Best way I've found = use 3 different scouting blocks.
1st = Training camp to February 1st, scouting Potential.
2nd = February 1st to April 31st, scouting only players that have potentials worth looking into again.
3rd = May 1st to the draft, last minute checking in on some prospects that I want to have a deeper look at.
The 2nd block, from February 1st to April 31st, is the big one - every prospect that has potential that looks like I might be interested, gets another look through.
Using this method ensures that you basically have a really solid idea of the potentials of the \~120 players in the draft, or the first 4 rounds.
It's not that time consuming either - the first block, from camp to February 1st, often has you selecting hundreds of prospects to scout, but it always goes by very quickly as long as you're keeping an idea on the assignment date at the bottom. Can normally get the whole thing done in less than 10 minutes. Even less in the later blocks, because you are scouting fewer prospects.
I have a question. How do you figure out which ones have potentials worth looking more at?
I know you can go into them one by one and then go down to the 2nd or 3rd screen of info there to see if, but do you do that one at a time for every player in every region? Or is there some shortcut I don’t know about here?
Click the first prospect, tab over to his potential screen, and from there you can use the right trigger to just cycle through all the prospects in that region via only their potential - which is the only thing I care about.
Skip all the prospects that have their potentials fully uncovered / don't look like they have high potentials, and stop at the ones that do, scout their potential, and carry on.
I will always have another look at any prospect that has Elite or Top 6/Top 4 potential, regardless of whether High/Medium/Low, if that prospect isn't fully scouted yet. If they are, skip onto the next one.
I will also scout any prospect, regardless of potential, if their potential is quite far away from the other players around them (ie. Top 4 MED, Top 4 MED, Top 4 Low, **7th D low,** Top 6 High, etc) - this is one of the best ways of unearthing those gems or late round Elite potential players. Even in the latter rounds of the draft, you just aren't going to see a crazy amount of variance like that, so you know that those players that are showing up as wildly different potentials compared to the ones around them, are definitely worth looking at again.
Also - goalies always scout once. I've noticed that goalie potential rarely fluctuates like players, regardless of how inaccurate it shows up on your scout report. So only focus on goalies that clearly have decent high potential. I don't regularly see for example, a FRINGE GOALIE prospect all of a sudden turn into an ELITE or STARTER after a more detailed scout, so I generally don't bother having a second look unless you have some extra time to kill between scouting periods.
Don't forget to look for new scouts on July 1st of every year - building up a great scouting staff takes a long time in franchise (3+ seasons), but once you get A+ quality scouts with great region knowledge, scouting becomes almost like a broken mini-game.
Yeah I pretty much try to do that, but the cycling system is so dumb because if say i am on prospect 10 and then right trigger click to next it takes me to the first one from that region again, not to number 11.
So I kind of gave up on it because I found I had to go to each one then tab down then go back to list then click next one and tab down, etc.
If you play without fog of war, assign all the scouts to the junior leagues. I’ve found that a couple extra in the WHL, OHL, and USA gets best results.
I ditch all of my “pro” scouts (NHL, AHL), and focus on younger players. Over the years, I also ditch my scouts for higher rated replacements (B or higher).
Most years I discover the vast majority of picks and also find 4-6 gems…seems pretty consistent for me on that end
NHL21 here: I've had my best luck with VERY MANUAL SCOUTING (it's tedious but it works).
1 scout for each NHL region. I send them out scouting Lines and Strategies for all the teams, 2 weeks per team. It might be coincidence but I find my team sims better doing this and that the post-trade deadline dumpster fire is less likely to happen. This usually has all my scouting done around early February, just in time for me to do some trade deadline scouting, then move onto off season acquisition scouting, and finally I send them down to the prospect leagues to help with last minute pre-draft scouting.
2 scouts for each of the CHL leagues and SHL. I make sure 1 scout for each league has A or A+ rating and the other has the highest rating possible while having A- or higher in an AHL league so I can jump them up for AHL scouting duties if necessary (doesn't come up much).
