Trouble Developing Prospects

[NoOne]

Originally Posted by marc5477

Just my 2 cents but since the change was made to hide coaching stats its become much harder to develop players. Its not impossible but it simply is no longer worth the money involved. I found that its muuuuuuuch more efficient (financially) to simply trade for great prospects who are ready to enter the majors from other teams by giving up your draft picks and lowering development/scouting budget to half of minimum (just to make mediocre players). The budgets savings for those two can easily buy you two super stars and the draft picks will land you young prospects (who are cheap to sign long term anyway).

Its strange how different OotP16 is from 15. In 15, you can easily decimate the game with your minor league development. In fact, it was so bad that I had to give myself insane handicaps and I still got bored because I won the championship 50% of the time with my long contract prospects... In 16, I still decimate the league but now I actually use more money since I trade for players who had contracts made by the AI previously (unless I get prospects). But bottom line is that in 16 you either micro manage your entire minor league and monitor the managers to get the good ones or you just dont use it. If you do it my way, you will end up with 2 extra superstars (money saved from development and scouting), and at least 1 fully developed super prospect (by trading top few draft picks and one average player).

I wish I could find a nice balance... 15 was too unrealistic with player development and 16 is more realistic (I dont think I have never developed a super star through the minors... they all seem to lose their stats by the time they hit AAA) but contracts and financials remain the weakness of the AI.

i just rationalize that i would have more info than just about his reputation. so ignore the change and i look up their ratings.

and as far as doing the minors stuff yourself, there are plenty of ways to pare down the amount of time you need to invest and still control the important stuff. no matter what, do not let the AI do promotions/demotions for your best prospects, if you want to maximize their development.

regardless, do not toss out your newfound strategy of trading for prospects. it's always good to have another tool at hand.

i don't know how you can handle letting the AI do callups to majors, lol. i'd throw a fit. each to their own, of course.

pujolsfan1: league settings - if not stats&ai its the one to the left of "stats & ai" at the top, in that row. thereabouts.

[marc5477]

Originally Posted by pujolsfan1

How/where do you find this?

I strongly recommend against filling your league with too many stars. This can easily ruin your league in a few years. In fact, in OotP15 I had to turn all of these PCMs down to about 75% just to keep the game from making so many damn star players and even then there were waaaaay too many stars in the league because player development was insanely easy (this seems to have been toned down in OotP16 or maybe its due to not being able to select the best managers now that their skills are hidden). Remember, there really shouldnt be more than 1 superstar on each team and maybe 1 or 2 other star players. Everyone else should be average (.250 hitter or 4.0 ERA pitcher) and half the team (including bench) should be worse.

Its your league so play as you like. You can change this option under

Game Setting > League Settings > Players

The options on the right side are what create players.

[fcabanski]

"and it has happened at least 20 seasons...."

The SSS's, small sample sizers, still say it's small sample size, even though it's double what they called a small sample size "10 seasons".

The same thing happens with other games like NBA 2K. If I let the CPU play out 100 games, and Lebron never scores more than 20 points, the SSS's say "it's just a small sample size".

If it happened over 100 seasons, would it still be a small sample size?

[fromthemachine]

For drafts, some things I have found useful:

You can get an idea of a pitcher's future stuff by his fastball speed. I've seen scouting reports where a POT stuff of 18 went to a guy who topped out at 89. Ignore that and look for someone who can throw faster.

When you go into a draft player's profile, it tells you their college stats and how stiff of competition they faced. The tougher the competition, the more accurate the scouting reports seem to be.

Don't be afraid to look at OSA ratings. When you've got two players you're considering, it's not a bad idea to flip over to the OSA reports to see if there's a consensus.

I think you can also direct your scout director to scout individual players. If you have a top 5 pick, it's a good idea to get the top 10-15 players scouted before the draft.