How Does the AI Use Scouting? Does it at all?

[adaman77]

I'm sure this has been discussed before, but I'm having trouble finding it, as the word "AI" is ignored by the search function on the forum.

I'm playing the 2013 MLB quickstart, with scouting set to high accuracy. In trying to make trade deals with the AI, I've noticed (as I'm sure we all have) that sometimes when you press "What will make this deal work?", the AI will sometimes ask for a horrible Rookie-level relief pitcher to put a deal over the top. My scout says the guy sucks, OSA says the guy sucks. I've checked in the editor, and usually that relief pitcher really does suck.

But sometimes, the AI asks for someone my scout says has a potential of 1 star. I turn on commissioner mode, look at his ratings... and he's actually a good prospect. This isn't entirely unusual – Lucas Giolito is usually rated very poorly by scouts, for example, but after a few years he's often pretty good. Same with Jameson Taillon.

The real kicker, though, is that it doesn't seem that the AI is paying any attention to scouting reports, or it doesn't actually have scouting reports to reference. Here's an example:

I'm setting up a deal to get a prospect from the AI. With the players I'm currently offering, the AI is saying "Okay, let me think about this." I then go into the editor and increase the prospect's potential ratings. I go back to the trade screen (this is the exact same day), and the AI is now saying "No, that's not a good deal for us."

For the human player, if this were to happen (the ratings changed one day), he or she wouldn't know about it until the next scouting report (if the scout noticed, of course). But it seems that even with scouting on, the AI is still directly watching the ratings, not a scouting report.

I'm guessing this is WAD. But how exactly does this work? Are the ratings passed to the AI through a filter, so that with a bad scout, the AI has a high chance of seeing an inaccurate rating? It does seem to me that there is some impact of scouting – I've played leagues before where I've turned off scouting in the middle of a season, and I had the impression that the AI stopped wanting my highly-ranked but ratings-poor prospects. But I didn't do any actual tests, so I could've been wrong.

If the AI doesn't use scouting at all in any form, then I guess the scouting system is effectively a handicap on human players. Which is fine by me.

[Déjà Bru]

I don't want to speak for the big guy, or anybody else with exact knowledge, but it has always been my belief that this is true: that "ratings [are] passed to the AI through a filter, so that with a bad scout, the AI has a high chance of seeing an inaccurate rating." Else, why have a competition for the best scouts in the game?

Now, how the developer accomplishes this may not be evident to the user. It may be he has it that the AI ignores its own scouting reports and is indeed looking directly at actual ratings, albeit filtered and "fuzzied" by the scouting quality that it has on file for a particular team.

By the way, don't forget about the setting in Game Setup as to the accuracy of scouting. That may affect things over and above (below and under) the quality ratings of scouts that you see.