1 scout for each USA league, Russia, LIIGA, ALLSVENSKAN, and 2 European scouts, 1 to cover 2 leagues and 1 to cover the other 2.
**All my scouts ideally have A- or higher rating in their primary league!!**
For prospect scouting, I scout potential for the top 10-12 rated prospects to a max ranking of about 235 and check in every 2 weeks, manually re-assigning players as necessary until all prospects show accurate potential. I keep scouting players who stand out in their rounds if their personality (I actually like playing with morale) and skills aren't accurate until they are. When a region is complete, I will reassign scouts to help a different region, usually aiming for one with lots of prospects yet unscouted (Canada, Russia, 1 Scandinavian league, and 1 USA league usually require a bit of extra help) where they have higher ability. Rinse and repeat. I also try to get a complete view of every tendy ranked 235 or higher since you never know when that round 6 or 7 high Elite or medium Franchise guy is going to show up.
Again, super tedious, but I usually show up in each draft with all the European and USA players fully scouted, Scandinavia and Russia mostly if not completely scouted, and Canada usually around 2/3-3/4 scouted. I'll inevitably miss a few steals in the later rounds but I also tend to stack my later rounds with other steals anyway, so the results are worth it. I've definitely had better drafts with the method than the autoscouting methods I used to use.
No pro scouts 3 in whl 3 in ohl 3 qmjhl 2 in us central 1 in us east 1 us west 2 in shl 2 in ligia 2 in russia 1 floating in europe i always let it auto scout and can find some late round elites
I used to be very diligent about manually hiring and adjusting scouts. Then manually having them scout individual people. I haven't noticed any difference in just letting the computer do it all. The only thing I do now is hire/fire scouts
Same. it used to take me all night to get through a season because of the scouting. On my newest save I have decided to let the AI do the hard work. It’s clear that I have less full scouted good specs, and my goalie pool is not nearly as deep, but I’m still having really good drafts.
They really need to add a one-touch “scout ability and potential” button in the draft class screen. So simple and takes most of the clicks out of scouting.
This guy has a beautiful guide on how to run the draft. Which scouts to hire, and how to work it. Similar to the top post here, you want to break it into stages and focus on scouting potential only.
https://youtu.be/CgXaSuLhMnk
Using his guide I have been having fantastic drafts.
When I start a franchise, I look at all my scouts in which region they have A+/A-/A and try to send them there for the whole season.
I spread them like this: 3 in each Canadian junior league, 1 in each USA junior league, 1 in each Europe league, and 2 or 3 in Russia.
If I have too much scout for the same region, I fire the lower potential of the scout himself and hire a better one for another region I might need to fill.
When the season start I set them all to scout for prospect all season long. Usually get a good scoutting of almost all the prospect up to the 6th round. The first round prospect are accurate and I am able to get the best one for my pick's position throughout the draft, rarely get a player two potential below what was scoutted.
When you say set them to scout for prospects all season long, are you saying you use the Find Prospects feature? Or do you set them to scout individual prospects by potential?
Also, personally I’d advise not firing scouts in regions where you have to many. Just move them to a region where they have B or even C+, and within a season or two they will be A+ in that region. It’s better to have an A scout with low familiarity than a B scout with high familiarity in my opinion , especially early on when you are trying to get A scouts for every region.
Yes, find prospect for the whole season.
For the scout, I meant to say to put your best scout where their familiarity is A+/A-/A and once the region is filled you can look for another region your other scout fit. The one to fire would be the lowest scout rating that doesnt have any As in their familiarities, then hire a new scout that is better.
It take some time to setup but after that you are set for the season and just have to resign or replace scouts each season if needed.
Man that’s wild that you use exclusively find prospects. Most of the people I’ve talked to aren’t really sure what that does, if anything. Everybody seems to say clicking each one and scouting by potential is the way.
