Question about Scouting

[jbone]

Originally Posted by zukes

This is absolutely something that should be changed. As mentioned a bunch of times, and hopefully will be mentioned a bunch more, the report is property of the team and should remain there. The fact that it is outdated should be punishment enough.

I, too, have to throw my support behind the general opinion of this thread that the scout reports are the intellectual property of the team.

[endgame]

One thing worth noting, unless it's been mentioned and I missed it, when you're discussing the scout report as the one perceived across the board - ala your Head Scout - that's a difficult capture, as well as individual Quick Scouts that are done on individual players.

However, if you examine scouting reports that are actually handed to you in the form of mail, detailing the top players, their ratings/potentials etc..., the reports are available for reference (save to file) by locating their Message ID and securing it from your game's folder, labeling e.g. Miwaukee AAA Franklin.

I've done this with those very important assessments I thought I might need down the road. When specific players got my attention, I simply put them on the Shortlist. Yes, the scout's appraisal later vanishes, but the fact that he's on the list indicates - to me - someone saw something in him once at least. This is even available with the draft pool scouting report. Or just keep in it your message box for reference. It'd be nice to have a Flag for those essential messages as well.

[CHCfan]

hmm, this is the first thing about v.2007 that doesn't have me excited. I guess I still won't use scouting.; that's disappointing.

[1998 Yankees]

Originally Posted by endgame

However, if you examine scouting reports that are actually handed to you in the form of mail, detailing the top players, their ratings/potentials etc..., the reports are available for reference (save to file) by locating their Message ID and securing it from your game's folder, labeling e.g. Miwaukee AAA Franklin.

Ha! Very good. I tried to do this using Print Screen and Word which did not work out well for long messages IIRC; I never thought to go looking for it in this manner.

[Markus Heinsohn]

Originally Posted by BruceM

In OOTP 2006, when a Scout left your organization, you lost all his reports.

Is this still the case in 2007?

IMO it shouldn't be. IRL, if a Scout files reports with you, you have them until "you" decide to discard them, not until your scout leaves and takes them with him.

So after 25 years you'd have a scout dropdown with 50 scouts listed? how cumbersome would be that?

[BruceM]

Originally Posted by Markus Heinsohn

So after 25 years you'd have a scout dropdown with 50 scouts listed? how cumbersome would be that?

I did say in my post "until you decide to discard (delete) them"

No, I wouldn't want a drop down with 50 scouts listed, I just want the ability to keep the reports that I choose to keep. Like I said before, think of it as email, we all get tons of it everyday, including junk mail. We, "the receiver", have the choice of what we wish to keep and what we wish to delete.

Maybe I'm not understanding something here, but it shouldn't be that difficult to have an option to "save" a report.

[John]

After a few months during the season many of the ratings change anyway, even if minutely. In my mind a scouting report more than a year old is for the most part useless. I have no problem getting rid of them.

[jerrycapo]

Originally Posted by John

After a few months during the season many of the ratings change anyway, even if minutely. In my mind a scouting report more than a year old is for the most part useless. I have no problem getting rid of them.

But it would be handy to be able to use those old ratings and see if a player is progressing, regressing, or reached a plateau.

[Kaitiaki]

Originally Posted by jerrycapo

But it would be handy to be able to use those old ratings and see if a player is progressing, regressing, or reached a plateau.

That's what the statistics and the annual SISA reports that are logged in the player's history are for.

- Kai

[jerrycapo]

Originally Posted by Kaitiaki

That's what the statistics and the annual SISA reports that are logged in the player's history are for.

- Kai

For starters SISA is worthless. As a player moves through different levels stats are not necessarily the best way to judge progression. This is something I would like to use the scouting reports for. But when a scout retires, you lose all of the information that scout had.

[fhomess]

Originally Posted by BruceM

I did say in my post "until you decide to discard (delete) them"

We should have the ability to delete scouting reports older than X days.

[Matches]

Scouting history is something that interests me too. Automation is a nice add but if I'm not getting the most recent information at my fingertips it's a significant drawback.

My idea for scouting history would be to display ratings in a graph by year. At the end of every year, the system grabs each scout's most recent report and averages them together, and plots them.

I'm not an excel graph wiz, but the basics are below. Plot actual scouted ratings on the same bar as the potential rating, and add bars for gap, power, eye, avoid Ks, overall, etc. If there's no data, show "No Data".

[Queensryche]

This has not been changed, as this is basically intentional. This should you make think twice before you replace a scout with a different one....

This is ridiculous,I'm sorry.

You have this great game that is 110% about realism,but not being able to keep scouting reports is incredibly unrealistic,and really a gigantic pain in the ass. It's one of the reasons I turned off scouting last year and If this hasn't changed,will turn it off once again this year.

[StyxNCa]

I'm in agreement with all this but I do have a couple questions.

#1: When do scouts tend to retire, before or after the beginning of a new year?

#2: Doesn't your head scout (even one that is newly hired before the new year) do an automatic league update at the beginning of the year? I thought they did.

