I have had an unusual experience recently that I thought might be interesting to share & get comment on.
Lately I have begun a new fictional league using my customary setting based the early 1970s. Typically when I start such a league, I let it run forward for 10 or 12 years, to generate a bit of an historical record and then I take over one of the weaker and smaller-market teams. It usually takes 4 or 5 years to clear the existing contracts, find a good scout with high ratings, and start building a winner through drafting. Trust me when I say that I have a lot of experience doing this, since I've owned every version of OOTP since 2 or 3!
This year, things have gone quite differently. Nine years into my "dynasty," my team is still mired at the bottom of the standings and my minor-league system is rated 23rd out of the 24 teams in the league. This is the case even though my recently retired scout had "outstanding" and "LEGENDARY" ratings across the board. I should explain that I don't use any player ratings in my games except fielding and speed, having been converted years ago to Malleus Dei's "Let's play stats only!" crusade. So when I draft, I depend exclusively on the scouts' ratings and the draftees' records in college and high school. As I said above, this approach has served me well enough in the past.
So what has happened in this most recent league? One idea that occurs to me is that the ratings shown for scouts and coaches are not 100% reliable. The usually are, by this line of thinking, so that most of the time a coach or scout who is said to be outstanding at what he does really is. (This would explain why most of the time my way of doings things has been moderately successful, because most of the time my scouts are as good as they're supposed to be) If this is really the case, then I applaud this bit of "fog of war" in the game, although I think we should be told about it, so we can learn to factor in a bit of uncertainty when hiring scouts and coaches and renewing their contracts. There's nothing unrealistic in Markus revealing this bit of the engine's secrets, because in doing so he would only be enhancing the game's realism.
There's a second and possibly more interesting reason for the lack of success, which is that my "outstanding" and "LEGENDARY" scout also stongly favored tools instead of ability and this preference, combined with the invisibility of ratings, may have led my scout's recommendations to be less useful than they might otherwise have been. Does this make sense? I'm not sure.
Finally, there's a third possibility which I do not think is in the game, but which maybe ought to be. This is that scouts and coaches have the same personalities that players have, and sometimes they slack off and don't work very hard. One thing I've always liked about Football Manager I that when hiring scouts and coaches for your clubs you have to take into consideration their work habits as well as their pure ratings. I think OOTP could use a dose of this kind of reality somewhere along the line, too.
Well, there it is. Sorry to be so long-winded, but I thought the assembled multitude might find it interesting to read about this, and I know I would benefit from hearing your thoughts on what might be going on. Meanwhile, my woe-begotten club now has a new scout, who, if not "outstanding" and "LEGENDARY" in all of his ratings, is at least "excellent." So we all have high hopes for the future.