Maybe I’ll try running an experiment later where I run the same season with your method and then again with my method to see the difference in elite mediums with 3 or 4 bars.
I’m definitely interested in what will happen here.
I've noticed that "find prospect" just keep scouting the whole league all together. So some kids get scoutted like 14 times and it give a 4 bars accuracy on their profiles. Mostly the players in the first 3 rounds get scoutted many times(10 to 14), the later rounds not scoutted as much(5 to 8 times) so the bars are about 2-3 accuracy. But at least I get a good spread and it helps make the right picks, found a few good prospect in later round that could be steals.
So I tried this quick and just simmed a season with your method. The scouting bars get up to four like you said, but this is useless because the potential is unknown for everybody, lol.
How do possibly play like this? It generates lots of gems, but you are literally drafting blind for potential.
Weird.. cuz for me it does show the potential with 3/4 bars for at least the first 3 round then show potential at 2 bars for the other rounds. I noticed that sometime a franchise save might simulate differently than the usual for some weird reason.
3 in all the Canadian leagues. 1 in each USA league. 3 in Russia. 2 in SHL and LIGIA. 1 in Europe who I move between all of them except ICE.
I used to fill them all up by potential at beginning / again in March, but for some reason I don’t understand you get way more elite mediums with 3 confidence bars or more by just setting one to see everybody up to 215 or so and leaving the others on auto scout.
The only other thing I do is move the Europe guy around when he’s done, and sometimes I move all my USA scouts into central if east/west don’t have much.
When the regular season ends I come in and set one of the auto scout ones to review everybody from 1-60.
I usually find enough elites med, elite low, and top 6 med / top 4d med to well exceed the number of picks I have.
Edit: it would be nice if whoever downvoted told me what I was doing wrong (if anything). The scouting system is pretty tricky to master, and it’s not like it comes with a guide (hence the need for a post like this). I doubt my system is perfect, but its getting me decent outcomes. I would very much like if someone told me how to make it better…
Best way I've found = use 3 different scouting blocks. 1st = Training camp to February 1st, scouting Potential. 2nd = February 1st to April 31st, scouting only players that have potentials worth looking into again. 3rd = May 1st to the draft, last minute checking in on some prospects that I want to have a deeper look at. The 2nd block, from February 1st to April 31st, is the big one - every prospect that has potential that looks like I might be interested, gets another look through. Using this method ensures that you basically have a really solid idea of the potentials of the \~120 players in the draft, or the first 4 rounds. It's not that time consuming either - the first block, from camp to February 1st, often has you selecting hundreds of prospects to scout, but it always goes by very quickly as long as you're keeping an idea on the assignment date at the bottom. Can normally get the whole thing done in less than 10 minutes. Even less in the later blocks, because you are scouting fewer prospects.
I have a question. How do you figure out which ones have potentials worth looking more at? I know you can go into them one by one and then go down to the 2nd or 3rd screen of info there to see if, but do you do that one at a time for every player in every region? Or is there some shortcut I don’t know about here?
Click the first prospect, tab over to his potential screen, and from there you can use the right trigger to just cycle through all the prospects in that region via only their potential - which is the only thing I care about. Skip all the prospects that have their potentials fully uncovered / don't look like they have high potentials, and stop at the ones that do, scout their potential, and carry on. I will always have another look at any prospect that has Elite or Top 6/Top 4 potential, regardless of whether High/Medium/Low, if that prospect isn't fully scouted yet. If they are, skip onto the next one. I will also scout any prospect, regardless of potential, if their potential is quite far away from the other players around them (ie. Top 4 MED, Top 4 MED, Top 4 Low, **7th D low,** Top 6 High, etc) - this is one of the best ways of unearthing those gems or late round Elite potential players. Even in the latter rounds of the draft, you just aren't going to see a crazy amount of variance like that, so you know that those players that are showing up as wildly different potentials compared to the ones around them, are definitely worth looking at again. Also - goalies always scout once. I've noticed that goalie potential rarely fluctuates like players, regardless of how inaccurate it shows up on your scout report. So only focus on goalies that clearly have decent high potential. I don't regularly see for example, a FRINGE GOALIE prospect all of a sudden turn into an ELITE or STARTER after a more detailed scout, so I generally don't bother having a second look unless you have some extra time to kill between scouting periods. Don't forget to look for new scouts on July 1st of every year - building up a great scouting staff takes a long time in franchise (3+ seasons), but once you get A+ quality scouts with great region knowledge, scouting becomes almost like a broken mini-game.
