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

[locuspc]

It's worth noting that the ratings dynamically rescale, so somebody is going to be the best player in 2064 and get that top rating. The key issue is the handover from real players to fictional generated players. The question is what happens in the 2030s: do the fictional players start making their mark on MLB as they age into their primes, or do they have to wait for the old generation to completely age out and retire before they can come out of the shadows?

[Rain King]

Originally Posted by locuspc

It's worth noting that the ratings dynamically rescale, so somebody is going to be the best player in 2064 and get that top rating. The key issue is the handover from real players to fictional generated players. The question is what happens in the 2030s: do the fictional players start making their mark on MLB as they age into their primes, or do they have to wait for the old generation to completely age out and retire before they can come out of the shadows?

IMO, everything should be checked first in a fictional setting where everything is being generated by the game.

If it is working well there, but not with the MLB roster set then the issue is likely with the roster set and not the game engine itself and that is a major distinction.

I'll run a test with the standard game for 10 years and see what things look like there next.

[Rain King]

With the Standard game, in 2034 on Opening Day.

Filtered to players under the Age of 29 and at least a 50 Overall (which should get us only generated players).

[CBLCardinals]

Originally Posted by Rain King

With the Standard game, in 2034 on Opening Day.

Filtered to players under the Age of 29 and at least a 50 Overall (which should get us only generated players).

Good information

Having a few IAFA players rise to be superstars looks realistic to me. Real MLB has literally 4 current 80 grade players per Baseball America.

Also with 50+ at least grade 50 IAFA’s also looks very encouraging!

[OutS|der]

Originally Posted by Daniel_09

if you think that the prospects do not reach their full potential you can set the TCR to 0 where all players in 99.9% reach their full potential since there is no variation of talent.

A 0 TCR will not result is 99.9% of prospects reaching their potential, I doubt it's even 50% or even 25%.

TCR hits every player not just prospects.

[sprague]

Originally Posted by OutS|der

A 0 TCR will not result is 99.9% of prospects reaching their potential, I doubt it's even 50% or even 25%.

TCR hits every player not just prospects.

there is no TCR of 0
1 is the lowest the game will allow


Even on 1, I have noticed quite massive swings of many players (I use it for historical development games) and every so often I have to readjust a player who takes quite a hit. Granted it might be 10 players per year.


Not a complaint, it is doing what it is intended, just letting you know

[Cluboris]

Originally Posted by thenewchuckd

This.

Actually I don't really care about the ratings to be honest. I am simply asking to be able: with the right staff & the right budget, etc to be able to make good decisions (and maybe even get some timely feedback when I didn't)

Also, am I the only one having trouble getting every single top rated 16 year old international amateur that I spend top dollar on out of the minors? I'd even take a guy who can get to be a utlity player or play in AAA.

This has been my experience, as someone who plays the game as a GM and tries to build a franchise into a perennial playoff contender.

I think that if all you want to do is wind OOTP up and then sit back and watch your baseball universe play out over time, the testing done by some indicates the program does a good job of creating a realistic spread of talent using modern rating systems.

BUT I am playing the role of a GM. if I hire a legendary scout, my staff is full of guys that are outstanding or better at development/mechanics/aging, I pour money into my development program, micromanage my prospects and lean towards guys with high work ethic/intelligence/adaptability, I feel like I should hit more on IAFAs and be able to more easily identify talent in the draft pool, and as those kids come up through my system they should develop into stars more often than they are doing now.

What I am seeing, and granted I haven't done a ton of testing like a lot of you have, is even though I do all the stuff mentioned above, it seems kind of arbitrary whether the players in my system develop into solid major league ballplayers. And since the inner workings of how all of this stuff plays out is hidden, I feel like no matter what dial I twist or button I push, it has no real effect on how the players in my system develop. The program is going to spit out a few superstars, some higher level major leaguers, and the rest are league average.

Of course guys are going to bust, my scout will get it wrong sometimes, dudes will be late bloomers, etc etc. But if the same numbers are produced regardless of what I do as GM, well that takes away from the enjoyment I get from the game.

At any rate, thank you devs for the game, I have gotten countless hours of enjoyment out of it. If someone in the know could shed some light on whether my GM decisions have an effect, that would be great. Thanks for reading.

[jpeters1734]

Originally Posted by Cluboris

This has been my experience, as someone who plays the game as a GM and tries to build a franchise into a perennial playoff contender.

I think that if all you want to do is wind OOTP up and then sit back and watch your baseball universe play out over time, the testing done by some indicates the program does a good job of creating a realistic spread of talent using modern rating systems.

