Does Anyone Know If # of Rounds Affects Talent?

[OldFatGuy]

I'm not really looking for speculation, I'm wondering if anyone is aware of whether or not Markus or someone addressed the question of overall talent levels in your league and the number of annual amateur draft rounds you have.

The manual seems to suggest the number of rounds is important merely to replace the proper number of players every year. I don't recall seeing it say anything about affecting talent level but i was very quickly skimming (and I mean QUICKLY LOL).

Put another way. Let's say I have a league with three levels of minors. In Situation One I set up 50 rounds for the amateur draft. In Situation Two I set up 10 rounds for the amateur draft.

Will the league under Situation One have lots more talent overall or does OOTP generate the "proper level of talent" and then merely fills in the other rounds such that in both situations the overall talent level will be pretty much the same??? In other words, in the example above, let's say 10 rounds is all that's necessary to replace and maintain the talent level, the other 40 levels are all "fillers" only (scrubs, career minor leaguers [is leaguers a word??? lol], whatever you want to call it). If that's the case then this situation will result in basically the overall same talent level as the situation where I only used 10 rounds.

I'm asking if anyone actually knows because it would be nice to know the actual, correct answer before I go changing my number draft rounds.

Thanks for any info and when I have time I'll go skim the manual a little slower next time to see if it mentions it.

EDIT: The reason I'm interested in lowering my number of rounds as much as possible is because I just get so tired of hundreds, if not thousands, of free agents all the time and 90% will never, EVER be MLB players. And I get this result already using LESS than the "recommended" number of rounds. (IIRC the recommended number of rounds is 5 X Number of levels of minor leagues). So with three levels of minors the "recommended" number of rounds is 15. I've been using 10/12 (10 rounds, make enough players for 12) and still end up with hundreds and hundreds of free agents all the time.

[NoOne]

i think it's more about size of the ML. (whichever league the draft feeds, even if mil in middle)

i could be wrong.. but that should set how many rounds produce fairly decent palyers as well as depth of top-tier talent...

e.g. when i've played a 20team league - 28 - 30 - 40, that's waht i see... talent proportional to league size, regardless of me tinkering with # of rounds in the draft.

the game wants to reach a certain distribution... that's how it would go about doing it. once it's into "mil filler" part of the draft, it takes an act of god just to get potential ratings good enough to progress to the mlb. this is the point when all pitchers have either 1/200 movement or 1/200 control etc.. not sure how i'd describe it for batters.. .but terrible. adding rounds at the bottom is mostly inconsequential unless you add so many that a majore positive TCR becomes 'likely' often with enough players to make a ripple.

[PSUColonel]

Is there an absolute answer on this? Will more rounds inherently result in a league with more talent?

Let's say you have a standard MLB setup with service time limits? (which I would think would mean you might need more rounds)


So with this in mind, is there a difference between having a 30 round draft while generating 35, a 35 round draft generating 40, or a 40 round draft generating 45?

[sprague]

I am not a developer but I do notice
Same league.
One with a 15 round draft will produce more 5 star talent than a 9 round draft over time.

[Mr. Marlin]

It's been a long time since I did this. Back when OOTP first introduced pre-generated stats to the draft pool (OOTP13 or 14 I think) I was curious about the stats and correlation to ratings. So I did a 10 year sim and tracked it. In the process I noticed the talent in the draft pool follows a Gaussian Distribution. In other words 20% is good, 20% is terrible and the rest fall somewhere in the middle. So the trick to improving the talent level in the pool is not to increase the number of rounds you drat but the number of rounds the game creates a pool for. The larger the pool the higher number of quality players. If you go from a 30 round draft with a 35 round pool to a 40 and 45 the percentage of high value players that are available to draft will stay the same. If you have a 30 round draft with a 45 round pool you will have 25% more high value players in the pool with fewer picks so you get a better shot at them.

[PSUColonel]

Interesting, I would think increasing/decreasing the pool would be what’s responsible no matter how many rounds your draft is scheduled for.

So if I have this straight, there’s no diffrrrrnce between say 35(40) & 40(45)?

[redmarkYankees]

Originally Posted by PSUColonel

Interesting, I would think increasing/decreasing the pool would be what’s responsible no matter how many rounds your draft is scheduled for.

So if I have this straight, there’s no diffrrrrnce between say 35(40) & 40(45)?

There is, a bit.

If you have 36 teams, with 35(40) you're creating 1,260 players - if we assume 20% are 'good', that's 288 good players, or 8 per team.

If you have 36 teams, with 40(45) you're creating 1,440 players - if we assume 20% are 'good', that's 324 good players, or 9 per team.

The 5 difference between 35/40 and 40/45 is the 5x36 players who are the worst of the bunch and aren't going to be drafted.

If 20% of <draft class size> is good, then increasing the draft class size will always produce more good players, regardless of whether you're drafting the entire class or not.

So there is a (slight) difference between 35(40) and 40(45), but effectively there's no difference between 35(40) and 40(40) - there is, but it's whether you're drafting the bottom of the class or not, not how many good ones there are.

[PSUColonel]

So basically a larger pool always means more talent and a smaller one means less..correct?

[Mr. Marlin]

Originally Posted by PSUColonel

So basically a larger pool always means more talent and a smaller one means less..correct?

