Anyone done any testing on prospect development in v25.2.52?

[FantasyDrafter]

Originally Posted by SirMichaelJordan

In this case, he will lose speed faster when he ages than he would if it was at default or higher...

Long story short "Development focus" is probably the wrong name to use for this feature. Its confusing people.

That is a great hypothesis. Based on Will’s comments I think that was the intent. Over many seasons there is no evidence that happens, certainly not at any rate that should deter anyone from doing it. Entire organizations (approx 75% in my case anyway) with zero in the speed bar should be noticeable.

What could be confusing is that there are so many “notches” in the bars, especially if it is really a ratio. That is 100% visual fluff. In ratio terms, if you think of it as:

1 1 1 1 1 1 1 - this is balanced

2 2 0 2 1 0 0 - this is how I set it up, as extreme as possible. Not with one player, with an organization. Zero (min) doesn’t give a noticeable penalty and 2 (max) doesn’t give a noticeable bump.

Those with faith it works or are happy that you can’t really deviate a players outcome with focus think this is good I guess. For those who do like this, don’t use the lab, because while daily focus or ignorance over many seasons might help turn a final editor number from 420 to 425 (if I want to believe) the lab can turn 420 into 460+ in one offseason.

Personally I think daily focus should have more impact. Positive and negative.

[SpartyQ]

After owning this game for many years, here are my thoughts...

The first step in fixing a problem, is admitting that you have a problem. And there is definitely a problem with prospects.

I am now 11 years into my Tigers sim. That is 220 rounds worth of draft picks. How many innings pitched or at-bats have my OOTP-generated draft picks or International Prospects completed? ZERO. A big, fat ZERO. Now, maybe I suck...but even a blind squirrel finds a nut. And I'm not even looking for nuts at this point...shoot, I'd take some partially digested mouse vomit at this point. It would be better than showing up at Scott Hatteberg's house at midnight and begging him with hat in hand to come bat cleanup and be the focal point of my anemic offense for the coming season.

Thankfully, my frustrated owner is not allowed to fire me, as with this track record I should be living in a van down by the river, not running a multi-billion dollar franchise into the ground. But here we are!

I do have faith that OOTP can fix this problem but in the meantime, I am ceasing all playing of the game as the prospecting is my favorite part and it's an unmitigated disaster at the moment.

[md40022]

^^^ well done post.

I was going to say that luring Scott Hatteberg to your team is better than asking Chris Pratt to put on a Scott Hatteberg jersey and then luring Chris Pratt to your team...... but actually, both scenarios would probably yield similar offensive production.

[Rain King]

Do other teams in your league have drafted players that are in the majors or is the league a bunch of 30-somethings?

If it is just your team that is something slightly different to investigate at least.

I took ownership of the Tigers in a Standard Game and am running through some years now to see what I see.

[SpartyQ]

Originally Posted by Rain King

Do other teams in your league have drafted players that are in the majors or is the league a bunch of 30-somethings?

If it is just your team that is something slightly different to investigate at least.

I took ownership of the Tigers in a Standard Game and am running through some years now to see what I see.

I would have to check on that...but I also run another one with 5 other friends and we each have a team. That one is 10 years in and everybody has the same problem/concern so far.

[Rain King]

I did a test with the Standard set and the team I controlled did have a couple of players from the draft in the majors in 2032. However, it was definitely fewer than the AI controlled teams...so there is potentially something for the developers to look into specifically when a human has control of the team. I imagine the tests they run checking the development curves may not be run with any human controlled teams.

Next, I am going to test a similar scenario with a fictional league to see if the results are similar there or if maybe this is related to the seeded rosters (although the AI teams seemed OK in my above test).

[Syd Thrift]

I am pretty positive that there is no "human team debuff" when it comes to development. This is one of these things where it's actually harder to code something like that in than to leave it out and as such if it were that this was being done it would be advertised as a feature.

What are you doing that AI teams are not doing / what are they doing that you aren't doing? I'm not even saying this isn't an issue; I'm saying that if we can figure out what, exactly is going to make human teams have lower cash-in rates than AI teams, we can present that to the devs and give them an easy pathway to fixing this potential issue.

[Rain King]

Originally Posted by Rain King

I did a test with the Standard set and the team I controlled did have a couple of players from the draft in the majors in 2032. However, it was definitely fewer than the AI controlled teams...so there is potentially something for the developers to look into specifically when a human has control of the team. I imagine the tests they run checking the development curves may not be run with any human controlled teams.

Next, I am going to test a similar scenario with a fictional league to see if the results are similar there or if maybe this is related to the seeded rosters (although the AI teams seemed OK in my above test).

