assessment continues this accuracy automatically updates (potential shown changes) in line with the percentage completed.
A news item will be generated with the players estimated potential once the assessment reaches 25% and again, with a more accurate reading, when the assessment is completed.

Learning additional levels of the JP skill will automatically increase the rate of assessment based on your new level and any potential reading indicated will also be updated automatically. If you stop assessing a player for any reason, it will remember the amount of assessment completed (and the reading) so that you can start again from that point in the future.

Assessment Lists

The table above outlines the time required to assess a player based on your skill level and that is applied to all players in your squad automatically it doesn’t apply to all the other players in the database though, that’s where assessment lists become important. If you want to assess the potential of any player you don’t own then you need to add them to an assessment list, this is done the same as you would add a player to your shortlist (and actually includes you in any relevant mail like you get for shortlisted players).

There is no limit to the number of players you can add to your Assessment List, but the more players you add the longer those assessments take! To keep it simple you can have up to 10 players on your list without penalty, they will be assessed at the rates mentioned above. However if you increase the size of your assessment list beyond 10 players then each additional player effectively increases the time required to assess by 10%. 20 players would take twice as long as 10, 30 players would take three times as long as 10, etc.

Considering there is somewhere in the order of 2,000 new players generated in the database each season this will be important to remember before you start adding hundreds of players to your assessment list, the more you add the longer it takes to assess ALL of them.

Loan Players

Players on loan also affect the rate of assessment; any player you loan into your club is considered part of your squad and will be assessed under those terms. But any player you own that you loan out to another team, whilst still being part of your squad, will take twice as long to assess than if they were playing in one of your teams.

Youth Academies

Still a bit early to give you any great detail on the plans for youth academies, but as they are mentioned at the start of this article it’s worth covering some of the basic plans at least in terms of how they work alongside player assessments.

Youth Academies will be an “optional extra” for those that want them, essentially meaning you will have to pay for them. What you pay is basically up to, beyond the basic set-up, and the more funds you pump into your academy the more players that are likely to ‘appear’ directly into your squad as potential academy graduates for that season. Paying extra (having a bigger academy) will not increase the quality (potential) of players appearing, that’s random, but it will increase the numbers appearing giving you a greater chance of snaring a high potential player.

Many people have expressed interest in playing a role in determining the country of origin of players generated through their academy and this will be accounted for. Along with increasing the number of players available to you, higher levels of academy and increased numbers of academies will generate more players per season in whichever country they are based in. This is something to keep in mind when assigning your base country initially, the amount of newgens created from each region can change just because you build an academy somewhere.

The player generation process will reflect “popular demand” so countries with an accademy are likely to generate more players than countries without, and the more academies in a single country will weight the generation process in favour of that. So choosing a less popular base country could give you greater access to the pool generated in that region but it may not provide large numbers of players to choose from.

Importantly the fact that a large number of players will appear directly into club academies means there will be a lot less new players available through the free agents pool. When combined with the new changes to player assessment this should have the effect of considerably lower wages for all youth players, those appearing through your academy being on base wages. As well as ensuring all managers have a good opportunity of producing the next star and not just the richest clubs in the gameworld. In short Judging Potential becomes a tool for evaluating your own players or those at another club you might be interested in purchasing, and less about monopolising the youth market through simplifying the assessment of newly regenerated players.

As mentioned in previous articles, Youth Academies are a feature that will be built up over successive updates. They will eventually incorporate proper training facilities (enabling the removal of squad limits), more detailed scouting camps and infrastructure. Once they are fleshed out, tweaked and 1.4 is locked for QA Testing (hopefully sometime this month) I will be able to expand in more detail how they will actually work.

Skills

In keeping with the move toward a greater expansion of the skills tree in Football Manager Live, and there should be an official blog out shortly with more details on that, there are some new skills added to 1.4 for Youth Academies. These will branch off the existing coaching, scouting and infrastructure skills trees.

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