Suggestions: Scouting

[injury log]

Originally Posted by Stu

Suggestion

Add an option to Scout the Free Agent list and Upcoming Free Agent list. The time it takes would depend on how many players are there.

Reason

It's way too tedious to scout these guys individually.

Priority
Medium

Great idea; extending this further...

Suggestion

Add option to scout Rule 5 pool, with a level filter (e.g. scout all rule 5 eligibles in AAA).

Reason

Almost impossible to get up to date reports on even a fraction of the rule 5 pool; normally I'd only care to scout the rule 5 eligibles in AAA and AA anyway, but that's still very difficult.

Priority

Low.

[Syd Thrift]

Suggestion
----------------
Base scouting almost entirely on player performance.

Reason
----------------
How do scouts IRL figure out whether a player is good or not? By watching him play, of course. Occasionally you hear guys talk about "the good face" but the fact is, unlike football prospects are not rated on how many bench presses they can do or how they scored on the Wonderlic test. They are scored based on how well they hit, field and throw.

This is how I think this should be implemented: say, for example, that you send your scout out to watch your AAA team for a week and come back with the results. During that time, Scrubby McFeely takes over for your stud 2B prospect who has the flu and hits .450 with 4 home runs. That scout should come back saying that he's an 80 out of 80 hitter. No, seriously. You want less noise like this? Send your scouts around more often. Eventually, after they've watched guys a few different times, the sum of their scouting reports will make sense - unless, of course, Scrubby McFeely keeps playing over his head all season long, in which case you've got to find out for yourself whether he really has it or if he just has the good luck to hit whenever your scouts are present. Perhaps a really, really good scout could help you tell for sure... but he'd have to be the best of the best to pick out a bad player who is putting up good numbers (and vice versa).

Admittedly, I am not entirely sure how you'd implement this for high school and college ball. One idea is to have scouts "watch" each player "play" against simulated high school and college level competition for several games. That would probably make scouting the draft pool take a lot longer than it takes now and although I would be more than happy with the trade-off I imagine that's a decision that's not in my hands. Once players are in the league, I don't think that generating a scouting report based on a given scout's length on an assignment would take that much longer to perform than looking at the player's actual ratings and assigning error.

Additionally, it would add another wrinkle to the game that we see in real life: teams always seem to salivate over players who do well against them, even when they don't do so well against the rest of the league. Since you're liable to be scouting your own teams more frequently than the league as a whole, your scouts are going to overrate these guys. Also, thanks to your advance scout you're going to have more accurate pictures of the players in your division if your league plays an unbalanced schedule.

Priority
-------------
As high as high can be. This IMO would go a long way towards solving the scouting and boom/bust in the draft pool issues.

[Nutlaw]

Suggestion
Allow an option to display actual ratings for players' current ratings and scout-influenced ratings for players' potential.

Reason
It would help provide a compromise for users who didn't want to deal with the full blown scouting system and worry about whether or not their major league players could perform as well as they ought to, but it would still leave future development potential more up in the air. The current ratings of most major league players should be commonly known throughout a league, regardless.

Priority
Medium

[ms2002]

Originally Posted by Syd Thrift

Suggestion
----------------
Base scouting almost entirely on player performance.

I strongly agree with this. Anyway..

Suggestion
Fix these international scouting bugs: 1) Finding players from much different countries than the one you're scouting (when I'm scouting Japan, I preferably would want to find a stud player from Japan and not Puerto Rico.) 2) Finding current players, which effectively removes them from their current team's roster.

Reason
These both are problems, especially the second one. I don't think I've seen this reported yet either. But I've seen it happen very often.

Priority
Low.

[injury log]

In case it's helpful to battists and raidergoo- ms2002's suggestion 2) above has been claimed fixed for patch 3. Details here (it's a long one):

ootpdevelopments.com/board/showthread.php?t=151891

It's a player id recycling issue, when 'Delete retired players who never reached the Majors' is on.
========================
note from raidergoo:
Cool!