I did a few more tests and things are looking fine for the human controlled teams (so I think the above test was likely an outlier...and it still had a couple of guys that had developed for the human team). I do agree, as Lukas has mentioned, that it could be tweaked to get a few more guys to be ready a little younger but I'm not seeing an "unmitigated disaster".

At this point, I think those of you that are experiencing this issue probably need to share your league files with the Devs.

I'm happy to look through them also to see if there is anything that stands out...but tests I'm running just aren't backing up the reports that are in this thread.

It doesn't mean an issue doesn't exist, but if it does it isn't showing in tests with default settings.

[locuspc]

I wonder if the conventional wisdom to get a "highly favors tools" scout is screwing people over here. If you're saying your prospects are developing worse than the AIs, maybe it's because you're picking up toolsy children instead of partially developed solid prospects, and those bust at a higher rate? The conventional wisdom for a while has been that HFT is just better in every way, but I've always kind of doubted that.

[Guthrien]

I simply feel 24 was kinder with prospect development. The drafts were more robust and it seemed easier to track a moderate progress with your higher picks. I'm purposely using feel/seemed because despite hundreds and hundreds of games in 24, and a few seasons and sims in 25 I can't point to more exhaustive proof.

For myself, I see it as the different tact 25 has taken towards assessing and measuring talent. Many people here have pointed to say, the Fangraphs top 100 prospect list. Look at the FV value of the best people drafted the last couple years and they run up pretty reliably into what I could see as the distribution in 25. A lot of 45s, a lot of 50s, and so on with a 70 value ceiling. It feels more realistic, and yet sometimes less fun.

I did post a couple weeks ago where I ran several, several 10 year sims and if prospects weren't developing, the WAR leader boards should all be existing talents. Instead, there was an extremely reasonable distribution of 'new' players, vets, and young prospects that were already established (your Wyatt Langford types). 3 WAR years were almost exclusively owned by 55+ players except for a few 50 SP (I only play 20/80 scale).

I'm sympathetic to both camps of complaint. There's reasonable evidence there is no "problem", yet my subjective experience is different. Maybe the difference is the greater attention to development altogether, though if anything the Lab feels almost negligible in it's impact to me (given it's measure of success and outcome).

[TheChief]

Can't people just turn up the quality of players created in draft if they want better players? I mean you could do this in previous versions

[FantasyDrafter]

Originally Posted by TheChief

Can't people just turn up the quality of players created in draft if they want better players? I mean you could do this in previous versions

There are a lot of topics going on here.

On this point, no, because the issue is speed of development on game-generated players. Example - sign the number 1 ITL amateur after your first season. He is 80 potential and his editor ratings match that. The AI agrees he’s great - he is a top 10 prospect in all of baseball immediately as a 17 year old. You eagerly anticipate news of his development so you can promote him up the ranks. You tell him what to focus on, get him the finest coaches in all the land and run him through the development lab every offseason (unfortunately he is one of the “No Improvement” guys every time though).

Then 3 seasons later he is still a top 10 prospect but his actuals haven’t budged. It can happen IRL, sure, but it’s a little more fun if they do something.

Devs have acknowledged the game created (fictional) players in general are too slow to develop. I think it is supposed to be addressed soon, I’m hoping next week.

[Syd Thrift]

Man, I don't want to be mean here but when "more fun" comes down on the side of "easier" vs. "more realistic"... I remember similar complaints when the game ramped up injuries to the now-realistic level that they are at. I'm sorry but this is part of the game. Sometimes - maybe most of the time - prospects don't pan out and that means that when you do get a blue-chipper who turns into... Chipper Jones, that ought to be cause for celebration, not some mild "welp, he was what we thought he was" moment.

The draft in MLB has never, ever been a place where you can grab someone you can absolutely count on. It's flat-out not the same as the NFL or NBA draft in that respect and expecting draftees to turn out like that is, no offense, misguided. If that's not "fun" for you, my recommendation is to turn development way up and accept that you're playing a modified league.

[FantasyDrafter]

Originally Posted by TheChief

Can't people just turn up the quality of players created in draft if they want better players? I mean you could do this in previous versions

Originally Posted by Syd Thrift

Man, I don't want to be mean here but when "more fun" comes down on the side of "easier" vs. "more realistic"... I remember similar complaints when the game ramped up injuries to the now-realistic level that they are at. I'm sorry but this is part of the game. Sometimes - maybe most of the time - prospects don't pan out and that means that when you do get a blue-chipper who turns into... Chipper Jones, that ought to be cause for celebration, not some mild "welp, he was what we thought he was" moment.

