I know we've made many changes over the last few years to try to avoid player ratings changing from simply opening and closing the file, and even from changing between scouting reports. However especially with how the relative ratings work, there's always a part of the system that is dynamic and may shift.
Otherwise, players don't tend to change much in the off-season. If you sign a player and get an updated scouting report shortly afterwards that shows a big change, odds are that the previous scouting report was much older, or was at a lower accuracy, and the scout is "catching up" on changes. If the previous report was in August, maybe there's some late season decline in September that wasn't reflected in the previous report. In real life, before you sign a guy, you would probably make sure to double-check with your scout before signing them. Probably some of that we can look in the future at improving the default behavior (so that if you have an offer out on a guy, he moves up higher in your scout's under the cover priority list), but it could be a case where if the scout got in an updated scouting report on them through the scouting task list you might have noticed those issues before finalizing the deal.
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