Young players losing defensive ratings?
 

Hey everyone, I drafted a defensive whiz in the first round. Part of the appeal was that he wasn't the best offensive prospect available but he could flat out play defense. 200 in experience (or close to it) at 2B, 3B, SS, LF and CF and he was 80+ (on a 100 scale) in all of them. Now a year later I'm seeing that he's losing ratings as I'm working on other positions for him... Not much but his 200's are going down by 5 - 12 pts. At first I fixed it manually but it's happened about 3-4 times now and it seems to happen every week.

I know veteran players lose ground as their skills diminish but do they do the players actually get rusty at positions and lose experience too? Is there any way to turn this diminishing effect off? I thought that once a player reached 200 in the experience section that he had mastered a position and could play it as long as his actual skills didn't go away...

First, you are looking under the hood. The 200 experience rating is not a visible rating and due to its wide scale absolutely should change often in either direction. It's nice to see that this happens. I rarely look at players in that detail. I'm not certain but don't think that 190 vs 200 is going to have a significant effect on defensive performance if the base skills remain high. You can play the game any way you want but the general idea is to limit information available to the human player in order to give the AI a chance. Your choice of course.

Second, he was a recent draft pick and all young players undergo variable development. This should be expected. The genius of OOTP lies in the development/aging curve which by definition is heavily weighed to the negative as we know most players do not succeed. It's quite possible changes similar to your edits may have occurred naturally over several weeks or months. Being concerned about under the hood ratings on a weekly basis may be a bit much and reacting to changes with edits may prompt further changes. Just my opinion, I have no evidence.

Third, he may decline and not become the player you want or he may become a superstar. A lot of this is out of your control just like real life. My suggestion is step back don't look under the hood, put the player at the right level and in the right position and let the results tell you what he is.


Merry Christmas