We have been evaluating the change we made in mid-2015 pertaining to prospect scouting and rating accuracy. We have finished testing some improvements pertaining to this and will be release it next Monday. The changes will only take place once a world enters its next season (i.e. when a season's schedule is generated for a new season).

The fuzziness distribution logic will now be different for high school scouting, college scouting and international scouting.
For example, if a team has spent $10M on both high school and college scouting, college scouting will, on average, provide more accurate projections than high school projections. International scouting will be somewhere in between, with older international prospects being more accurate (with the idea being they are coming from a proven foreign league).

Across the board, the new fuzziness will be slightly less fuzzy than what is currently in place.

We believe these adjustments stay true to the goal of making the draft and int'l scouting less formulaic, but also introduce more realism to the projections the scouts provide.

So everyone spends $20 million in College scouting now?

Well, realize that none of this addresses the actual quality of the prospects. All you're paying for is the filter through which you see them. So if you're inclined to take the road which gives you the most, um, "security", it still leaves open the possibility that you won't be paying for the best players, and you'll be leaving them for other owners with higher risk tolerance.

As I keep saying, the whole "issue" with fuzzy ratings has nothing to do with the quality of the players, it's the owners discomfort with having to spend budget money.

Posted by hockey1984 on 6/13/2016 10:58:00 PM (view original):
So everyone spends $20 million in College scouting now?

I wouldn't think so. Sounds like $14-16M might provide decent enough College ratings, at least better than what we see now for that amount. If the change prompts most people to boost College and drop HS, putting $20M into HS might be smarter.

Yeah, seems $20M in HS would be a pretty smart call if even more owners in the <$15M range end up swinging and missing on HS prospects. I actually like the current system, I'm finding solid value in picks all the way down to round 4. My only criticism remains the rather large discrepancies in dur/sta ratings I keep seeing, even at $20M scouting.

Very few players who were drafted under the "old" scouting are fully developed. It's virtually impossible to know if it worked as intended or not. However, as usual, the caterwauling of a few brings about change.

Will ratings for older college prospects be more accurate than younger college prospects like international scouting, or will it be the same for any college prospect?

Just drop prospect ratings uniformly so that all prospects will out perform their scouting projections. A prospect with a 75 true rating will be celebrated by the masses if the projections were 70. The exact same prospect will have owners shouting from the rooftops in disgust if he was projected to be 80 overall. Owners, in general, want to feel like they got a steal/great find, instead of being disappointing that the player was significantly worse than anticipated.

While that's pure silliness, you're 100% correct. If no prospect ever projected to be more than a middling BL player, people would wet themselves when he "develops" into an All-Star.

It's not silly at all. It's how everyone sees things. If you tell someone it will be a 70, and it turns out to be a 75, they are happy. If you tell them it will be an 80, and it turns out to be a 75, they are disappointed.

Too bad HBD coders don't get that. Adding someone who does to the HBD team would put money in their pockets.

If this update works exactly as described, it will add more complexity to drafting and IFAs, as we'll have to consider age a lot more than we do now. Personally, I'm for that. Although I'm not sure making the game harder for new GMs is on the short list of HBD issues today.

It will completely flip how IFAs work. Today, projections on anyone over 18 are BS. Closer to 22 means they they won't improve much, if at all, so you should only look at current ratings. If they are 18 they will improve along the lines of draft picks. If I'm reading this correctly, projections for older IFAs will suddenly have more meaning than projections for 18 year old IFAs.

If WIS had taken on the far more simple and less expense project of coding anti-tanking rules and options, they could have left drafting more or less alone. This seems to be a crazy complex way to deal with a simple problem.

I'm glad WIS is working on HBD. It's fiddling while Rome burns, but if they are working on the game there's always hope WIS will decide to fix what's proven to be the real problems with HBD.

The only problem the should be working on is that there are hundreds of people who want to be running an HBD team today who cannot because of the way HBD is designed. Fix that, and you have money to fix smaller issues. Don't fix that and the game will continue to stumble along until it doesn't.

It's silly because, if everyone knows their prospects are being "underrated", the ******** will soon turn to "My prospects are rated 70 and never get past 75. Why can't some be better?" You've been around long enough to know this.

The solution to the problem you mention is simple. Multiple world sizes and/or "travel teams".

I stop worrying about projections the moment I sign a player. Projections no longer matter, development does. If everyone would adopt this philosophy, all projection problems would go away. But that ain't happening.

Posted by MikeT23 on 6/14/2016 5:08:00 PM (view original):
I stop worrying about projections the moment I sign a player. Projections no longer matter, development does. If everyone would adopt this philosophy, all projection problems would go away. But that ain't happening.

But how ill I know I drafted the next Jimmy Powell or not? I need to see projections!!!!

MIke got it right. The whining of some "forced" the change, unfortunately.

Something had to change. I had joined a league and took the worst team in the league just so once I could get the first pick in the draft. Hoping I never had to get that again. I had 14 and 14 on my scouting. The best player I saw was an 82 overall. What a joke. I was told by several others in the league they saw anywhere from 96-100 type players. As we all know, I have not seen any have better overalls after drafting them than I saw before. Most guys I had I got in the international market were all at least 10 points or more off of their potential I saw before signing them. And I had a similar 14 on scouting for that. So I had to assume the best player I was going to get with the first OVERALL pick I thought might turn out to be about a 72. That player was drafted 36th in the draft and was about a 76 overall. The player I selected was a hard to sign guy that did not sign. Most of the top ten players drafted I didn't even scout. That's ridiculous. I didn't even have a chance at the best player because I never even saw him. EVERYONE in MLB knows who the best players are. It shouldn't be a secret as far as top ten. Only whether you have the resources in the right areas to develop them. Or I would rather hire scouts for East, West, North and South and base your picks off how good and which scout had scouting him if it was up to me.