If they retire before the beginning of a new year, and they do automatically create a new scouting report at the beginning of the year, I don't see the problem. Just make sure a new head scout is hired on time.

It seems to me retirement or not re-signing take place right after a season ends.

However, I agree that reports should be available whether or not the scout that created them is still with a team.

[injury log]

There is, of course, a workaround that allows you to get a fresh head-scout report on every player in your universe; go to Commissioner mode, resign from team, go to Available Jobs, hire yourself again, quit Commissioner mode.

As for StyxNCa's questions, scouts will only retire the day the offseason begins (just after the World Series ends). This is also when their contract will expire if not renewed. The only players automatically scouted by your Head Scout are those on the 40-man roster, each month; you do not get a fresh scout of your league unless you ask the scout to do it.

[RonCo]

I enjoy the idea of scouts, but I dislike managing them to the point where I have to tell them where to go. I suggest there be a scouting option created that allows you to hire scouts, and to see the scouting organization's opinion of all players in existence. The quality of those reports would be dependent upon (a) the number of scouts you hired, and (b) the quality of those scouts--driven heavily by your head scout. This list would get updated say once a month. This approach would resolve this issue to a greater degree because a scout that left would not leave the team in the dark, but would eventually just degrade the qulaity of the reports until he was replaced.

[thbroman]

Originally Posted by RonCo

I enjoy the idea of scouts, but I dislike managing them to the point where I have to tell them where to go. I suggest there be a scouting option created that allows you to hire scouts, and to see the scouting organization's opinion of all players in existence. The quality of those reports would be dependent upon (a) the number of scouts you hired, and (b) the quality of those scouts--driven heavily by your head scout. This list would get updated say once a month. This approach would resolve this issue to a greater degree because a scout that left would not leave the team in the dark, but would eventually just degrade the qulaity of the reports until he was replaced.

I certainly agree that scouts don't "own" their reports and the team should be able to keep access to them. But honestly, if Markus wants to take a major step he could overhaul the system entirely in the direction indicated here by RonCo. My own version of this would be for each team to have a scouting office funded at a given level by a team (more money tends to provide better results, of course), perhaps with a scouting director who would have to be hired like coaches and with a menu of tasks for the office to accomplish, perhaps ordered by priority. Those tasks would include scouting upcoming opponents, scouting your own organization or the organization of other teams, scouting the world for hidden talent, etc.

Having individual scouts is pretty cumbersome and repetitive. In my solo league, all they do for most of the time is cycle through scouting of other teams' organizations, so I can have relatively updated reports on all players --unless the scout retires, that is!

[Curtis]

Originally Posted by thbroman

In my solo league, all they do for most of the time is cycle through scouting of other teams' organizations, so I can have relatively updated reports on all players.

Then you're not getting much use out of your scouts. I rarely scout the opposition (I wouldn't know what to do with the information). There's too many other things for them to be doing!

[Burgandy]

Originally Posted by Curtis

Then you're not getting much use out of your scouts. I rarely scout the opposition (I wouldn't know what to do with the information). There's too many other things for them to be doing!

I can't fault that approach, as I do it at least once a year with each scout, and change teams. If fact, I'm going to start doing it a lot more. I do this because A) scouting nations is too effective, so I'd rather just kill time with them doing something else and B) scouting an organization is the best way to get a vertical look at a specific demographic of players. It's not about "the opposition" at all to me. It's about trying to get the most comprehensive and easy to track scouting accomplished, for whatever purpose you need. You can get everyone scouted, but getting the information in a useful format (in-game) is difficult.

What I mean is, good players (the players I might want) tend to move vertically (getting promoted) within an org more than laterally (getting traded, etc) between different orgs. So having 5 scouts do 5 different orgs can get every single player in a division scouted at the exact same time. There's a lot more to it, but no system is perfect (mine is worthless for looking at free agents)... I sort of appreciate that it's a challenge to come up with one that works best for you.

[thbroman]

Originally Posted by Curtis

Then you're not getting much use out of your scouts. I rarely scout the opposition (I wouldn't know what to do with the information). There's too many other things for them to be doing!

Curtis, apart from periodic updates on how my own players are developing, I do not know what there is useful for my scouts to be occupied with. It certainly makes a difference in my use of scouts to know that I don't allow foreign players in my league (I thought this weas too much of a an exploit in OOTP2006), and so my scouts don't spend their time trekking around Argentina and Indonesia looking for diamonds in the rough. If they don't spend their time doing that -- and setting aside the obvious things one would use them for, like scouting the amateur draft pool and potential FA's* -- I would still maintain that there's not a whole lot for them to do most of the time.

IMHO scouting is the single most important area of OOTP for Markus to think about overhauling in a fundamental way. The entire concept has to be changed. As noted by several people, the results of scouting are too closely tied to the player-development engine, leading to anomalous results like scouts being able to "predict" declining player ratings. Personally, I favor ctorg's ideas, as reported in these threads and in the suggestions forum.

* - and by routinely scouting other teams I usually have one or two current reports on potential FA's without scouting them specially.