Suggestion Collection Thread: Scouting

[battists]

I'm going to be posting a number of Suggestion Collection threads like this one, each one designed to collect a number of ideas for one specific area of the game. I'm going to compile these suggestions into some kind of helpful format, and see if this helps Marc and Markus. If necessary, I'll create polls later on to gauge the relative interest in different features.

However, if you want to join my thread, you need to follow my rules, and here they are:

1. Only 1 suggestion per post.
2. Suggestions must be on-topic for the thread.
3. Constructive, non-inflammatory suggestions only. I'm flat-out deleting posts that are angry in nature. If you want to do that, start your own thread.
4. No comments on others' suggestions necessary. That means, no posts saying "Great idea!"
5. No linking me to other forum threads. If it's important enough to you that you want it in this thread, then it should be important enough to put it in the format I've asked for here.
6. You can certainly post suggestions that conflict with or build upon earlier suggestions. You can also add screenshots of mockups and such if they help.

Format for Suggestions:
Suggestion: What is your suggestion? Be as specific as possible; include the screen you're talking about, if applicable.
Reason: Why do you think this is important?
Priority: High (MUST have), Medium (should have), Low (nice to have)

Thanks for participating!

Steve

[battists]

Today's Topic: Scouting

What's In?
- Suggestions about the scouting model and functionality

[battists]

Suggestion: The ability to assign scouts to a "task list" so that they will immediately start something new once their previous task has been completed.
Reason: Scouting is a great addition, but it introduces an additional level of micromanaging. This would help alleviate that.
Priority: Medium

[battists]

Suggestion: The ability to assign scouts to a "while idle" task. For example, if they are left idle, scouts should scout players within their own organization one by one, in reverse order of the most recently scouted players.
Reason: Again, trying to minimize the impact of failing to micromanage scouts
Priority: Medium

[battists]

Suggestion: Have scouting Overall and Overall Potential ratings handled according to the scouting rating scale set by the player.
Reason: Most players would like to see this follow their own scale rather than the default 20-80 scale.
Priority: Medium

[battists]

Suggestion: Add XML-based scouting reports on players, similar to the text reports in OOTP 6.5 ("This guy would be a solid starter on any team...)
Reason: Adds a lot of flavor to the game, and the flexibility of the XML engine would make it so that we could create a wide variety of scouting reports to keep them "fresh."
Priority: High

[battists]

Suggestion: Create an action menu wherein you can assign a scout to a task from the Personnel screen, or by right-clicking on a scout.

The menu could look something like this:

Scout --> League --> submenu with leagues listed
         --> Team --> submenu with teams listed, divided by league
         --> Draft Pool --> no submenu needed, assign immediately
         --> Player --> sends you to some sort of select screen where you can select a player. If this would be too complicated, this is one that could be left out, I suppose! :(
         --> Organization --> submenu with teams listed, divided by league
         --> Nation --> submenu with countries listed

Reason: Right now, scouting options are scattered all over the game. Rather than scouting by going to a target league first, it would be much more intuitive to go to a scout and say "Do this!"
Priority: High

[Elendil]

Suggestion: Quick-scout reports by a scout should not replace full-scout reports done by the same scout at an earlier date

Reason: Currently the head scout automatically does a full quick-scout of your organization on the 1st of every month. The new quick-scout ratings replace the more accurate full-scout ratings. (If this has already been logged as a TT, discard this suggestion!)

Priority: High

[andymac]

Suggestion: Make your coaches part of the scouting process.
Reason: When you want a report on a minor league player in your own organization, typically your first resource should be the coaches that are around the player every day. Same thing at the major league level, your pitching coach should have an opinion about how good the teams pitchers are. So, I think it would make sense to be able to get a scouting report from the managers & pitching/hitting coaches for players that are currently or have recently played for them. Their opinions should also play a factor in depth charts/lineups when under computer manager control.
Priority: Med

[Raidergoo]

Processed to this point.

[JinAZ]

Suggestion: Insert a "scouting time" coefficient that allows users to adjust the length of time it takes to perform scouting tasks. E.g. coefficient=1.0 is default, coefficient=0.5 means each task takes about half as long as it does by default. Just as it is now, nNothing would take less than a day.

Reason: It would be nice to be able to use the scouting system, but not be limited so much in how long it takes to do things like scouting other organizations/leagues. This setting would allow users to adjust it to their taste and desired difficulty level.

Priority: Medium

[JinAZ]

Suggestion: Revisit the factors that affect player ratings given by scouts. Currently, scout preferences seem to affect the ratings too much compared to scouting ability, as they affect ratings of many of the component player ratings. Scouting preferences should really only affect the final score given by the scout.

Reason: It currently seems more important to pick scouts that agree with your strategy preferences than to pick scouts with high ability ratings if you want to have reasonably consistent scouting reports.

Priority: High

[JinAZ]

(this was (in part) posted by another user in the interface section, but I thought it might bear repeating here)

Suggestion: Allow an option in the action menu to Quick Scout a player with all of your scouts. Even better, allow users to group scouts in the personnel screen (e.g. pitching scout group & hitting scout group, with overlap) and then select Quick Scout Player with Pitching Group or Quick Scout Player with Hitting Group.

Reason: The key to using quick scouting effectively is to get a lot of quick scout opinions and determine the consensus rating. This functionality would save a lot of clicking.

Priority: Medium

[sporr]

Suggestion: We should have the ability to set the specific amount of time we would like to give our scout, keeping in mind the total time required to give a full scouting report.

Reason: For online leagues, it's very difficult to use scouts since the season progresses a week or more at a time. By allowing owners to set the specific amount of time to send a scout out, they are more able to plan appropriately and scout within those time blocks.

Priority: High

[Raidergoo]

Processed to this point.

[Nutlaw]

Suggestion: Allow users to view the combined scout ratings from any other screen outside of the Scouting Reports screen within the Player Profile.

Reason: Scouts aren't all that accurate, and an averaged rating is significantly more useful than any one scout's ratings. Currently, you have to either cycle through the "Ratings Scouted by:" list or enter the Scouting Reports screen under the Player Profile in order to get an overall feel for a player's worth. That is terribly time consuming.

Priority: High

[Cooker]

Suggestion: Add an option in Game Setup to allow the player to select that SISA scouting automatically rates all major league players instead of only some (i.e., no missing scouting ratings).

Reason: In the real world, some scouting info is available for every major league player. The total absence of any SISA scouting information on a major leaguer is simply unrealistic. (It's fine if SISA isn't entirely accurate; but everyone has access to some basic evaluation about every major leaguer.) For example, in the real world, everyone knows that Omar Vizquel is a decent singles hitter with low power and excellent defensive skills. Even supposedly overworked SISA scouts would have a general evaulation of him.

Priority: Medium

[sporr]

Suggestion: Allow the commissioner or league "god" to decide how accurate scouted ratings are or how much unpredictability there is. This could be by using some modifier. i.e. the highest level scouts would be withing fractions of a percent of actual ratings or you could set scouts so that there is a lot of variability even between scouts of the same level.

Reason: While it could be used to allow some to set great scouts to almost always give near accurate ratings. As it is now, there seems to be a tad too much variability even between two scouts with excellent scouting ability.

Priority: Low

[Raidergoo]

Suggestion: Multiple scouting services with built in biases other than SISA. You would have to pay for the service; an organization could pay for more than one.

Reason: It would be fun to have 3-4 different, competing scouting services. They would have different biases, say, towards "tools", "stats", "High schoolers", "college", "US regions", "hitting or pitching" or a combination of these factors.

Priority: low

[Raidergoo]

Processed to this point.