[Syd Thrift]

The issue with comparing it to FM is that OOTP ratings are by and large directly based on stats. Speed isn't actually line speed, it's SB rate, Power is how often a player hits HRs, and so on. In FM on the other hand, Finishing measures how well a player finds the goal once they're in range but there are like 10 other attributes at least that help them get in range, get open, and so on, and so neither that nor any other single attribute (or, for that matter, any algorithm you can create) measures "goal scoring ability". A lot of that, I'm sure, is due to the highly different nature of the two games: baseball is all about discrete outcomes that are (mostly) down to the interaction of one player vs another one, whereas soccer is highly organic. But the bottom line is, even if your scout tells you that a striker's Finishing just went up from 9 to 12, you have no way of knowing whether that means he's going to score 33% more goals in your system or not. Maybe it'll be 0 more goals.

In OOTP, when a scout notices an uptick in power, they're directly noticing that a player will hit more HRs. This presents a number of issues. IRL, a scout might say that a guy's bat speed has improved, but bat speed alone might not improve HR rate - what if he's still hitting the ball into the ground most of the time, for instance? IRL you'd also notice that a guy is still having problems making consistent contact and that would affect his power but the game engine doesn't work this way. But even if it did, you'd have that same basic issue: scouts aren't telling you if a guy suddenly figured out how to hit the curve, or if he has a hitch in his swing, or any of the other things that real-life scouts tell you when assessing a hitter, they're literally telling you what his statistics will be.

If you wanted to make the game scout like FM, you'd need to do one of two things:

- Completely redo the game engine so that instead of using player "skills" like BABIP or Avoid Ks you'd have a whole mess of attributes that combine to create BABIP, Avoid Ks, and so on. This would require a *lot* of rework in the game and make it very, very hard to do past seasons (which, let's be fair, FM straight up has zero support for historical play).

- Add some kind of layer in between the scout and the actual ratings that will abstract this, which is basically what I've been advocating all along.

Scouting just plain doesn't work right now and won't work until the devs understand why it doesn't work. All of these funky little add-ons do zero to affect this issue.