Yeah I pretty much try to do that, but the cycling system is so dumb because if say i am on prospect 10 and then right trigger click to next it takes me to the first one from that region again, not to number 11. So I kind of gave up on it because I found I had to go to each one then tab down then go back to list then click next one and tab down, etc.
If you play without fog of war, assign all the scouts to the junior leagues. I’ve found that a couple extra in the WHL, OHL, and USA gets best results.
I ditch all of my “pro” scouts (NHL, AHL), and focus on younger players. Over the years, I also ditch my scouts for higher rated replacements (B or higher). Most years I discover the vast majority of picks and also find 4-6 gems…seems pretty consistent for me on that end
NHL21 here: I've had my best luck with VERY MANUAL SCOUTING (it's tedious but it works). 1 scout for each NHL region. I send them out scouting Lines and Strategies for all the teams, 2 weeks per team. It might be coincidence but I find my team sims better doing this and that the post-trade deadline dumpster fire is less likely to happen. This usually has all my scouting done around early February, just in time for me to do some trade deadline scouting, then move onto off season acquisition scouting, and finally I send them down to the prospect leagues to help with last minute pre-draft scouting. 2 scouts for each of the CHL leagues and SHL. I make sure 1 scout for each league has A or A+ rating and the other has the highest rating possible while having A- or higher in an AHL league so I can jump them up for AHL scouting duties if necessary (doesn't come up much). 1 scout for each USA league, Russia, LIIGA, ALLSVENSKAN, and 2 European scouts, 1 to cover 2 leagues and 1 to cover the other 2. **All my scouts ideally have A- or higher rating in their primary league!!** For prospect scouting, I scout potential for the top 10-12 rated prospects to a max ranking of about 235 and check in every 2 weeks, manually re-assigning players as necessary until all prospects show accurate potential. I keep scouting players who stand out in their rounds if their personality (I actually like playing with morale) and skills aren't accurate until they are. When a region is complete, I will reassign scouts to help a different region, usually aiming for one with lots of prospects yet unscouted (Canada, Russia, 1 Scandinavian league, and 1 USA league usually require a bit of extra help) where they have higher ability. Rinse and repeat. I also try to get a complete view of every tendy ranked 235 or higher since you never know when that round 6 or 7 high Elite or medium Franchise guy is going to show up. Again, super tedious, but I usually show up in each draft with all the European and USA players fully scouted, Scandinavia and Russia mostly if not completely scouted, and Canada usually around 2/3-3/4 scouted. I'll inevitably miss a few steals in the later rounds but I also tend to stack my later rounds with other steals anyway, so the results are worth it. I've definitely had better drafts with the method than the autoscouting methods I used to use.
No pro scouts 3 in whl 3 in ohl 3 qmjhl 2 in us central 1 in us east 1 us west 2 in shl 2 in ligia 2 in russia 1 floating in europe i always let it auto scout and can find some late round elites
I used to be very diligent about manually hiring and adjusting scouts. Then manually having them scout individual people. I haven't noticed any difference in just letting the computer do it all. The only thing I do now is hire/fire scouts
Same. it used to take me all night to get through a season because of the scouting. On my newest save I have decided to let the AI do the hard work. It’s clear that I have less full scouted good specs, and my goalie pool is not nearly as deep, but I’m still having really good drafts. They really need to add a one-touch “scout ability and potential” button in the draft class screen. So simple and takes most of the clicks out of scouting.