BUT I am playing the role of a GM. if I hire a legendary scout, my staff is full of guys that are outstanding or better at development/mechanics/aging, I pour money into my development program, micromanage my prospects and lean towards guys with high work ethic/intelligence/adaptability, I feel like I should hit more on IAFAs and be able to more easily identify talent in the draft pool, and as those kids come up through my system they should develop into stars more often than they are doing now.

What I am seeing, and granted I haven't done a ton of testing like a lot of you have, is even though I do all the stuff mentioned above, it seems kind of arbitrary whether the players in my system develop into solid major league ballplayers. And since the inner workings of how all of this stuff plays out is hidden, I feel like no matter what dial I twist or button I push, it has no real effect on how the players in my system develop. The program is going to spit out a few superstars, some higher level major leaguers, and the rest are league average.

Of course guys are going to bust, my scout will get it wrong sometimes, dudes will be late bloomers, etc etc. But if the same numbers are produced regardless of what I do as GM, well that takes away from the enjoyment I get from the game.

At any rate, thank you devs for the game, I have gotten countless hours of enjoyment out of it. If someone in the know could shed some light on whether my GM decisions have an effect, that would be great. Thanks for reading.

GMs are not farm directors. The job of a GM is to win at the major league level. I love prospect development as much as anyone, but the game is to win the World Series, not have the best ranked farm system.

[Syd Thrift]

Originally Posted by sprague

there is no TCR of 0
1 is the lowest the game will allow


Even on 1, I have noticed quite massive swings of many players (I use it for historical development games) and every so often I have to readjust a player who takes quite a hit. Granted it might be 10 players per year.


Not a complaint, it is doing what it is intended, just letting you know

Even without TCR on (or basically when it's set to 1), you're still going to see players develop or not develop - development is handled on a semi-random basis and also daily I believe - players get hit with aging, sometimes the moment they turn 27, and players take hits to their ratings when they suffer severe injuries.

Advising people to turn TCR "off" if they want the Ronald Acunas of the world to develop "normally" isn't going to do what people think it's going to do either by the way. Acuna graduated the minors with a 65. We keep bringing that up because in OOTP terms in order for a 65 to become an 80 he needs positive TCR to happen to him. In Fangraphs terms they talk about a guy's "95th percentile" chances; in OOTP guys getting lucky with TCR is the 1 in 20 chance.

TCR as you noted also hits veterans. I personally really really like it in conjunction with turning ratings off, as you're pretty much completely in the dark when your 31 year old comes out hitting .150 after 120 at-bats - is this guy washed or is he just having a bad run? To me that is as it should be. I won't bore everyone with my opinion about how scouting ought to work except to say that I think a lot of people who are in here complaining about the Ronald Acunas and Adley Rutcshmanns of the world would very, very much not like it.

[Cluboris]

Originally Posted by jpeters1734

GMs are not farm directors. The job of a GM is to win at the major league level. I love prospect development as much as anyone, but the game is to win the World Series, not have the best ranked farm system.

Ok, cool. Then I play the game as a Farm Director. As the game only offers two modes of play, what you describe I would call manager only. When I play in GM mode, I control the entire organization, top to bottom.

What I try to do while I play is to build up my farm system, which the game allows me to do in GM mode. You can call it whatever you want.

[Daniel_09]

Of course, but taking into account the opinions expressed above, there are people who want a player with a potential of 80 to stay at 80 and have a high chance of being 80 at the current time.

For that reason, it is recommended to set the TCR to 0 or 1 which is the real minimum value, since it has high chances that a player with 80/80 potential does not become a 25/25 player.

This almost completely eliminates randomness from the ratings. Apparently, a lot more people than one would think want this.

[Daniel_09]

in other words, there are people who only want the player's randomness to be on the positive side, and not on the side that turns the player into a career minor leaguer.

[OutS|der]

Originally Posted by Daniel_09

in other words, there are people who only want the player's randomness to be on the positive side, and not on the side that turns the player into a career minor leaguer.

No I turn it down to 1 cause I wa t the development engine to determine if the player reaches thier potential. Just because it's set to 1 doesn't mean an 80 potential will reach that even 25% of the time, let alone 100%.

How you handle that players development is what determines if they develop or not. Rather than the luck of TCR turning a player into a stud

[Daniel_09]

Originally Posted by OutS|der

No I turn it down to 1 cause I wa t the development engine to determine if the player reaches thier potential. Just because it's set to 1 doesn't mean an 80 potential will reach that even 25% of the time, let alone 100%.

How you handle that players development is what determines if they develop or not. Rather than the luck of TCR turning a player into a stud

Perfect, I still play with TCR 150 because I like that any kind of random situation can happen with the whole universe of players.

36 year old players with a ratings boost, or 25 year old players with a ratings reduction almost to retirement.

