OOTP 26 wish list: trading "hard" mode, draft bonus pools + pre-draft rankings, & scouting

[rayhorton728]

I've really enjoyed a lot of the newer "optional" features that have given the game more nuance and complexity, though I admit that some of them tend to be more trouble than they are worth and I end up turning them off ("carrier pigeon," er, "hard mode") or ignoring them (development sliders...for now). In light of these features, though, I've had a few ideas I'd like to suggest for next year or future releases.

Revamp the "carrier pigeon" trading system with a more consequential "make this work now" button, the use of which irritates the other GM when you use it too often. One of the more useful features of contract negotiation with players is the real-time feedback you get on how the player is feeling about your offers and your responses to their counter-offers. What if, instead of a hard mode that forces you to make a blind trade offer and wait an entire day for feedback, we could make trading work more like contract negotiations? You make a trade proposal, ask what it would take to get a particular package, or ask what the other GM would give you for one or more specific players, and then you go back and forth using something like the "make this work now" feature ... but not indefinitely. Instead, if you nickel and dime too often, asking them for more after they've already agreed to offers, they start to get grumpy and eventually break off negotiations. Broken off negotiations could then maybe affect your GM reputation, and other GM's personalities could factor into how patient they are with more drawn out negotiations. Maybe there could even be other factors that impact how much back-and-forth they'll put up with. Say, if you keep badgering a GM with an extensive negotiation in a random time like early May, they cut you off quickly and stop taking your calls for a month, but during "hot" times when GMs tend to have each other on speed dial (Winter Meetings, All Star Break, and Trade Deadline), there could be more tolerance for trying to get a deal "right" -- at least from GMs with easygoing and personable personality types.

Make drafts a bigger "event," with an option for using MLB-style bonus pools and "prospect pipleline" style pre-draft rankings. Watching my Guardians go 1:1 this year, I rather enjoyed all the strategy speculation (top talent overall or spread out the bonus pool?) and the competing rankings (Keith Law has this guy ranked 13th but Baseball America puts him at 7, etc.) leading up to draft day. Could we add a draft bonus pool system similar to the Intl. FA signing bonus pool system we have in place now? And what if, in addition to the OSA Mock Draft, we could get two or three different, side-by-side "top 100 draft prospects" lists in order to better compare how our scouting reports match up to where players are likely to be drafted? Maybe the game could even give some local/national popularity to a few of the more exciting draft prospects so that teams get a small fan interest boost when, say, their team drafts a Paul Skenes 1:1 or has a Jac Caglione fall to their team at 6. Obviously this is sort of suggesting multiple changes, and while I suspect the pre-draft rankings and popularity boosts would be the easier of the three to pull off, I personally would love to see a bonus pool system most out of these ideas.

Make scouting the next piece of the game to get an in depth upgrade like the coaching system, the international camps, and the development lab. As it stands, so much of the game depends on the scouting director and the money you dump into and adjust through your scouting budget. Presumably, though, what this scouting budget represents is lots of real scouts who work for the scouting director and focus on different tasks. What if, instead of just a single scouting director, you could hire actual scouts for different areas (international, amateur, minors, etc.) and have those scouts work their way up through your system? In a system like this, when your scouting director retires or gets replaced, you don't suddenly lose every bit of progress (for instance, starting from zero with the international camps when a scout retires after the playoffs), because knowledge of different players is coming from different scouts, and in many cases your scouting directors come up through the ranks of your scouting system.

Have others had similar ideas? I'd love to hear them!

[biggerme]

And I need Trading difficulty setting for a more casual player, light, let me live my life on a difficulty that lets me enjoy those little treats. I know that it reduces reality but I don't need another reality staring at me.