Correct. The difference the number of draft rounds makes is the burn rate of the top 20% players.Assuming the AI & player both know the absolute value of every pool player then the last pick of a 30 round draft will be a higher quality player than the last pick of a 40 round draft assuming both are drafting from a 45 round pool.

[saturn2187]

I am in an online league with standard setup.


Normally we have your typical 35 rounds but one season something went wrong and we had 90 rounds.


4-5 seasons have since passed and now looking at that draft class is like looking at a future HOF roster.


The draft classes since then have been terrible. Not sure if we are just comparing it to the 90 round class, or the game is trying to balance out all the talent since that year.


Either way, my anecdotal evidence says yes it matters.

[Syd Thrift]

Originally Posted by PSUColonel

Is there an absolute answer on this? Will more rounds inherently result in a league with more talent?

Let's say you have a standard MLB setup with service time limits? (which I would think would mean you might need more rounds)


So with this in mind, is there a difference between having a 30 round draft while generating 35, a 35 round draft generating 40, or a 40 round draft generating 45?

More players get generated, which will inevitably cause more players of each level of quality to get generated. So in a nutshell, yes, more rounds = more talent. You can very easily saturate your league by having too many draft rounds.

[andyhdz]

I'm not sure this is right. you can have a 100 round draft it wouldn't necessarily mean 20% of that pool would be good. Try it and find out. Look at it from the opposite end. I have 3 levels of minors so I only have a 15 round draft as suggested (5 rounds for every minor level). That doesn't my league over the years will have less talent just because it doesn't have 7 levels like a real league does.

[NoOne]

it makes sense that it would all stay in scale -- otherwise the game wouldn't work as we expect it. and no difficult reason why they can't make it diminishing returns relative to # of teams to keep it somewhat in line.

i think i was mistaken in previous reply... i've done a bit with drafts since that time... i'd bet it stays somehwat proportional - like someone said it adheres to an obvious distribution -- but as someone else said, not if oyu add ~100rounds (an exorbitant amount). the volatility year-to year makes this a bit murk with just hte eye-test.

i can definitely find 'more' top shelf players with a larger league -- that's a certainty over time. i think that's (#teams) the bigger factor still, but increasing rounds likely has an effect too -- (speaking only of times it's appropriate # for league within a fairly forgiving range).

just in case -- stick to enough rounds to feed the mil plus a bit of give/take and that's all the worry you need to put into it. i like extra rounds created vs # of rounds simply because you can run out of various positions and while they may not be good options, IRL you don't run out of choices at a position... significantly more people are eligible than # of rounds any year(irl) by far more thana handful of rounds.

with 5 extra rounds for a 30t league (consider teams) i don't run out of choices often, if at all.

[PSUColonel]

So for an MLB setup 35(40) & 40(45) make no difference?


I. Oils go 40(40) but the run out at any given position

Just want to make sure I get this straight

[jpeters1734]

yes, more players created means more good players. test it out. create one round. that one round will have a few good players, a few bad players, and a few average. now create a 40 round draft. you will now have 40x as many good players

[Syd Thrift]

Originally Posted by andyhdz

I'm not sure this is right. you can have a 100 round draft it wouldn't necessarily mean 20% of that pool would be good. Try it and find out. Look at it from the opposite end. I have 3 levels of minors so I only have a 15 round draft as suggested (5 rounds for every minor level). That doesn't my league over the years will have less talent just because it doesn't have 7 levels like a real league does.

Like others I have tested this... well mostly by accident but still. I have a season where I accidentally had a draft class that's about 3 times larger than normal and that class is dominating. Yes, there are clearly 3 times as many good players.

The game just randomly generates draftees. I don't think it's as complicated behind the scenes as you're making it out to be. And look, I appreciate that; the relative simplicity makes it easier to work with and manipulate.

Sent from my SM-G950U using Tapatalk

[itsmb8]

How would this work if you have TCR at say, 170-180? Im about to start a long term MLB save and im planning on going with 40 rounds like the actual MLB with 45 rounds of players generated. Im just wondering if that'll matter for player talent in relation to the current league rosters when TCR is almost maxed.

[PSUColonel]

I was just trying to get a feel of whether it would be a good idea for the MLB default setup. The thing is, I have DSL enabled, but only latin American players can play in it, also I use service time limits, so there will be a group of players who might not be able to play at lower levels.

This is why I thought it could possibly be a good idea to expand to a 40(40) draft so that I could have more rounds/players...but I don't want to do it at the expense of inflating the amount of talent in the league either.

[jpeters1734]

Well technically talent is all relative. The stat out put is really based on LTM

[NoOne]

40 vs ~30 won't be a huge difference. 35 comes with default?

how many studs do you see from each draft? rhetorical.. it's not many, right?

let's say its "2" a year, some more some none etc... talking mike trout level of quality.

25% increase is 2.5 a year.

the biggest change the eye can probably see is the larger "middle" of the pack. 25% more of the bulk of the league is, on the other hand, significantly different to see with the eye, if you try.

you might see a small uptick in, i'd assume offense, but ... Like jpeters said, that's easily fixed with a click (or more) after (as) your league turns over all of it's current players for new draft rules created players.

auto-calc LTM and it's roughly back to where you were, league-wide totals speaking.

anecodotal - i use 39 / 44created and i don't see any huge leaps. i didn't even have to change my LTMs... in fact, by luck i am currently experiencing a drought of top-shelf HoF players of various positions. fewer than i've seen before with fewer rounds.