And following up on my previous post, if the pre-draft projections are this fuzzy, even at $20m, this may be a reason to invest more in ADV in order to see who and what you REALLY drafted.

How so?  You already drafted them and you'll see them develop.   Unless, of course, you want to start dealing away first round picks.   Even then, the market will give you an indication of what everyone else sees.

I treat my potential MLB prospects with a more care than I do with my non-prospects, so I like to designate them as such.  My comment was based on the thought that if I just go by the fuzzy pre-draft ratings, I may misidentify non-prospects as potential MLB prospects, and vice-versa.  I'd hate to think that I failed to properly develop a MLB prospect because I kept him inactive on a minor league roster half the time.

A higher AVD budget as a "sanity check" would clear the pre-draft fuzziness.

I do the same.   That said, after the draft, I compare the projected ratings I saw to the currents I now see.    And I mark my real prospects accordingly.   Then after a season, I re-identify based on progress.   I just don't think ADV makes a difference still if you aren't trading young players.

For now, unless and until there are important changes to the development engine (promised any day now), I would just use the current ratings once you can see them to project development.  

Once those changes are made, I can see making an investment in ADV.

It would be more effective to just increase the number of prospects you treat "with care" than to increase ADV. I'll likely invest bit more in Coaches so High-A is better than I usually have it now, so I'm more confident of good development at three levels instead of two. Adding $1M in MiL Coaching would go a lot farther than another $1M in ADV. I'd think to make ADV effective it would have to be at $14M+. Not worth it if the only benefit is a higher comfort level in assessing first-year players.

The ONLY way to make ADV relevant is to determine the projections of all prospects.   No one liked that idea but that will be the simplest way to make it useful.   I expect most owners would bump ADV up and drop the draft or IFA instead of trying to do both.  

Posted by MikeT23 on 7/14/2015 6:23:00 PM (view original):
The ONLY way to make ADV relevant is to determine the projections of all prospects.   No one liked that idea but that will be the simplest way to make it useful.   I expect most owners would bump ADV up and drop the draft or IFA instead of trying to do both.  

Not the ONLY way.  If you radically vary the development patterns of prospects it would make ADV relevant for most owners.  You would need to make huge changes, including all of:

     1) some players making large improvements at all ages up until 27 or even 28;
     2) some players making large improvements in their 7th or 8th year in the pros;
     3) some players declining and then improving, or at least stagnating and improving;
     4) some players plateauing and improving, and others plateauing permanently very young;
     5) some players declining from age 23 or so

etc.  The point is to make it so that when you look at the current ratings of a 19-23 year old player, regardless of pro experience, you have a greatly decreased clue what the hell he's going to become if you don't have money in ADV, and a somewhat decreased clue for 24-26 year olds.

That's not perfect; some owners will still run zero ADV and not trade for anyone under the age of 26 or so, because most players would still have to have fairly stable ratings at age 26.  But it would make ADV do what it was originally supposed to do.  

I'm not saying this is any better than Mike's proposal, and I'll concede that Mike's is easier to program.  But it is in my opinion a viable alternative, and one I would enjoy more.  Furthermore, it blows up the incentive to copy, paste, and store ratings periodically, which is a thing I think should be blown up; in Mike's system you would still be able to trade for young players confidently if you knew their historical ratings because you had them in an excel spreadsheet.  (Mike, I know you think that's crazy to do-- but there are plenty of crazy people who play this game... is it any crazier than going 49-113 for four consecutive seasons to get good draft picks?)

ONLY is a bit of a grandiose way of stating it.    It's the simplest way with redoing virtually every aspect of the game.

And, yeah, copy/paste/save all draft prospects is retarded.  But, if ADV gave you their projections, you still need ADV.

It isn't a gain in any way if ADV becomes relevant and other budgets become irrelevant.

How would other budgets become irrelevant?

At the end of the day, someone is ALWAYS going to use 0 in some category.    There's no way around it.   Making ADV relevant in the way I suggest would create different 0 options.   Right now, ADV is 0 for almost everyone.   And will remain that way.   In any world, the other zeroes will vary but ADV is constant.