Scouting / Evaluating Talent in an Online League

[CMH]

I'm going over the demo while I evaluate how the game operates in version 20 to see if it's a good fit for our online league (which has leagues in other text-sim games).

This is the best basketball option and DDS has improved in many ways to make it more viable for an online league. At the moment, my question centers on scouting. Not for the draft, but for pro players.

From what I've gathered, GMs in the game have ratings that determine how good they are at evaluating talent. My concern is: is there a good balance here for real-life GM ratings in an online league that wants to take advantage of coaches evaluating players but alternately doesn't want to create an environment where a coach's ability to evaluate talent is ignored.

I want every GM to be equal. But I don't want GMs to be close to 100% in evaluating talent because that makes coaches less valuable. I also don't want to make them terrible to the point that the teams with more money dominate the game because a poorer team can't hire good coaches and compete.

Any help would be appreciated.

[Tim Moungey]

To achieve equality for all GMs, yet still have coach scouting matter, and not have coaching budget create disparity, I think you pretty much have one solution:

Edit all the coaches to have the same scouting ratings or within a few points of each other.

You'll still have variability in scouting, but no one gains a major advantage over the others.

[CMH]

I don't want to completely remove coaches. I think that should matter. Having a good coach should matter.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding how player ratings work. Who is providing the team that 1-10 ratings of a player? I assumed it was the GM. And the GM is us. I just don't want to make GMs all zero in ability because that seems way too harsh. Maybe the solution is to put everyone in the middle.

[Tim Moungey]

I don't want to completely remove coaches. I think that should matter. Having a good coach should matter.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding how player ratings work. Who is providing the team that 1-10 ratings of a player? I assumed it was the GM. And the GM is us. I just don't want to make GMs all zero in ability because that seems way too harsh. Maybe the solution is to put everyone in the middle.

It's a combination of scouting ability of GM and coaches that generates scouted player ratings (Interesting that the league uses 1-10 BTW)

[CMH]

Sorry, I still find this extremely confusing and reading the manual did nothing to help in this regard.

When I open a current player card, I see Player Bio which lists several skills rated 1-10 in current and potential. I can also see Staff Report from each coach rating some of these skills from A-F.

Why would the Player Bio give me the coach ratings when I already have a screen for that? Or are you saying that the Player Bio ratings are a combination of GM & all coaches? Is that the same for Overall Rating?

Lastly, not sure I know what you mean by "league uses 1-10". I haven't started the league just yet, unfortunately. I'm trying to grasp how the game works so I can explain it to a league of guys to gauge their interest in a multiplayer league. Is there a drastic reason why we shouldn't use 1-10 ratings and instead use 1-100?

[Gary Gorski]

Ok there is a couple of things at play that go into the ratings - I will explain this as best as I can without giving away too much.

The ratings that are displayed are an aggregate of the GM as well as the coach - so if you set every GM's ratings to be the same then they will all perform at the same level in terms of scouting the players and the individual coaches each team has will matter because the teams with better coaches will then have a more accurate picture of the player than teams with worse coaches.

However at a certain point for each player he stops being "evaluated" and the player is accepted as a certain rating by everyone in the league. For example lets look at a player like Giannis - every coach and GM in the league would have told you two years ago that he was a stud. There was no more evaluating to be done. But if you go back four or five years I am sure Milwaukee felt that way but maybe others weren't as sure. The same thing happens in the game to players so the idea of scouting really is only important for the players who would still have some unknown factor to them in their career and not for every player in the league.

[CMH]

Thank you Gary. And I really love that concept behind scouting. There should be no guessing anymore at a certain point in someone's career. If they are great, everyone knows it. One coach shouldn't call a player a bum while others say he's great when the guy is 28 years old and obviously one or the other.

I appreciate the response and help here.