I can't tell if tbird is joking or not, but:

I'm strongly in favor of scouting "mistakes" or, at least, ambiguity. It's not that "high-high" should be mistaken for "low". It's that it should be harder to know exactly where a player is going to end up.

Perhaps a better way of doing things would be to have players labeled either "high" or "low", with high being 15+ and low being <14. You can argue about where the line should be, but the point is to make it a bit more difficult to be sure about players. 

This would have the effect of (1) making the game more realistic; and (more importantly) (2) making the results of recruiting more unpredictable, leading to less predictability of game outcomes. 

im a pretty middle-of-the-fencer on this. i think knowing exactly what will happen makes it too programmatic, not enough adaptation on the fly. but introducing too much randomness into things like injuries, how players will turn out, players leaving early - any time it happens, people get ******, because it sucks when you get hit with the wrong end of the random stick. ones like injuries, where there is a set "norm" and just a bad random outcome, clearly seem to cause more aggravation that can be tolerated (from the standpoint of a game creator). but i like ambiguity in recruiting - and there is some now - the difference between that 75 med rebounding hitting 82 max (meaning you struggle to break 80) and hitting a 95 max (allowing you to break 85 quickly and 95 junior season) is huge. the difference between that 30 per high high hitting 58 and 99 is monumental (in some cases). so i think there is a decent amount of randomness. it would go over a lot better if the curve of recruit quality were smoother, allowing people to dip lower consciously for a guy who could be better than a bit higher guy who doesnt have the possibility of becoming great.

to me, the whole point of randomness in stuff like recruiting is 1) leaving players with various degrees of luck, which allows players in situations on both ends of the spectrum (risk adverse and pro risk) to play the dice how they choose, and 2) having a variety of outcomes so that coaches have to adapt, and to take into account certain eventualities - allowing those who plan better and adapt better to gain an advantage. 

i can't personally find an obvious answer, it seems like there is a happy medium, but unfortunately, for everybody, that happy medium is in a different place :) which implies no matter what, most people think you are too far one way or the other. i'd think hitting it in the middle and being close enough to most people would be good enough, but then you have to take into account how much people like to ***** :)

Posted by coach_billyg on 11/27/2013 1:16:00 PM (view original):

Posted by dahsdebater on 11/27/2013 1:10:00 PM (view original):
Random elements of this game have been being removed for years.  Collectively, the HD community basically hates them.  The idea is that the real challenge is in understanding how all the elements of the recruiting and game engines work and how best to take advantage of that understanding.  Random elements undermine your ability to succeed in those central challenges.

well said.

theres always the theory that its extra-tough to deal with random events (like injuries) and maybe that gives coaches who work for it an edge... did you plan for these eventualities, have the depth to absorb them, etc... but in practice, people just seem to hate it. it would be sweet if people were like, man, i really handled that brutal injury to my star point guard well, we really didn't suffer much, that was awesome! but sadly what everyone is really thinking can't be posted here 

I know I am in the very miniscule minority, but I would like to see some random elements, at least on the positive side.  It would have to be very limited to avoid high levels of frustration but it would be nice to have for a variety of reasons.  Most every game, including a lot that have a very devoted following, have random elements in them.  Even games based on strategy like Risk have an element of randomness in them, small enough that true superiority overcomes it but enough to make things less predictable at other times.  As it stands now, HD is basically a large math problem with many of the variables well known or closely approximated.  While that appeals to my inner nerd, I still long for more randomness.  Of course, with a public forum such as this, anymor randomness would exponentially increase the moaning and gripping but its not like there isn't a lot of that already.  
I saw all this, of course, knowing that it is very unlikely to happen as the vast majority of coaches prefer predictability over randomness in this game as noted above.