The draft in MLB has never, ever been a place where you can grab someone you can absolutely count on. It's flat-out not the same as the NFL or NBA draft in that respect and expecting draftees to turn out like that is, no offense, misguided. If that's not "fun" for you, my recommendation is to turn development way up and accept that you're playing a modified league.

The subject keeps getting changed. I didn’t say easier. I didn’t even say improve. I said do something.

The devs have acknowledged the game generated players are slower to do something than the ones that start with the game.

From a realism standpoint, I honestly don’t know - does Druw Jones have the same rating on the 20/80 scale today and prospect ranking as he did when he got drafted? Does anyone from that draft?

[ChrisJNelson]

Originally Posted by Syd Thrift

Man, I don't want to be mean here but when "more fun" comes down on the side of "easier" vs. "more realistic"... I remember similar complaints when the game ramped up injuries to the now-realistic level that they are at. I'm sorry but this is part of the game. Sometimes - maybe most of the time - prospects don't pan out and that means that when you do get a blue-chipper who turns into... Chipper Jones, that ought to be cause for celebration, not some mild "welp, he was what we thought he was" moment.

The draft in MLB has never, ever been a place where you can grab someone you can absolutely count on. It's flat-out not the same as the NFL or NBA draft in that respect and expecting draftees to turn out like that is, no offense, misguided. If that's not "fun" for you, my recommendation is to turn development way up and accept that you're playing a modified league.

You're being disingenuous. People aren't complaining that prospects sometimes bust. They're complaining that no prospect EVER becomes elite, or basically ever reaches the majors. That is the issue some of us are clearly noticing, and it's not a problem to be dismisssed.

Personally, I'm the kind of person that "cheats" by giving myself perfect scouts, perfect coaches, max spending on scouting, development, farm system. Even in that scenario, I can't get an elite prospect to develop over years/decades of sim.

If I can't even cheat my way to occasionally having an elite prospect pan out, the game is broken, plain and simple. OOTP24 maybe being too generous with player development does not mean over-correcting is impossible.

[SirMichaelJordan]

Originally Posted by ChrisJNelson

You're being disingenuous. People aren't complaining that prospects sometimes bust. They're complaining that no prospect EVER becomes elite, or basically ever reaches the majors. That is the issue some of us are clearly noticing, and it's not a problem to be dismisssed.

Personally, I'm the kind of person that "cheats" by giving myself perfect scouts, perfect coaches, max spending on scouting, development, farm system. Even in that scenario, I can't get an elite prospect to develop over years/decades of sim.

If I can't even cheat my way to occasionally having an elite prospect pan out, the game is broken, plain and simple. OOTP24 maybe being too generous with player development does not mean over-correcting is impossible.

Then that is just not a true assessment at all.

[Rain King]

Originally Posted by FantasyDrafter

Devs have acknowledged the game created (fictional) players in general are too slow to develop. I think it is supposed to be addressed soon, I’m hoping next week.

This isn't what they said. They said there could maybe be a few more prospects that develop younger...but "in general" they are developing when they should. They are talking very minor tweaks.

[Rain King]

Originally Posted by ChrisJNelson

People aren't complaining that prospects sometimes bust. They're complaining that no prospect EVER becomes elite, or basically ever reaches the majors. That is the issue some of us are clearly noticing, and it's not a problem to be dismisssed.

I encourage you to post your league files for others to examine. I'm just not able to replicate this situation.

[snepp]

Originally Posted by SirMichaelJordan

Then that is just not a true assessment at all.

I have to concur, at least post-patch the results have been much better. That's not to say there isn't some work to be done with pacing and the relationship between initial players and generated ones, but never and broken appear to be highly exaggerated from what I've seen over 35 seasons.

[FantasyDrafter]

Originally Posted by Rain King

This isn't what they said. They said there could maybe be a few more prospects that develop younger...but "in general" they are developing when they should. They are talking very minor tweaks.

I don’t think I said “major tweak.” But if you sim out a few years (like to 2028/2029) and look at 19-20ish year old prospects who have supposedly been developing for 2-3 years that the game engine considers to be good based on their top 100 rankings and think that is how it it should look, we simply have much different opinions on what reality is. Your opinion might even be correct. But they don’t match and never will.

Seemingly there is a small but devoted group on the forum that believes the development team is infallible. I’m sure it is nice for them to have that level of support and devotion. Let’s just all keep in mind that just because they coded it doesn’t mean it is right - I respect that this is a pretty complicated game developed over 25 years that attempts to create a realistic “baseball world” out of the box, but with 25 years of development there is layer on top of layer that has unintended consequences that crop up when things are changed - both in the execution in game and the reaction of the player base. Sometimes things that are touted as big additions one year are turned off by default the next for example.