Thursday, October 8, 2009

Is this the thinnest draft ever?

It is, in my opinion. Every scout I've heard about reports on a severe limit of talent available in this year's draft. Can anyone remember a weaker class?

My scout, for example, shows only a couple of players above even 1 star. And two of those are middle relievers, if I recall correctly.

Oy.

8 comments:

  1. I agree, my scout (who is good) has 2 draftees over 1 star and one of the two is MR. It is not good...not good at all. I am interested to see how feeder leagues change the way draft classes are formed in my other leagues to see if it gets better. Becasue I have not been impressed with the random generation of Draft Classes so far in OOTP9.

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  2. I am not convinced that the problem is that the *draft class* is poor, per se. We had people saying the same thing last year, too, and I doubt the game is so broken as to have so few decent prospects built; the league would become very strange in short order.

    I think the problem is with our *scouts*. I've been stuck on this for a while, but I think this version of the game introduced a ton of variance between the opinions of the scouts, and widened the gap between even a good scout's opinion of a player and that player's actual potential.

    I wonder if we pooled our information (not that we should do this! Although it might be an interesting project for after the draft), whether we would find that collectively, our scouts have identified 15-20 multiple-star prospects - it's just that each of us has identified different ones. I suspect that's the case. But absent statistics by which to judge, we're all prisoners to our scout's assessments... which makes the outcome of the draft, and thus the long-term outcome of the league, much more subject to pure chance than I'd like. Oh, well.

    Feeder leagues, where players could generate an actual statistical record that could be used along with a scouting report, would help.

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  3. Frank, I do agree with you to a point, but I think that it is more than that. I think that there is a flaw in the way that the game gives out stars for potential ratings. I think that many of the prospects are better than they are rated and that is why some go from one star to 5 stars seemingly overnight.

    If you notice, if you have your scout put together your draft list. Normally the players at the top are not the same ones that have the most potential stars. It is very interesting to me.

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  4. My scout isn't very good, but he says that there is one 5* prospect, a 4.5* prospect, several prospects between 2.5* - 4*, and five 2* prospects. Just to add to the confusion.

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  5. Also, I am experimenting in another league with a very large scouting budget. I think that it is going to really help identify the good players from the bad ones.

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  6. As far as the draft within the sim goes, does one have to have as many potential picks as there has been picked to date? ie 8th pick third round needs to have 32 players listed? Plus only one past one star from my scout.

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  7. No, not at all, David. But if there's no one listed for you (i.e. all of your choices have been taken) your scout will choose someone for you based on his tendencies. Sometimes that works, sometimes it doesn't.

    Though I've always let my scout handle the 1-2 star players as they're a crap shoot.

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  8. For the sake of fairness, I'll disclose that my scout thinks this is an decent draft and much, much better than last year's.

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