Scouts seem utterly worthless?

[KCRoyalsFan]

Do players who play above their ratings tend to see a ratings increase?

[Curtis]

Originally Posted by KCRoyalsFan

Wouldn't it be nice to be able to click on scouting and have an option of "avg score" which would be the average of all your scouts thoughts on the player instead of just being able to look at one scouts ratings at at time?

We were assured that this was being lobbied for in beta for 2007, but apparently it fell by the wayside, as so many other things did.

[ctorg]

Originally Posted by KCRoyalsFan

I have just thought of a feature that I think some of you might like to see added.

When you looking at the draft prospects, FA pool, or maybe just one players profile. Wouldn't it be nice to be able to click on scouting and have an option of "avg score" which would be the average of all your scouts thoughts on the player instead of just being able to look at one scouts ratings at at time?

I actually turn the scouts off because of frustrations like this. It's one area of the game I just don't like that much. The one thing I keep bringing up about it (I'm surprised more people don't have this frustration:

There is no way to look at all the players in the league and simply sort them to find out who has the highest ratings. You can do it for a single scout, but no single scout (usually) has all the players, so there is no way to avoid switching back and forth. I want either an average score or the ability to use the most recent score (the latter is actually my preference) when sorting a list.

[KCRoyalsFan]

Originally Posted by ctorg

I actually turn the scouts off because of frustrations like this. It's one area of the game I just don't like that much. The one thing I keep bringing up about it (I'm surprised more people don't have this frustration:

There is no way to look at all the players in the league and simply sort them to find out who has the highest ratings. You can do it for a single scout, but no single scout (usually) has all the players, so there is no way to avoid switching back and forth. I want either an average score or the ability to use the most recent score (the latter is actually my preference) when sorting a list.

amen brother, that bugs the crap out of me as well.

I like to scout the league with my head scout and have my 2nd scout scout my organization as much as possible. However, when I see my teams ratings, I'm seeing what my head scout thought a year ago rather than what my 2nd scout thinks now.

[RonCo]

How scouting should be modeled is something that received a great deal of discussion while in beta. At issue is that opinion on what the vision/scope of the process should be varies widely. Personally, I want a much higher-level function. Others want the immediate detail of individual scouts, pretty much as coded. Others want various levels in between. I don't know that there is a solution that serves everyone's desire.

In the end, for me, I just turn them off and let the development engine provide all my "scouting variance." I find it's just as unreliable as using the scouts, but saves me a ton of labor.

[thbroman]

Well, I see nothing wrong with sending more than one scout around to evaluate a guy i'm particularly interested in or having different guys visit a team's minor-league organization over the course of a couple of years. I wish that the scouts' ratings could be averaged (although seeing the scatter in evaluations is useful too), but I enjoy using the scouts.

[Erithtotl]

I would still like to see a good explanation as to why my top two scouts not only get these players wrong, but agree almost exactly on all of them in their wrongness, while my inferior scouts agree in their accuracy. That should not happen. It sounds to me like there's a glitch somewhere, some dependency where their shouldn't be one, like that old bug where free agents would either agree or not agree to talk to your organization in distinct blocks (i.e. if free agent A didn't like your team, FA B wouldn't either, and if he didn't like the another team, FA B wouldn't either).

[aroslv]

Originally Posted by ctorg

I actually turn the scouts off because of frustrations like this. It's one area of the game I just don't like that much. The one thing I keep bringing up about it (I'm surprised more people don't have this frustration:

There is no way to look at all the players in the league and simply sort them to find out who has the highest ratings. You can do it for a single scout, but no single scout (usually) has all the players, so there is no way to avoid switching back and forth. I want either an average score or the ability to use the most recent score (the latter is actually my preference) when sorting a list.

Yup, I also turn off scouting. I find it frustrating and it feels like its too much work, I get no enjoyment out of the process. I don't want to micro manage that kind of stuff.

[KCRoyalsFan]

in order to convince anyone that is a bug, you are going to have to increase your sample size by more than a handful of players. It could just be an anomaly

[Syd Thrift]

Originally Posted by Erithtotl

I've played several seasons and I'm extremely frustrated with the scouting.

Scouts seem completely clueless on prospects of any kind, regardless of their ratings.

For example:

My lead scout has an 18 scouting hitting and a 19 scouting hitting potential.

I have another scout who has 19/19.

Understand I'm not quite sure how the 1-250 scale of the editor measures against the 1-20 scale in my game. I'm basically dividing the 250 scale by 10 to determine the 1-20 rating (with the assumption that the extra 50 is the chance of players exceeding max ratings. Also it seems to line up that way approximately by looking at established major league players.


One of my better hitting prospects rates as 14/15/12 by the first and 15/15/12 by the second. Ok, good, my two top scouts agree that this guy is going to be really good. Their potential relative to MLB lists him as
69/80 and 68/80.

Great, so then I fire up the editor and take a look at him.

His potential ratings (out of 250), are 58/105/35.

By my best guess this puts him somewhere around 6/11/4

Take another player: 17/9/15 and 18/9/15, both scounts agree at 67/80 potential. Actual ratings 123/44/97 or about 12/5/10

Another: 14/15/12 and 12/15/12 67/80 and 67/80. Actuals? 87/101/78 or 9/10/8.

EVERY single prospect on my roster is like this. If my scouts rate them highly, they actually suck. SISA rated players are of course no more accurate.

Now, scouts seem to be pretty good at major leaguers, their evaluations are typically pretty close to reality.

I have no problem with scouts being frequently wrong, it's not a science. But by my estimate, they are ALWAYS VERY WRONG, even the very highest rated scouts. Understand these results were given with a full scout of the draft pool (not a quick scout).

Am I doing something wrong here? It seems like any effort made to scout prospects is worthless.

