I've posted this before and I don't think its ever gone anywhere but I think it would add to the strategy of the game and with the proper implimentation could be a detriment to the tanking 101 teams.
Scouting.
Currently there is the potential for a team to tie up 80 million per season in scouting. (Don't shoot me yet) I know there is no reason why any HBD owner would waste 20 million in each catagory, so I post it only to help make a point. We scout 3 locations, HS, COL and INT thats potentially 60 million.
My proposal is to combine the high school / college scouts into one lump sum, and diversify the pool by regions. According to baseball-almanac.com (
http://www.baseball-almanac.com/players/birthplace.php) historically 15,681 players have come from the US, 564 from the Dominican Republic, 286 from Venezuela, 234 from Puerto Rico, 237 from Canada, and it drops like a rock from there. So that gives us 4 main international regions, 4 regions in the us (NE, S, Central and West) and the rest of the world. I propose that we take the maximum 60 million that we can 'location' scout with and allow owners to split that amoung the 9 or so regions mentioned above. In theory someone wanting to cover all locations could spend a bit over 6 million in each region and get average results, but you can still use the same vision ratio that is there currently allowing teams to go all in in some regions and stay out of others. I don't propose that potential pool size be different or based on historical numbers, simply because who would spend a lot of money on 'rest of the world' when such a small percentage of players come from there.
I think this would add strategy, reward teams for taking a potential risk, (provided that I can't see were my competition specifically spent his money) only how much is alocated overall.
I'll add some additonal thoughts on specific scouting, possiblity of loyalty etc as the post goes on. What do you all think?