Posted by timf on 12/15/2010 10:16:00 AM (view original):
You are using external tools not intended for use within the game to gain a competitive advantage. In other words, cheating.

What should I do with this pencil and paper that I've been using to take notes on??

Posted by jtrinsey on 12/15/2010 3:04:00 PM (view original):
I use 0 advanced and don't think I would ever change unless Advanced somehow impacted the actual gameplay or player development was less predictable. I trade for and trade away 1st/2nd-year prospects too. Some prospects have higher growth curves, but most develop at similar rates. I also just tend to look at how much they fetched in the IFA market or when they were drafted, and check to see how much money the drafting/signing owner had in the relevant scouting category.

Even if I am losing out a little bit in those trades, I will gladly take that extra 20M plus, put a top tier free-agent on my team and come out ahead. I don't see why anybody would put any money into advanced, to be honest with you.

Using IFA bonus and draft position is a nice guideline but you'd be well-served to find out how well your trade partner does in the IFA/Drafting parts of the game.

Seriously, I use 0 ADV but I think it's irresponsible to recommend it to everyone.    HBD has a lot of moving parts and if you're going to ignore one of them, you need to know what to do without it.    All 10m IFA are not created equal nor are all #5 picks in the draft.   To say "He was the 5th pick last year, he must be good!" is borderline retarded.  Owners make mistakes in the draft all the time and they overpay for IFA even more frequently.  

Again, the best time to use 0 ADV is when you decide you're not going to trade for a lot of prospects.   If that's your game, you're better off with 18-20m.   If you're more likely to trade away prospects for older players, 0 ADV is worthless.

I'd use 0 adv scouting every time.  The improvement tracks are too linear to make it worth anything, other than if your trading for a player 1 year removed from his draft/IFA status, with only 1 spring training line. I'd recommend keeping adv scouting at 0, start learning the develoment pattern, know that the development pattern isn't perfect, and also recognize that you're going to be limited if you try to trade for a young prospect.  However, for the extra $20 mil I can use elsewhere, its well worth the tradeoff.

The help box says   ---    Advance Scouting Department - The advance scouts are responsible for projecting the ratings of all signed players within the franchise and on other franchises. The higher the budget, the more accurate your projected ratings will be for all players who have not yet reached the peak of their career. After a player reaches his peak, projected and current ratings are the same.

   This thread makes it out to seem that Advanced scouts every player outside of your franchise, but the help says it's every player in the world.  So how would you know if you were developing legit prospects or junk?  If 0 advanced shows a guy to be a 70, and 20 advanced shows him at 85... ?  

Wouldn't every player on your franchise be part of the world?

tim=retard
i suck at math, but i don't consider saving info to a spreadsheet to be cheating
god bless anyone who can figure crap like that out

Posted by a_ersberg on 12/15/2010 10:57:00 PM (view original):
The help box says   ---    Advance Scouting Department - The advance scouts are responsible for projecting the ratings of all signed players within the franchise and on other franchises. The higher the budget, the more accurate your projected ratings will be for all players who have not yet reached the peak of their career. After a player reaches his peak, projected and current ratings are the same.

   This thread makes it out to seem that Advanced scouts every player outside of your franchise, but the help says it's every player in the world.  So how would you know if you were developing legit prospects or junk?  If 0 advanced shows a guy to be a 70, and 20 advanced shows him at 85... ?  

You seem to have completely missed one of the key issues of the thread - if you have good draft scouts, you got a good projection of the guys you drafted at draft time - very easy to save that, either just by making a note on the player, or by saving off the data. And since there's no real variability to player development as long as you don't screw guys up, having a good report on a player at draft time is the same as having a good advanced scouting report on him a couple seasons later.

Everyone understands that 0 advanced impacts your projections for your players as well.

Do you really NEED to save the ratings you saw for the players you draft?   Seems to me that when I draft a guy in the first round, I consider him BL material.   What I saw as his projections are irrelevant.   I need to develop him into a BL player.

For first round guys, no. But depending on the draft, I might get guys who can be BL contributors or worthwhile trade bait in the 2nd, 3rd, etc - or those guys might be total garbage - so I generally put a note on guys I consider to have BL potential after I draft them so they stick out when I'm managing the rosters. That being said, I've been doing my draft prep in Excel since long before I started cutting out ADV and yeah, I very rarely go back to the data for my guys.

I used to think that some ADV scouting was helpful, but now I see that it is redundant.  However, I don't think that I will ever go down to 0 for one reason:

WIS has been known to change the game without much warning.

If the next update makes High School/College/International Scouting determine how many players you see and Advanced Scouting shows you their ratings, I would hate to be 5 seasons away from getting it up to 20.  Or if it gets tied to development.  Or if draft prospects were switched to letter grades instead of numbers.  It's the fear of putting all my eggs in one basket that will keep me from going below 6.

I don't see much current advantage to budgeting $6 million for adv scouting, because it's sort of an almost-all or nothing proposition to me. Either you budget $12 million or more for accurate projections or trust your knowledge and roll the dice with zero.

But I go with zero on all my teams because the development patterns are fairly predictable. I don't use Excel, but I will do some research before making a trade for a prospect. For example, if I'm considering a deal for a prospect, I'll look at all the ML players at the same position group in that world and compare some of them to the player I'm scouting. I'll compare the older player(s) when they were at similar ages to my prospect to help determine whether other players made the same hops, skips and jumps on their way to their peak.

It's still an imperfect system, and I make far fewer trades than I used to. But I also play around in FA a lot more than I used to, which seems a more efficient use of resources in most worlds. Too many owners overvalue prospects.

Posted by jonas1102 on 12/16/2010 9:13:00 AM (view original):
I used to think that some ADV scouting was helpful, but now I see that it is redundant.  However, I don't think that I will ever go down to 0 for one reason:

WIS has been known to change the game without much warning.

If the next update makes High School/College/International Scouting determine how many players you see and Advanced Scouting shows you their ratings, I would hate to be 5 seasons away from getting it up to 20.  Or if it gets tied to development.  Or if draft prospects were switched to letter grades instead of numbers.  It's the fear of putting all my eggs in one basket that will keep me from going below 6.

This is a legit concern.   However, since I'm either at 0 or working my way to it, I have a plan.   I'd punt the draft for a few seasons.   Sign some Type A players and you don't have to worry about 1st-4th round picks.

Honestly, it all boils down to how frequently you trade FOR 1st/2nd year prospects.   If that's not your thing, you don't really need ADV if you understand development patterns.   I will say that my pattern for development may not be the same as your pattern of development which might be different than travisg's pattern of development.   They aren't identical between owners.

I have had a lengthy back and forth with WIS about the worthelessness of advance scouting due to the ability to pretty much "divine" accurate predictions based on progression. I did finally convince them that it needs further looking into, and about 3 months ago they told me they would keep my ticket on the issue open until such time as they have been able to fully review the issue. No word since, but I am keeping my AS budgets up still because I expect a change to be made sooner or later.

In fact, this was the exact final comment:

9/20/2010 8:50 AM Customer Support
Chad -- we're keeping this ticket open until we have the time to give it the thorough review it deserves. Thanks