I'm glad to see that the game is working as it should! Scouted ratings should be way off sometimes, especially with drafted players. ESPECIALLY with drafted players. It's my experience that they're just far off enough. Obviously, some may want to know exactly what a player's ratings are and to not be hampered by this, but that's what turning scouting off is for.

[nsorens]

Yeah, scouting is not fun. It's a bunch of tedious micromanagement that doesn't even really provide a gameplay reward for the player. Having to manually direct 6 scouts just to get a marginally accurate (maybe, if you're lucky) report on a prospect is silly. Why not 15, or 100? I could just turn the scouting feature off and be in the same position without having to go through the constant supervision of scout tasks. I have seriously spent far more time poring over scout assignments and reports than I have on other GM-related tasks, and I have almost nothing to show for that effort. I'd have been much better off just auto-drafting and signing proven free agents instead of hunting for prospects and trying to build the farm system.

I would propose several changes to the system:
- Have the scout supervision oriented more around specific needs: I need to know about the draft prospects. I need to know how my top 25 minor league prospects are doing. I need to find a major-league ready 3rd baseman to trade for. etc.
- Have a scouting director take care of the nitty-gritty details of assigning scouts specific jobs. You can micro-manage them if you want, but you should just be able to give them a general assignment and a time frame (the longer the time, the more accurate the report) and have them do everything that's needed.
- Have the scouts make the rounds on their own if you don't give them an assignment.
- Tune scouting so that max-potential studs don't turn into minimum-rating busts so often.

[magnet]

Originally Posted by nsorens

Yeah, scouting is not fun. It's a bunch of tedious micromanagement that doesn't even really provide a gameplay reward for the player. Having to manually direct 6 scouts just to get a marginally accurate (maybe, if you're lucky) report on a prospect is silly. Why not 15, or 100? I could just turn the scouting feature off and be in the same position without having to go through the constant supervision of scout tasks. I have seriously spent far more time poring over scout assignments and reports than I have on other GM-related tasks, and I have almost nothing to show for that effort. I'd have been much better off just auto-drafting and signing proven free agents instead of hunting for prospects and trying to build the farm system.

I would propose several changes to the system:
- Have the scout supervision oriented more around specific needs: I need to know about the draft prospects. I need to know how my top 25 minor league prospects are doing. I need to find a major-league ready 3rd baseman to trade for. etc.
- Have a scouting director take care of the nitty-gritty details of assigning scouts specific jobs. You can micro-manage them if you want, but you should just be able to give them a general assignment and a time frame (the longer the time, the more accurate the report) and have them do everything that's needed.
- Have the scouts make the rounds on their own if you don't give them an assignment.
- Tune scouting so that max-potential studs don't turn into minimum-rating busts so often.

I gotta say, after tinkering with my fictional league all night, I gotta agree 100% with this post.

[swishbish33]

Originally Posted by RonCo

In the end, for me, I just turn them off and let the development engine provide all my "scouting variance." I find it's just as unreliable as using the scouts, but saves me a ton of labor.

This doesn't make the process of drafting and signing prospects too easy? Is the development engine random enough so that your stud prospect still may not develop?

[magnet]

Originally Posted by swishbish33

This doesn't make the process of drafting and signing prospects too easy? Is the development engine random enough so that your stud prospect still may not develop?

I could see some complaining that it is too unreliable with scouts off, but I like it.

[RonCo]

Originally Posted by swishbish33

This doesn't make the process of drafting and signing prospects too easy? Is the development engine random enough so that your stud prospect still may not develop?

No. All my testing has been done with scouts off, specifically because of the work load that is mentioned above--life is too short for me to go through that, but I'm sure others find it lots of fun...so more power to them. But the development engine causes plenty of uncertainty, and if you want even more uncertainty, just bump the amount of random talent changes up a bit in the Game Settings.

For example, the deveopment engine is ultimately responsible for those late-round draft picks who make the Hall. It's also responsible for a majority of 1st round picks who bust, even with scouts on.

[disposableheros]

Originally Posted by Curtis

We were assured that this was being lobbied for in beta for 2007, but apparently it fell by the wayside, as so many other things did.

a low blow from someone that doesnt know

[cbbl]

Originally Posted by KCRoyalsFan

amen brother, that bugs the crap out of me as well.

I like to scout the league with my head scout and have my 2nd scout scout my organization as much as possible. However, when I see my teams ratings, I'm seeing what my head scout thought a year ago rather than what my 2nd scout thinks now.

I might be missisng the point here, but isn't this accomplished by simply selecting the right scout from the drop down?

As for averaging, it may not be ideal, but you could export the reports by scout into Excel and then combine them. I've done some Excel analysis with data from OOTP so far. I select the report I want, click "Write report to disk" which, for some reason, opens it in an external browser (bug?), right click at select "Export to Excel" and go from there. Using cut and paste you can merge the data, create some formulas, and get averages. Yes, more work that if the game did it for you, but if you want to really analyze a draft pool, it may be worth it.

cbbl

[Here24]

I think using excel is a good idea. I use it from time to time to look at player data.
The other way is to look at each player's scouting report where the average is given along with the ratings from each scout that looked at that player. This also is more work.
So, we can put the work into it one way or the other.
Another outcome of doing the legwork is to get to know our scouts. I have not done enough to know if the game works this way, but I seem to be noticing trends: one scout, despite being a very highly rated scout of potential, consistantly over-estimates potential but is very accurate with current ratings. Another scout, with a lower skill in this area, is closer to reality in his potential ratings.
Rather than simply not trusting my scouts, I am discovering which ones I can trust in which circumstances. I then try to keep these scouts employed for as long as I can.
Again, I am not sure the game works this way and maybe I am attributing too many characteristics to scouts, but it seems to be working.