What Scouting Accuracy Setting is for You?

[DaBears]

I play manager-only mode so use 100% scouting accuracy. My reasoning is that if you are managing a team and watching every play of every spring training game, all 162 games, and (hopefully) a few in the playoffs as well, you are going to know your players very, very well. OOTP does not naturally account for this, it seems, so I use the scouting accuracy to create that boost.

The only non-manager function I use is choosing the active roster, and have gone back and forth on that. On the one hand, in today's game most managers will at least have some say over the active roster, but then I also realize they will almost always have players the GM wants on the team but they don't. I'm trying it now with a bit of a house rule where I only get to choose one replacement player, if desired. The benefit here is it does leave the roster pretty much in the GM's hands but I can have a little say while also avoiding really dumb decisions. The AI, while vastly improved over the years, will simply never be completely real world. Examples are in April when the schedule allows a four man rotation so you might carry an extra bat or even a traditional reliever while waiting to call up a true fifth starter, or when your bullpen is absolutely wiped out so you know you need a real long reliever for a day or two, or when you have a day-to-day injury and don't want to DL but might need to adjust the roster to get by for a few days. Those are just a few examples.

Overall, I thoroughly enjoy manager only mode and let the GM do his thing while I do mine. Yes, I do yell at him occasionally but that's real life.

I have found 40/30/20/10 to work pretty well but have to say 50/25/18/7 gets what seems like pretty realistic results nowadays. I have always used hard/neutral until this year, but have to say average/neutral seems more fair now. I would still use hard if I were doing the trading, though.

[BBGiovanni]

I have never messed much with the default settings. Lately I've switched the scout accuracy to "high" because they seemed so wacky when suggesting draft picks and giving lousy FA relievers high ratings. This thread is making me think I will go back to "normal" and change the rating weights instead.

Not to derail the thread, but some of the comments here make me wonder if there should be a "coach/manager" rating too. It would give the GM a second in-house opinion, and represent the real-life divergence between scouts and coaches. I don't know how the mechanic works now, but maybe the coach rating would be based more heavily on player attitudes/work ethic/current season, with the scouts more focused on tools/past performance. And it would be interesting to have OSA (sort of the Baseball America/groupthink scouting), the scout's reports, and coach/manager appraisals. It would make for an interesting 3-sided data set instead of the duality we have now: useless OSA and possibly useful scouts.

[Whoofe]

I use normal scouting but I turn off the "stars" and just look at the contact/ gap/ power/ eye/avoid K ratings, that gets me to a point of who i will bother to check into more thouroughly, then I final evaluate with stats.

seems to work well for me, I've promoted a few players from my minors that are everyday solid players, passed up a few players who ended up being very good on other teams, and also found some players the AI wouldn't have rated that ended up being useful players for a couple seasons. mainly my minor league system has been rebuilt from almost nothing after 3 seasons and is considered the top minor league system according to the AI in game

[NoOne]

Originally Posted by Questdog

Your points are valid, except for one thing: OOTP does not work like you are expecting it to. Allowing the A.I. to only evaluate players on ratings would seem to be the logical way to get it to field the absolute best team at any given moment. But this is not how it works in practice. You need to have this year's stats included in the formula and to a pretty high degree, in order to compensate for it's inadequate evaluation of the ratings.

As for this year's stats throwing a monkey wrench into the equation because of small sample size, this is not a problem in OOTP, because this year's stats mean nothing until an adequate sample size has been achieved.

I do not like this. A better solution, to me,would be to count all results from the last 3 seasons, regardless of sample size and just weigh each plate appearance in the seasons differently. For instance, this year's stats each count 5 times more than last years, which count 5 times more than the year before. If a player had 500 AB last year, then last year's results will prove to be more important on decisions until he has 100 AB this year, at which point the two seasons will be equal in importance and as the season progresses, this year's stats will continue to grow in importance.

But that is not how OOTP works. It is all or nothing. Not enough stats and they have no value regardless of the settings.

that's not quite what i said... i said it is more strongly correlate than any 3 year percentage of stats (results).

i do use "this years" stats, just for different reasons... it's basically the same as the others 25 / 20 / 5. light on the third year, heavy on recent 2.

this years stats will not be an adequate sample size, that's the problem. the % error on many things will be quite large even in July when you are making really important roster decisions....

your idea on the 3year thing... 5x more than ... etc.. that's the same as doing your percentages of each year in a ratio like that. 1 : 5 : 25... then:

(1/31) * total Percentage allocated for stats for 2 years ago
5/31 * total percentaget allocated for stats for 1 year ago
25/31 * total % of allocated stats for current year.

That's already in the game, if you want to do that.

So, if it's too small to use for most of the year, realize the hefty chunk you want to be used isn't even being used for a good portion of the year... and when it is used it's not that accurate, because even an entire season is too small of a sample for many things, let alone a portion of one even if it ignore early portions.

will it play the "best" player all the time, no. but the greater amount you use ratings the more likely it is to happen. what do you think those stats are directly derived from in the video game? why wouldn't results be better predictors of success when you have the actual basis of them? they are exactly how it works, regardles of how well some bum was hitting in april - july... think chris shelton or brennan bosch.. fooled by randomness of results of a small sample size. in the case of brennan bosch, it even made his entire season look good (another det guy: creaig monroe, king of half-seasons of luck).

i don't have 100% clarity on how ootp works, but i'd bet the farm on this, lol.

[injury log]

Originally Posted by endgame

For instance. when examining setting comparisons like 50/20/20/10 versus a very close 45/30/15/10, I seriously doubt it would be anything less than extremely time consuming to find significant and demonstrable differences between these two.

Yes, exactly this. Anyone switching between those settings who thinks they're seeing perceptible differences in player evaluation is likely just experiencing a kind of placebo effect.