Greetings,

N00b to HBD...inherited a team. I'm investing much more in the ratings-related budgets, e.g. Advanced Scouting and the draft-related budgets.

My understanding is that player ratings are more accurately projected if you have a higher Advanced Scouting budget. If so, when does that increased accuracy occur? Put another way...since the guy before me had low/no budget on scouting, am I currently looking at imprecise ratings, or did they magically adjust and improve their accuracy once the new budget was set?

Or am I not thinking about this the right way?

College/HS/ International scouting budgets:

20 million - you'll see the maximum amount of players available to you, and the most accurate projections you can get. BUT you will still miss out on a handful of them, and the projections will never be perfect.

18 million - almost the same quality of projections but less number of prospects.

16 million - about as low as I'd go to put any real confidence in the projections.

14 and below - diminishing returns from here on down. You can still get lucky picking up a player at 14 million, but they won't be what the projections show you. For the most part, when you get bad projections they're mostly overestimates.

For Advanced Scouting, I think you get what you pay for. I say I think because many/most experienced owners Zero it out. Advanced shows you projections for players on teams other than your own, so if you're not actively and regularly trading for other teams' prospects it's a large expense for minimal return. Owners like me trust our own best guesses when looking at those types of players. Or we just never trade for them.

The change happens as soon as the new budgets are processed. And as damag said, not only does your advanced scout budget affect the accuracy of projections of your own players, but also projections of the players on everyone else's teams.

Ok...thanks...in essence, there was a one-time adjustment of higher accuracy in existing player ratings once the new budgets kicked in with my much higher Advanced Scouting budget. And, if one looked at a player rating the day before and the day after this year's budget kicked in the ratings would have changed (unless they were both accurate to begin with).

That's correct. But it doesn't affect the current ratings - they are always accurate. It only affects the future projections.

good to know...thx

Fair to say. To explain my statement, I based it on a few repeated examples:

A/ With 0 High School scouting, I usually see five or seven 18 year old high schoolers in my prospects. Invariably two or three of them are 90+ Overalls. 90+ batting ratings or pitching splits sounds good, right? But the tell is that some of the positional ratings don't make any sense, like a 1B with 87 Range and a 42 Glove.
B/ Same thing with International scouting less than 14 million. Pitching DUR/STA ratings I see are usually things like 42/93, which the system almost never generates for real. And then the right-left pitching splits will look like 13/64. I've seen hitters like that, but not pitchers.