Hey everyone, ok so this is going to be a very long read but if you are anyone interested in the future of the HBD draft or have voiced concerns over the current HBD draft, fuzzy ratings and missing out on the top players of each draft please have a read. Hopefully we can start a conversation about this in this thread and work out something new going forward.

Background
Recently with the Hoops Dynasty promo I decided to pick up the 5 pack of teams for the price of 1 as something different to play. I honestly have to say the current way Hoops dynasty does scouting is head and shoulders above that of HBD. Its really incredible and I don't really feel like you would ever feel "cheated' if you missed out on a player. I've been on the HD discord trying to gather as much information as possible and adlorenz is on the discord server as well (programmer for HD and HBD for WIS) we got to talking and adlorenz mentioned that an overhaul to the HBD draft and scouting similar to HD may be possible as a minor or major overhaul in the future if enough people are interested in it. Now, HD and HBD are the last 2 games in line for full rewrites as they are the ones that got rewrites the most recently (other sims are over 10 years old) so take that as it is.

The Hoops Dynasty Scouting process. What is it?
If you have played HD 3.0 before feel free to skip this section as you know the ins and outs for scouting in HD. If you have a few extra bucks and want to see the ins and outs of the scouting engine up close I encourage you to purchase a HD team. Even if you don't get into the game you would be able to input on the possibility of this skeleton being used for HBD (obviously with tweaks for the system). If you have no idea what the hoops dynasty scouting system is, read on. I'll try to touch on everything but being a new owner I'm sure I'll miss some stuff. If anyone plays both, feel free to chime in.

In hoops dynasty you have a set budget at the beginning of every year. Every player that is available to be recruited has 4 levels to be scouted to once they are discovered.

Level 1 - The player has three categories they are ranked on - physical , defense and offence. Each category is given a letter grade from A to F. A is the best, F is the worst.

Level 2 - Each category is now broken down into sub categories. Physical is broken down into stamina, durability, athleticism and speed, defense is broken down into rebounding, defense and blocking, offence is broken down into low post, perimeter, ball handling, and passing. There are also 2 new categories: Work Ethic and free throw ability. Each sub category is given its own letter grade. A being the best F being the worst.

Level 3 - Each sub category letter grade can now be given a plus or a minus. Similar to school C- < C < C+. As well, each letter grade is given a color based off of potential. If the letter is yellow the potential for improvement is low, black, the potential for improvement is medium and blue the potential for improvement is high.

Level 4 - You are given the players actual current ratings for all sub categories. Each sub category is now color coded based on potential for each category. Red is very low. Yellow is low. Black is medium. Blue is High. Green is very high.

How to discover the players and unlock each scouting level for them:
At the beginning of each season every team gets to see the top 100 projected recruits or prospects and has them scouted to level 1. There are 4 ways that each team can find new players and scout them up to level 4. Assistant Coach, Coach, Camps and the future star service. You have approximately $20 000 to scout players.

The future star service - You are given a map of the entire United states with a small tab for Canada and international players. At the top is a drop down menu to determine if you want to scout players that are projected to play for Division 1 teams, Division 2 teams or Division 3 teams. Once you pick from the dropdown menu it lists the number of players that can be scouted in each state. You pick the states that you want to scout and pay $15 for each player you scout. If you discover a new player they are at scout level 1, for each player you have discovered before their scout level goes up 1 to a maximum of 4.

Camps - There are 8 scouting camps that are run per season. You can go to any of the camps to scout players. The price of the camps is about $30 per player with about 110 players showing up to each camp. You can also hold your own private camp once. Deciding how many players you would like to come out, and from how far away (more on that later) with the cost being $60 per player. You can invite as many or as few players as you like. You gain 2 levels of scouting for each player you recruit by this method. New players you find would be scouting level 2, any player you scouted before would go up 2 levels to a max of scouting level 4.

Assistant coach - You can ask your assistant coach to scout players for you. You can ask for players that play a specific position, you can ask the assistant coach to either scout new players or scout players you had found previously and you can set the distance from your school that you want the assistant coach to scout (again, more on why this is important later) The cost for scouting is $60 per player and has to be in denominations of 5. Each player you scout that has been scouted before goes up one level.

Coach scouting - You can scout players you have found before by doing coach scouting. Your coach can't find new players but is able to bump any player you have already found up a scouting level at the cost of $100 flat plus and additional 25 cents for each mile the player is away from your school. You can do this multiple times on the same player until they reach scouting level 4 as long as you have money.

