improving personnel for OOTP9

[blackrussian]

ive come up with a few points regarding personnel that i think could use some tweaking/changing. most of these are relatively minor and (hopefully) would be quick fixes if implemented yet still have some bearing on the game. several ive addressed in last year's beta and they were marked "fix in next version." perhaps they will be, so if nothing else this is a reminder

1. ability to edit years of experience
mostly cosmetic, but if i'm running a historical league, i'm somewhat of a stickler for realism and i dont want to see a tommy lasorda in 1988 with 0 yrs of experience. i imagine this value may have to something to do with signing personnel (contract demands, etc) so it could have a more practical application.

2. ability to delete personnel from free agent pool
self explanatory; in large setups, will help prevent the accumulation of too many coaches, etc.

3. ability to hire multiple doctors/physicians
no doubt this happens IRL, especially with richer teams that have in it their best interests to get their stars healed as fast as possible by the best. either have a hard limit of X amount of doctors max, or teams can make their own recommendations about how much staff to have.

4. would like to be able to see history for all personnel, not just managers
a nice additional for league history, esp. since not all managers stay in that role (some get coaching jobs, or some start as coaches and progress to management). easily accomplished by giving all personnel (except maybe doctors) a managerial history screen adding a field titled "role on team" (manager, pitch coach, etc). useful even when looking for prospective coaches for your team, since i would want a pitching coach that has a successful track record (as you can see ERA/runs allowed in the managerial record).

5. decrease the percentage of personnel that find work in other/foreign leagues
this is a big one for me, and ive brought this issue up a few times. but i still find the percentage of foreign managers/staff way too high. a good example is if one sets up an MLB league w/the NPB. since there is no way to prevent personnel from moving (a la "FA's may not leave league setting" for players), you will always find a significant amount of foreign staff filling vacant MLB slots, especially with an important role like GM or manager. can you imagine an NPB manager being hired in the off-season to guide the Dodgers for example? it would be colossal, groundbreaking stuff. now within the game it happens so often, it has no meaning. since the game doesnt yet understand that particular implication, a very, very low percentage of personnel moving to foreign leagues should be instated.

6. scouts should have some bonus for scouting their own countries/nations
i know that scouting is being re-written, but i am hoping to see something like country/nation knowledge depending on the scout's country of origin. so a mexican scout would be more like to find good players in mexico (and perhaps to a lesser degree, central/south american countries). a japanese scout would obviously have japan as his highest rating, with lesser knowledge of s. korea, china, etc. conversely, there can be penalties for sending a scout to countries he is not rated for. certainly, than can be super scouts that aside from their high ratings, would have a broader base of countries than most. for example, a top american scout could not only have USA but dominican rep., puerto rico and mexico rated. that would set apart very good scouts from super scouts.

7. GM ratings
im still not sure what sets a GM apart from any other personnel in the game in terms of ratings. there should be something within the GM profession that sets it apart from manager, scout, etc. many GM's come up within their organizations in some sort of scouting/personnel capacity so they should at least gave better generated scouting ratings. otherwise why not hire the cheapest possible? the only thing i can see useful for GM's are their tendencies/strategies. hopefully the AI takes at least that much into consideration (such as a GM who heavily favors veterans attempting to build a team around veterans, trading prospects etc).

8. Ability to force retire players to become personnel
again, useful for historical leagues when one is trying to create a past season. this will prevent having duplicate entries in the db. for example, if i am creating 1980 MLB season from a lahman import, i have to create new personnel (eg Joe Torre managing the mets) rather than finding a retired Joe Torre and turning him into a manager.

[johnnybourbon]

9. Ability to have player-managers ala Pete Rose

[blackrussian]

Originally Posted by johnnybourbon

9. Ability to have player-managers ala Pete Rose

good call i knew i forgot something. and to add to that, having multiple roles for personnel would be kind of cool, a la the GM/manager model (whitey herzog for instance).

[mikev]

Signing personnel should work like signing free agents. Period. This is completely broken and makes it a gigantic PITA for online leauges since an outside of the game solution for hiring must be implemented as a workaround.