[pfholden]

Originally Posted by Lukas Berger

I think the main issue here now is that people are expecting development to work in an unrealistic way that it's not designed to do.

Most prospects don't develop to their peak potential. Very few prospects will ever develop to be over 50 ratings no matter what their peak potentials are. Many real-life draft classes don't have more than 15 or so above average MLB players once all is said and done, whatever their potential was viewed at the draft. Just because a player has an 80 potential for example, it does not mean he's expected to turn into an 80 overall rated player at his peak. Some may. Most will not. It's going to be a rare player to develop to a 55 or 60 or above rating. If you have an 80 rated prospect and he turns into a 55 or 60 player at his peak, this is a pretty good result.

This is even more the case this year than in previous years, because we've adjusted the overalls to incorporate standard deviations a bit more and thus they are a little tighter and they end up tracking a little closer to the real-life scale now (they are still not identical, so you will have more 70 and 80 players in OOTP than there would be in real-life f.e.). So more players will end up fairly tightly clustered in the 40-60 range once fully developed and it will be somewhat rarer to see a player to hit 60-80 than in previous version of the game. Thus a player whose ratings would have given him a 65 overall rating a couple versions back might have more of a 55 or a 60 now, even if the underlying ratings are essentially the same.

The original concern with development was more just that players were taking too long to develop and there were very few young players well developed. The patch does greatly improve that. What the patch does not do is to make all young players develop to max potential. That's not how it works in reality, and it's not how the game is supposed to work. The league talent levels will stay roughly equal over time (though they drop a bit from the initial roster set ratings, which is to be expected as these are slightly higher than the long term targets), which pretty clearly show that enough players are developing overall.

So, basically the 20-80 scale is adjusted to be more like real life, where 50 can loosely be considered average, but there may be more player with potential at the top of the scale in OOTP than in real life? This is all super helpful to know, and a positive change imo. Thanks, Lukas!

[SirMichaelJordan]

Originally Posted by Cluboris

This has been my experience, as someone who plays the game as a GM and tries to build a franchise into a perennial playoff contender.

I think that if all you want to do is wind OOTP up and then sit back and watch your baseball universe play out over time, the testing done by some indicates the program does a good job of creating a realistic spread of talent using modern rating systems.

BUT I am playing the role of a GM. if I hire a legendary scout, my staff is full of guys that are outstanding or better at development/mechanics/aging, I pour money into my development program, micromanage my prospects and lean towards guys with high work ethic/intelligence/adaptability, I feel like I should hit more on IAFAs and be able to more easily identify talent in the draft pool, and as those kids come up through my system they should develop into stars more often than they are doing now.

What I am seeing, and granted I haven't done a ton of testing like a lot of you have, is even though I do all the stuff mentioned above, it seems kind of arbitrary whether the players in my system develop into solid major league ballplayers. And since the inner workings of how all of this stuff plays out is hidden, I feel like no matter what dial I twist or button I push, it has no real effect on how the players in my system develop. The program is going to spit out a few superstars, some higher level major leaguers, and the rest are league average.

Of course guys are going to bust, my scout will get it wrong sometimes, dudes will be late bloomers, etc etc. But if the same numbers are produced regardless of what I do as GM, well that takes away from the enjoyment I get from the game.

At any rate, thank you devs for the game, I have gotten countless hours of enjoyment out of it. If someone in the know could shed some light on whether my GM decisions have an effect, that would be great. Thanks for reading.

Everything you mention should increase chance, not be a formula for success. If developing players were that easy with the right formula, I'm not sure how fun that would be.

And considering you admitted to having a small sample size, I'm not sure those chance increases would even appear.

[Cluboris]

Originally Posted by SirMichaelJordan

Everything you mention should increase chance, not be a formula for success. If developing players were that easy with the right formula, I'm not sure how fun that would be.

And considering you admitted to having a small sample size, I'm not sure those chance increases would even appear.

How fun it is is entirely subjective.

In previous versions of the game, with hundreds if not thousands of hours of game time spent, to me, there seemed to be a direct relationship between increasing development budgets, hiring well rated scouts and coaches, and seeing the chances of players in your system develop to the point where some of the highly rated guys would come up and have a positive impact on your big league club.

I haven't spent that kind of game time with 25 yet. But in starting multiple sims since purchase, and playing them forward a bit, and doing the things mentioned above, I'm not seeing the same results, and it seems development is more arbitrary. I'm not talking about developing a team of superstars and mastering some sort of formula for success. I'm cool with draft busts and guys fizzling out, getting older, or guys coming out of nowhere to develop later in the cycle.