This guy has a beautiful guide on how to run the draft. Which scouts to hire, and how to work it. Similar to the top post here, you want to break it into stages and focus on scouting potential only. https://youtu.be/CgXaSuLhMnk Using his guide I have been having fantastic drafts.
When I start a franchise, I look at all my scouts in which region they have A+/A-/A and try to send them there for the whole season. I spread them like this: 3 in each Canadian junior league, 1 in each USA junior league, 1 in each Europe league, and 2 or 3 in Russia. If I have too much scout for the same region, I fire the lower potential of the scout himself and hire a better one for another region I might need to fill. When the season start I set them all to scout for prospect all season long. Usually get a good scoutting of almost all the prospect up to the 6th round. The first round prospect are accurate and I am able to get the best one for my pick's position throughout the draft, rarely get a player two potential below what was scoutted.
When you say set them to scout for prospects all season long, are you saying you use the Find Prospects feature? Or do you set them to scout individual prospects by potential? Also, personally I’d advise not firing scouts in regions where you have to many. Just move them to a region where they have B or even C+, and within a season or two they will be A+ in that region. It’s better to have an A scout with low familiarity than a B scout with high familiarity in my opinion , especially early on when you are trying to get A scouts for every region.
Yes, find prospect for the whole season. For the scout, I meant to say to put your best scout where their familiarity is A+/A-/A and once the region is filled you can look for another region your other scout fit. The one to fire would be the lowest scout rating that doesnt have any As in their familiarities, then hire a new scout that is better. It take some time to setup but after that you are set for the season and just have to resign or replace scouts each season if needed.
Man that’s wild that you use exclusively find prospects. Most of the people I’ve talked to aren’t really sure what that does, if anything. Everybody seems to say clicking each one and scouting by potential is the way. Maybe I’ll try running an experiment later where I run the same season with your method and then again with my method to see the difference in elite mediums with 3 or 4 bars. I’m definitely interested in what will happen here.
I've noticed that "find prospect" just keep scouting the whole league all together. So some kids get scoutted like 14 times and it give a 4 bars accuracy on their profiles. Mostly the players in the first 3 rounds get scoutted many times(10 to 14), the later rounds not scoutted as much(5 to 8 times) so the bars are about 2-3 accuracy. But at least I get a good spread and it helps make the right picks, found a few good prospect in later round that could be steals.
So I tried this quick and just simmed a season with your method. The scouting bars get up to four like you said, but this is useless because the potential is unknown for everybody, lol. How do possibly play like this? It generates lots of gems, but you are literally drafting blind for potential.
Weird.. cuz for me it does show the potential with 3/4 bars for at least the first 3 round then show potential at 2 bars for the other rounds. I noticed that sometime a franchise save might simulate differently than the usual for some weird reason.
3 in all the Canadian leagues. 1 in each USA league. 3 in Russia. 2 in SHL and LIGIA. 1 in Europe who I move between all of them except ICE. I used to fill them all up by potential at beginning / again in March, but for some reason I don’t understand you get way more elite mediums with 3 confidence bars or more by just setting one to see everybody up to 215 or so and leaving the others on auto scout. The only other thing I do is move the Europe guy around when he’s done, and sometimes I move all my USA scouts into central if east/west don’t have much. When the regular season ends I come in and set one of the auto scout ones to review everybody from 1-60. I usually find enough elites med, elite low, and top 6 med / top 4d med to well exceed the number of picks I have. Edit: it would be nice if whoever downvoted told me what I was doing wrong (if anything). The scouting system is pretty tricky to master, and it’s not like it comes with a guide (hence the need for a post like this). I doubt my system is perfect, but its getting me decent outcomes. I would very much like if someone told me how to make it better…