Quote:
Originally Posted by StyxNCa
I have used the same settings you have and I have seen some players with real high potential sitting in the free agent list as well. I have sort of chalked it up to my scout being one of the best and his opinion is different than other scouts in the league. However, I also find it hard to believe that none of the other 23 scouts see what mine does.
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Just curious: have you tried playing with ratings on and scouting accuracy set to low? I haven't done that myself but it seems like it would be worth a shot.
IMO the problem that a lot of people are experiencing isn't so much that the game AI is stupid (although it does have its issues and always will, given that it's a computer game and not a human being) but that the scouting model is still waaaaaaaay too accurate. My ideal for the scouting model would be to bring back multiple scouts (perhaps the head could hire them himself and save you the hassle of micromanaging all that stuff) and have them actually base their reports on "watching" a guy play over a series. If a stud prospect went 1-12 with 5 strikeouts, he'd come back saying that the guy is terrible at avoiding Ks. Perhaps you'd want to temper this assessment with actual current ratings (the equivalent of seeing a lot of loud outs or quiet hits), but I think you'd still want the games witnessed themselves to be at the forefront. A scouting department might have the following personnel:
Minor league scout (for your minors, of course)
Several regional scouts (for scouting amateurs; I don't think computers are at a point where you can reasonably expect the game to simulate 10,000+ high school and college players a year, so you'd need to abstract this into having the game generate the draft-worthy players and having each regional guy look at 20% or 25% depending on how many regional scouts you had, which in turn would be based on your team scouting budget. The more guys a scout would have to look at, the less accurate his reports would be. If you had one
guy scouting the entire country for a 25-round draft by himself, his results might be no better than OSA's and similarly incomplete)
National cross-checker (to re-evaluate the best of the players the original scout found; this could be an optional position depending on a team's scouting budget)
Advance scout (to give you a heads-up on the next opponent)
Director of Player Development, (other country) (each DoPD would cost quite a bit of money themselves, but this would be the guy who would find hidden players and/or provide feedback on guys that can be had from Japan, Cuba, South Korea, the Domican Republic, and so on)
Assistant GM(provides info on the other teams in your league; also, he could be the person to interface with when you wanted to know about trade rumors throughout the league)
fireyournamehere.com(not paid for by your scouting department, of course; this would be a place you could go to read a blog written by some kid living in his mom's basement who has nothing better to do than to call out your bad GM moves)
My side issue is something that's been raised before: scouts are useful for judging potential ability, but why use them at all to tell you something the stats should already be revealing (current ability)? If a guy is blocked at 2nd base in the majors and therefore isn't getting at bats, asking the scouts is an okay way of abstracting watching him yourself in BP, but I'd like to see that more, well, realistic. Specifically in that case, I'd like to see a potentially wildly inaccurate assessment of his hitting abilities. Could you imagine if you had, to bring in a name from the past, Rob Ducey on your team and all you had to go by was how he did in practice? You'd want to start him for sure. Rob Ducey looked like Mickey Mantle in BP. Of course, in actual games he looked like Rob Ducey, but that's the point. A real-life manager might look at Ducey's past record (in game terms, his stats) and scouting reports from seasons past to determine if the guy is worth it. IRL there is a sense that once a guy gets to a certain age he's not going to suddenly change what kind of ballplayer he is. If you have younger guys who you think might have a chance to be big-league players, you put them somewhere where they get regular PT. This is for their development's sake, sure, but it's also so that you as a GM have a record you can base your moves on.