A guy in one of my leagues always goes with 0 for advanced scouting, but has one of the top franchises in the league stocked with talent....moderate amounts in HS and college scouting (10-12 million)...what does he know that the rest of us don't?

That you can get a good idea of how a player will progress without wasting money in advanced scouting...

If you're not trading for prospects with 1-2 years experience, you don't need ADV if you trust your drafting skills.

However, this is what will happen if everyone starts going with 0: We all make mistakes in the draft. We'll know this and deal our bad picks for actual talent to owners with 0 ADV.

I have not made any mistakes in the draft yet.

Or WIS will make some sort of adjustment to the game engine that makes advanced scouting important. And all the owners (such as myself) who have it zeroed out will be screwed for a couple of years.

It is simple really, all players current ratings are seen the same even in the draft by everyone. It just takes knowledge in what to look for in players in the draft and trading. I agree they will probably change this at some point in time, but then all you have to do is look at the stats.

I'm a 0 ADV guy and I tend to disagree that it's useless. I don't need it because I seldom trade for a player in his 2nd season and I trust my drafting skills. If I were to run across a 2nd year player on his way to 0 ADV I'd question if he was really a n00b.

You can gauge how good a player is just based on current ratings and how they've improved. Typically teams with 0 advanced scouting have put that money directly into player payroll. As Mike said, it mostly hurts you when evaluating relatively new players in their first few seasons. I tend to still go high in that regard because I like to keep a relatively low player payroll and trade guys during their last few years of arbitration... Advanced scouting helps me get the best possible return on those trades. But to each his own.

Even when I use 20 in Advanced scouting, I have to consider current ratings and progression because it'll let me know who is unlikely to reach those projections.

Quote: Originally Posted By jtrinsey on 6/07/2010Or WIS will make some sort of adjustment to the game engine that makes advanced scouting important. And all the owners (such as myself) who have it zeroed out will be screwed for a couple of years

This is what I'm waiting for since the low advanced scouting strategy became popular. WIS to introduce some type of change that makes player improvement less predictable. Or tie something else into the advanced scouting budget. It's going to cause an uproar from all the guys that went to low advanced and can't adjust it immediately.

And I'm not saying there is any problem with going to 0 advanced scouting. But one of the risks associated with ANY extreme strategy in a game like this is that they will modify the logic your extreme strategy is centered around. It's not like they have put in the Help pages that you can expect a linear and predicatable improvement path. It's just that guys have figured out that's the way it's currently coded.

It wouldn't make much sense to have a discontinuous development path. The only reason to implement it would be to combat zero ADV scouting.

I don't know why they'd want to combat 0 advanced scouting. It's just a strategy. You get certain benefits and certain harms. It benefits some people and probably hurts others. Doesn't seem to be any massive reason to change it.

If you are a guy who hates that some people go 0 in ADV and get away with it, how about this idea? CURRENT ratings show up as ? for all ratings and all players until the player's 4th year? THAT would make ADV scouting VERY important, I believe.

Not sure if it would make game any more or less realistic, and I haven't considered other consequences. Just throwing it out there.

I think advanced scouting should have some sort of effect on either viewing current ratings of other players in the league (not on your team) or tied in somehow to scouting.

In real life, an "advance scout" is somebody who, for the most part, scouts other teams in the leagues to get an idea of their strengths and weaknesses. It kind of makes no sense that I can put 0 in my advanced scouting and still get a perfect judgement of the current skill level of every player in the league.

The above suggestions are too radical of a change, however. At this point, you can't just turn off the lights on current ratings. It would have to be a much more subtle change.

My suggestion would be to add much more variance in the player's development curve, but specifically the LENGTH of that curve. I think this would mirror real life better and also make advanced scouting more valuable.

For example, look at Johan Santana. He signed as a 16 y/o IFA and was obviously talented but had tons of control problems. However, his control kept improving and it wasn't until his 8th professional year (when he was 24) that he finally walked fewer than 3 batters per 9. Jayson Werth is another example, he is just hitting his peak at 31, and has steadily improved ISO, walk rates and his platoon split has evened out.

On the flip side, you have a guy like Felix Hernandez who, in just his 3rd pro season at 19 was basically as good (or better) as he is now. Ditto for a guy like Ryan Zimmerman who was drafted in 2005 and hit the ground running in the majors, but had 3 straight years of basically being the same player. Of course, he did have an uptick in power last season, so maybe that will continue, but that's just an example off the top of my head.

The point is that, in real life, players have very different growth curves. Some have great potential with one or two glaring weaknesses that either never improve (keeping them mediocre) or improve greatly and make them a star- like Johan. Some, like Jayson Werth are fairly unremarkable but gradually improve all facets of their game until they are excellent players.

Some are ML-ready very early but never hit superstardom. Some are ML-ready very early and get even better. Some players develop power first and batting eye later. Some don't add power until they fill out in their late 20s.

I think that would make the game a lot more interesting and realistic and also had a huge element of strategy with regards to advanced scouting. It could also be phased in slowly enough so as to not totally shake the whole game up in one or two seasons.

I think it would be interesting if there were 4 sorts of growth patterns:

(1) Could be the standard growth that they have now. Big improvement in the first year that steadily slows down until they are pretty much at their peak by year 4.

(2) Could be "peaked out" guys who improve a bit in year one and/or two, but after that don't improve too much.

(3) Could be "slow and steady" guys who don't improve more than 1-3 points in any category per year, but they do so until they are 29-31.

(4) Could be "singular attribute" guys who see most of their improvement in one or two attributes. For instance, a guy has a fairly standard growth curve except that his power continues to improve into his 7th or 8th pro year. Or a Ryan Madsen-type guy who goes from "decent" to "good" because his 2nd pitch continued to improve.

I'm sure there are other growth curves as well. I just think that this would be a significant improvement without drastically altering the nature of the game.