[falkonisback]

Suggestion
Give a notice when your scouts are in the last year of their contract or when a scout retires.

Reason
So that you don't accidentally lose all your scouts to free agency and you know to replace a scout whenever one retires.

Priority
Medium

[koohead]

Suggestion
Related to international scouting, a scout that is listed as being from latin america should have better success finding talent in Latin America vs the Far East. so a scout who is from japan would be naturally assigned to Japan.

Reason
More realistic in my opinion. Obviously all scouts will have the ability to scout anywhere.

Priority

Medium

[Cornroe Wallace]

Give the g.m. the ability to tell ALL the scouts universally that he or she wants them to scout for OBP, or pitching, or averages, rather than having to edit all of the scouts strategies individually.

As GM I should be able to call all my scouts into the office and tell them all at the same time what I expect them to do.

[dybbuk]

Originally Posted by battists

Suggestion
Bring back text descriptions by scouts, using the XML text engine. The text team can build a wide variety of messages so that each player gets a nearly unique description from any scout who reviews him.

It could look something like the middle section on this page:

http://www.minorleaguebaseball.com/m...jsp?mc=wieters

Reason
This is an area that really added a sense of immersion in OOTP 6.5, even though there weren't enough different phrases in that game. With the new text engine, there is a huge opportunity to present some really cool descriptions of players. This would in turn increase the "fun factor" of the game and reduce the reliance on sheer numbers.

Priority
Really, really fantastically high.

---------------------------------------------
(I hope this all makes sense.)
I absolutely agree with this, but, also would want to add ontop of it. I come from ehm.

Suggestion
When you scout somebody in ehm it might give you information about attitude and what not, as well, I like the trainer feature of ehm because if a player of mine is injured and I scout him with my trainer he might come back and say"well his knee is finished unless it has some physio done to it(not exactly, but, afterwards it' give me the option to send player x to physio)" I'd like it to give the option of pushing a player back on the field too early and rising his chance of getting re-injured, trying a physio route or total shutdown and opting for surgery.

Reason
This way you could reduce a guy's chance of injuring his knees or something after repreated knee injuries by sending him to surgery. (Can anybody say AJ Burnett?) It would also mean adding in a behaviour to GM's, sometimes they'd wanna rush him out there, say for the World Series, but, if they're 45 games out, pfft, shut him down. Or maybe the GM is an idiot who doesn't beleive in pain or injuries.

Priority
Really, really fantastically high.

[Sauce-O-Matic]

Suggestion - Text-based scouting reports to include player performance at level, potential asessment, and personality as a scouting alternative in hidden attribute leagues


Reason - As is, with the exception of draft time, Scoting in hidden attribute leagues is almost meaningless. Also, the more REALISTIC the experience, the better the sim. In *real lif* you do not get a simple attribute rating sheet...you get a written report from scouts. With a properly developed text-based scouting system, I would see zero reason why anyone would want attributes shown...if they were truly all about the best "sim" possible.


Priority - HIGH. Regardless of how far y0u take this, any improvement for hidden attribute leagues is essential.

[hockey72]

Suggestion - Not necessarily getting rid of the current scouting format, because some people like it played this way. But have an option where you could still have scouts there, but bring back the old scouting with ootp. I like the talent changes choice, but the rest of it is too much.

Reason - I do believe scouting is important, but it seems like to be really successful, you have to continue to scout. I often start with scouting, but end of getting rid of it because it seems like I am scouting pretty much all the time, making the game less enjoyable. I understand scouting plays a huge role, but it doesn't mean you should be doing it the whole year. I understand players have good days and bad days, so ratings can continually change. It would be nice to see it simplified to what you had before you changed from ootp. I would play the old ootp, but you have added some many nice things since, that I end up playing ootp 2007. The current scouting format is the only thing I don't like about ootp 2007.

Priority - HIGH.

[Raidergoo]

All suggestions have been collected in this thread.