At any point in time you can look at and compare the pool of your players. You can scout locally to save money or you can scout from states across the country to try to pick up other players. It still is very much using your budget to the best of your ability but you have a lot more options and are very much in charge of your scouting.

How this would transfer over to HBD
Again. These are all just base ideas that I had. I would love to have a conversation on this and see what everyone thinks. Flush out an idea so that when adlorenz is ready to do a major update we have a fleshed out idea ready to implement. Either that or I'm the only one that thinks this is a good idea and you've stopped reading at this point.

Top 100 in Hoops Dynasty
A top 100 for HBD is way too much. This would go through the first 2-3 rounds meaning no one would ever get a surprise pick. Maybe a top 5 or a top 10 with the 5 best pitchers and 5 best position players being listed for everyone to see. I would think these would be based off of overall rating and nothing else, meaning there are probably still (in good draft years) stud players hidden in picks 11-30 and maybe into the later rounds, just in terms of overall ratings these are the projected best players.

Budgeting and scouting
Either draft budgeting would still be split by High School and College or it would be pooled into one big 'amatuer draft budget'. I don't know how I feel one way or the other on this but for my argument we'll say HS and College is still separate. You would still budget money accordingly and the more money you put into HS or College the more you would have to spend on the scouting. You could scout HS by state or College by state, go to HS or College camps but whichever one you decide would take money out of that pool.

Player ratings once scouted to level 4
My thought for this would be very similar to the scouting for hoops dynasty. Level 1 you get to see 4 categories. General ratings, fielding ratings, pitching ratings and hitting ratings. Each has a letter grade A through F. Level 2 you get to see a letter for each category (control, VsL, VsR) level 3 with the coloured letters. When you get to level 4 you get to see the players CURRENT ratings with a colour code showing the potential for how many points they could gain in those categories with proper play and coaching. This way we wouldn't have people complaining saying they had a stud pitcher projected but he ended up losing a ton of important ratings. Instead if you got that stud pitcher up to level 4, when you draft him you would know exactly what his current ratings are but if he was red all across the board he might only gain a point or two, where as if he were green all across the board but 5-10 points less, he might end up being a better pitcher in the long run.


I'm sure I probably had more to add to this that I'm forgetting about but my brain is totally fried from all of this writing. If you read to this point, Thanks. If anyone has any input on this, or if adlorenz wanted to reply to this to get the ball rolling feel free to. Again, if this is just another one of my crazy ideas please disregard. Cheers.

I agree.

These are the only two games I play primarily because of how great of an experience recruiting is in HD and the draft is for HBD. I wouldn't want to see the draft changed for HBD unless it was well thought out. Need to think about this for a little while but one thing that jumps to mind is that in HBD scouting doesn't just cover the draft, but also professional (advanced) scouting as well. If HBD draft scouting is changed, advanced scouting may need an overhaul too. This may be welcomed for most users.

For an explanation, in HD, after a recruit is signed, only his coach can see his projection, and it is true. There's no budgeting to get that info. This is fine for HD, because the player is normally locked into that team until he graduates or leaves. For HBD, we budget how we see players before the draft and after the draft. For players we drafted, and others have drafted. If HBD is changed for pre-draft so you can see current ratings and a projection on those ratings, there's going to need to be an equivalent after a player is drafted that works with the HBD budgeting.

Also, for any change in the HBD draft it would be nice to still have a screen that allows you to copy the full pool of players (pitchers or pos.) with their ratings so we can copy that data to a spreadsheet and rank players manually with our own formulas.

I think it is a clever idea. I don't play HD so i am not familiar with how it works. Based the above, it might correlate over. The concerns I would have are below.

1. There is a lot to do in HBD from a roster organization perspective across six levels (5 minor leagues and the big show). If we added year long recruitment, it would be fun, but it might be a little much when you add it to everything else that needs to be managed.

2. I played OOTP for a little bit and I really enjoyed the depth of the scouting in that game. I would order scouting reports often with the hopes of eventually getting extremely accurate reports on the ratings of players. However, as I learned more about the game, i found that there is a GM mode where the GM can simply change to GM mode and look at all the current ratings for all the players. I was doing all of this work and spending hours and hours with my scouts. However, all the GM had to do was go into GM mode and that immediately made all the work I did moot because he could see all the current ratings of players and they were 100 percent accurate in that mode. I can see that if other issues brought up in other posts are not addressed, then this could be a similar situation to the above referenced situation in OOTP. I like the idea of doing more work to find gems in the draft. However, if other owners will still be able to see a 100 percent accurate current rating of the player that was recruited by another owner during the previous season, then we just implemented a system that makes the situation worse. If this is a situation where we are putting much more time into the draft, I would not be a happy HBD player if the same owners did the same thing -- simply checked the draft from last season and traded for the best players despite not spending a nickel on the scouting of that player.