I know the devs have changed the ratings and tinkered with the engine so development resembles statistically what you would find in the real world, and the numbers adhere to what publications like Baseball America and Fangraphs use to rate players, that's fine. If superstars and generational talent are rare that is wonderful and that's not what I am talking about.

What I want to know is, when I play, and do all the stuff, does that increase my likelihood of developing that guy? Or maybe with that increase in focus on development and coaching and high work ethic guys, will my farm system produce more above average players than the rest of the league? Because that is the way I like to play the game. Right now, I'm not seeing it, and based on this thread others aren't either.

[FantasyDrafter]

Originally Posted by Cluboris

This has been my experience, as someone who plays the game as a GM and tries to build a franchise into a perennial playoff contender.

I think that if all you want to do is wind OOTP up and then sit back and watch your baseball universe play out over time, the testing done by some indicates the program does a good job of creating a realistic spread of talent using modern rating systems.

BUT I am playing the role of a GM. if I hire a legendary scout, my staff is full of guys that are outstanding or better at development/mechanics/aging, I pour money into my development program, micromanage my prospects and lean towards guys with high work ethic/intelligence/adaptability, I feel like I should hit more on IAFAs and be able to more easily identify talent in the draft pool, and as those kids come up through my system they should develop into stars more often than they are doing now.

What I am seeing, and granted I haven't done a ton of testing like a lot of you have, is even though I do all the stuff mentioned above, it seems kind of arbitrary whether the players in my system develop into solid major league ballplayers. And since the inner workings of how all of this stuff plays out is hidden, I feel like no matter what dial I twist or button I push, it has no real effect on how the players in my system develop. The program is going to spit out a few superstars, some higher level major leaguers, and the rest are league average.

Of course guys are going to bust, my scout will get it wrong sometimes, dudes will be late bloomers, etc etc. But if the same numbers are produced regardless of what I do as GM, well that takes away from the enjoyment I get from the game.

At any rate, thank you devs for the game, I have gotten countless hours of enjoyment out of it. If someone in the know could shed some light on whether my GM decisions have an effect, that would be great. Thanks for reading.

I like this post. I want to feel like my development decisions matter for good or bad results. Right now it feels like choosing a player for the lab matters - good results can be really good, bad results can be really bad. Focus sliders seem to be underpowered fluff, both good and bad. Maybe the brakes need to be on there so people do not ruin their players, but I have TRIED to ruin players and it just doesn’t happen.

The players that come with the game seem to have a set range of outcomes they will not deviate from and then the generated players have the same restrictions, only they develop less/slower. No matter what my organization does to help or hurt their growth.

[Rain King]

Originally Posted by Cluboris

What I want to know is, when I play, and do all the stuff, does that increase my likelihood of developing that guy? Or maybe with that increase in focus on development and coaching and high work ethic guys, will my farm system produce more above average players than the rest of the league? Because that is the way I like to play the game. Right now, I'm not seeing it, and based on this thread others aren't either.

Can you quantify further how you are evaluating this? What specifically are you no longer seeing that you were seeing previously?

[SirMichaelJordan]

Originally Posted by Cluboris

How fun it is is entirely subjective.

In previous versions of the game, with hundreds if not thousands of hours of game time spent, to me, there seemed to be a direct relationship between increasing development budgets, hiring well rated scouts and coaches, and seeing the chances of players in your system develop to the point where some of the highly rated guys would come up and have a positive impact on your big league club.

I haven't spent that kind of game time with 25 yet. But in starting multiple sims since purchase, and playing them forward a bit, and doing the things mentioned above, I'm not seeing the same results, and it seems development is more arbitrary. I'm not talking about developing a team of superstars and mastering some sort of formula for success. I'm cool with draft busts and guys fizzling out, getting older, or guys coming out of nowhere to develop later in the cycle.

I know the devs have changed the ratings and tinkered with the engine so development resembles statistically what you would find in the real world, and the numbers adhere to what publications like Baseball America and Fangraphs use to rate players, that's fine. If superstars and generational talent are rare that is wonderful and that's not what I am talking about.

What I want to know is, when I play, and do all the stuff, does that increase my likelihood of developing that guy? Or maybe with that increase in focus on development and coaching and high work ethic guys, will my farm system produce more above average players than the rest of the league? Because that is the way I like to play the game. Right now, I'm not seeing it, and based on this thread others aren't either.

Nothing changed on that end. Doing all those things still increases your chance of developing good prospects. What changed is how OVR is calculated, and this year, there are fewer top-end guys.

We first need to define a successful prospect and then proceed from there. In the game (in some cases, IRL), a 50 OVR player is a successful prospect. Now, it can be debated how fast or slow prospects are reaching their peak, but that option is tweakable, and the default doesn't necessarily mean realistic but a general setting that applies to all levels of baseball.