I'm a newbie who has tried reading through a lot of the forums for advice and what not and I remember reading about two tricks in particular that I can't go back and find for the life of me. I'll try to outline them as I remember, can someone clear up or confirm?

1. A formula for estimating a prospect's final developed ratings based on their INITIAL ratings and FIRST YEAR DEVELOPMENT. IIRC, it went something like (# of points of development in first year) * 2.5 + Initial rating = solid estimate for their true potential. So for example, a new pitcher has a vsRH of 50 at signing and increases 8 points the rest of that developmental year. (8)*2.5 + 50 = 70. So, 70 would be a great estimate for what they will peak at.

2. Max training/medical budget to 20. If a player gets hurt in anyway (even a 3 day injury) put them on 60 day DL. And they will get huge bumps WHILE ON THE DL and healthy?

The second one works some of the time but not all of the time. This guy:

https://www.whatifsports.com/HBD/Pages/Popups/PlayerRatings.aspx?pid=7449492

went down for 7 days with a sore shoulder so I gave him the super soilder treatment. It works well to bump up those 'hard to increase' stats like health and durability.

I double a prospects first FULL year of development points as a general rule of where I think they will top out.

Thanks for the input

would that change due to age...college or hs prospect?

The formula you outlined in #1 was extremely reliable prior to the most recent round of updates/changes in gameplay, but the goal of those updates was to essentially make that formula useless or at least much less reliable. I have not yet figured out a formula to perform that sort of projection using the new updates.

I believe they claimed they were making development patterns more random to some degree. You can't build a formula to predict random changes.

But my sense so far is that the old formula will still be a fairly good predictor, even if it's less exact and consistent. It's more likely to be far off in one or two categories, but in terms of overall value for a player I don't see a big change. The formula was never exact anyway, given the effects of coaching, training, and playing time.