3. I have done some extensive research on late round picks with the current system and i have learned that it is extremely random. There is no hot bed college or high school where these late round hidden gems come from. However, I have not dug deep on it from a "region perspective". Maybe there are hotbeds from a region perspective or maybe if they implement this new recruiting strategy in HBD, they will make hot beds. Maybe more talent comes out of schools where the weather allows them to play baseball year round (hotter climates). If this is the case, this may cause another unfair advantage for veteran owners. Once veteran owners find the hot beds, they get to take advantage of deeper talent pools in those areas. This will definitely be fun to tinker with. However, I can see certain owners not liking a consistent hot bed that veteran owners know about and take advantage of.

I would be all for a system similar to OOTP where you need to continue to order scouting reports on players in order to have the most accurate scouting. However, if a system like this was implemented, I hope it doesn't turn into situation like we have Fielding Instructors where there are not enough high end ones to satisfy the market. If we are hiring a special coach or a special scout individually, that can turn sour quickly if not enough high end guys are avilable.

Also, when you say that an assistant coach or a coach scouts out players, would we need to hire separate coaches? If so, would these coaches have a "recruiting" rating?

Don’t get too hung up on the title ‘assistant coach’ and ‘coach’. In terms of hoops dynasty they are just titles they assigned to be able to scout players in a different way. I know last thing people want are to hire more coaches. In HBD these could be called ‘head scout’ and ‘assistant coach’ or ‘scouting visit’ and ‘player interview’. All that would matter is your scouting budget.

unless you scouted the players during the scouting period you would never know the players ‘potential’. So you would be able to see the players current ratings but you would never see the ‘colours’ to determine how many points the player is likely to gain in their career. As soon as the player is signed those colours go away. (Or maybe that is what advanced scouting does)

so if we do an example Jose Alex is considered the #1 player in this draft. I spent no money on this years draft so I can see he is a CF. His fielding ratings are an A, his general ratings are a B. His hitting ratings are a B and his pitching ratings are a F.

owner 2 scouts Jose Alex to level 4 and sees he has splits of VsR 63 and VsL 56 (I’m not going to list all the ratings) his VsR is blue meaning this rating will gain a good amount of points in his career and the VsL is green meaning this rating will gain a lot of points in his career. Owner 2 drafts Alex Jose 3rd overall. As soon as Alex Jose signs, I can see his current ratings but I can’t see the colours that indicate how likely those ratings are to go up and by how much. (Again, maybe advanced scouting does this)

I’ll make another post I’m just posting this now so I don’t lose my place.

Edit: Tlowsters first point is the biggest negative I can see for this new scouting model. HBD is massive and it is a lot of work. If we had scouting from day 1 of the regular season to the draft, that is a lot of extra work on top of an already heavy game. But, the biggest plus is if you put in the work, it will pay off. If you spend the time and find as much information on as many prospects as possible, you have a larger, more accurate pool to draft from.

For the ‘hotbed regions’ I honestly can’t comment on that part. As it’s only my first season in HD 3.0 I have no idea if their are regional hotbeds or not but you are right. This would have to be addressed and there would have to be a fair spread of good players across the country. Otherwise everyone would only set up shop in certain cities.

I like the idea overall. I am all for areas where more work has the potential for more payoff. However, I still think that if other owners see the current ratings without paying to see them and development remains as predicable as it is right now, it would just be another situation where veteran owners sit back drinking their Don P as they live off of the labor of others.

In the example above, owner #1 paid nothing and was able to see general ratings. That's fine. However, as soon as Jose Alex is signed, owner #1 now sees his current ratings just like owner #2 did despite not paying anything and if the system's development remains as predictable as it is right now, owner #1 can swoop in and get this player. If owner #1 paid a scout to see the guy and just missed him in the draft and traded for him, I would be fine with that because they have a scouting report on the guy that they paid for. However, if owner #1 paid nothing as the above example suggests, the owner shouldn't have an idea where this player ends up.

That makes sense to me. Again, I feel this would be a part of a bigger update maybe including what we had talked about previously where advanced scouting now shows how accurate a players current ratings are that isn’t on your team.

Again I think if given the option I would rather wait, hash this out with everyone and do a major update that addresses a lot of things rather then just one or two that results in patches and further updates. I’m glad we are having these forums and conversations now so that the programmers have lots of data to work with.