Quote:
Originally Posted by jaa36
As it stands (in OOTP), development is a very "hands off" process, and abstracted. Maybe it happens, maybe it doesn't, maybe as you sink money into the development budget players get better, but you don't really know what effect it has- as in, if a player gets better, you don't know if that was the team's effort at development, or just random change on the part of the player.
|
To a certain extent, that's true, especially for pitchers. You can always put a position player in a new position and hope that he learns it - he'll at least get a rating at that position after a while, even though it probably won't be a good rating.
Pitchers, on the other hand, can't be forced to develop a new pitch the way a position player can be forced to play a new position. There's actually a good reason for that: dictating pitch development would make it too easy to "game" things and would give the human player too big of an advantage over the AI. That's because, in OOTP, a pitcher with only two pitches can never become a starter (unless one of those pitches is a knuckle ball). So the human player can look at the draft class and say "hey, there's a reliever with high stamina and two good pitches. If he can just develop a decent third pitch, he'd make a pretty good starter!" The AI, on the other hand, sees that pitcher and says "oh look, a slightly above-average middle reliever. I'll pass."
So unless the AI can be taught how to develop players the same way the human player would, I don't see much change in this area of the game.