[Timofmars]

This thread is quite confusing to me. I don't get where some of your conclusions are coming from. Here's the assumptions I would make.

Higher importance of ratings should mean teams make decisions based on what the ratings say the player should do. So a poorly performing player will still be valued the same compared to if he were performing well. I would think this would make the AI as strong as possible since the true ratings should be driving the performance of the player, and differences in actual results from that expected performance are just luck. Also you shouldn't be able to get a discount on a star during a bad year, or trade away your mediocre guy on a hot streak for a premium if the AI doesn't look at stats.

But some caveats regarding the above are:

1. The ratings the AI sees probably depends on their scouting quality.

2. Maybe some combination of attributes can lead to better or more valuable performances than a different combination of attributes even with both cases having the same overall rating. In other words, maybe even 100% accurate overall rating doesn't tell you the true value of the expected performance, and so including a comparison of stats in the evaluation might lead to more accurate determinations of player value in some cases, as the AI will favor players that do better, even if it's not clear why they do better.


On the other hand, having greater dependence on stats does the opposite. Although ratings will probably still be used to some extent even with it set to 0%, since it seems that any stats that don't have a large enough sample size will be prorated in how much it is used in the AI evaluation. So for example, maybe at the beginning of a new season, there are no current stats, so the percentage of evaluation that comes from that will be 0%. Although I don't know if those missing stats will default to the AI using ratings as the replacement, or if the evaluation will just ignore the current year factor, making the other factors more important proportional to what you had set in the game settings.

I would also think that the setting to include AI evaluation in ratings would just affect what ratings you, the human, get. I think it just lets you see what the average AI manager sees (if they had your scouting). Maybe you could use it to see who is overvalued by the AI in your team, etc. Or may it could give you a good idea of what the AI sees when it is making some decisions you think seem strange. Maybe setting scouting accuracy to 100% and turning on AI evaluation in overall ratings would help test out how different AI evaluation settings really change things.



I think the optimal AI in terms of being as competitive as possible would be if the AI used ratings as much as possible, minus some amount based on the accuracy level of their scouting, where less accuracy means they rely more on stats. After all, it should be possible to determine a probable error range interval for stats depending on the size of the sample, and if you could determine an error range for your scouting too, it should be possible to weight each of these based on error range and combine them into a best guess of the true player rating. Though this is something for the game programmers to do, not something players have much control over except in maybe making stats matter more when scouting accuracy is turned down, or making it 100% ratings when scouting is 100% accurate.



I also wonder if the ratings from stats are prorated based on handedness too. Like if I play right handed platoon batter only where he has the advantage in the L/R matchup, will the AI think he is better than he really is? Or will it take all of the ABs against LHPs and use that only in determining his value against the proportion of the league that is LHPs, while giving no opinion on his value vs RHPs, and so defaults to using his scouted ratings vs RHPs for that if there is not enough statistical data.