New Scouting System

Wrote this on the plane (yay for optimizing time). Keep in mind a lot of this is still a work in progress, so let me know your guys thoughts on whatever you want. I'm open to feedback for sure.

I’m hoping that this new scouting system will not only provide another level of realism (and fun), but also be easier to interpret and at the same time add a layer of complexity we didn’t have with the letter grades (scrapping the letter grades for sure). Here’s each of the aspects of the new scouting system.

Side by side College Basketball season (run by DDS:CB2)
Each year before the season starts I’m going to add in all the rookies in the upcoming draft class to their respective college teams. The college season will be simmed in conjunction with the CSL season, so you’ll be able to keep up with all the prospects as the year goes on. HTML will be uploaded so you can see their raw stats, but I’m not going to include the ratings HTML pages (so that you can’t just see their ratings there).

This also means rather than just scouting players during the month, you’ll be able to pick out games you want to send your scouts to. Being able to scout as you go will allow you more flexibility in terms of how often you want to scout a player or in which situations you scout a player.

I’ll also be using the college season to drive media, so that way there’s more concrete stuff to write about. Rather than making up stats and storylines, I’ll have real stats and storylines to write about.

There will also be a European season run side by side as well for all the international prospects who play for a Euro League team.

Two options for Scouting
There will be two different ways you can scout. The first way is you can utilize your own coaches as scouts. This is where Evaluate Offense, Evaluate Defense, and Evaluate Potential come into play. The higher your coaches ratings are in these categories, the better scouting reports you will get. A coach with a high evaluate offense but low evaluate defense rating might give you an inaccurate picture of a player’s current defensive ability, or perhaps he might need multiple times to scout a certain player just to give you the full defensive report (he might have missed block rating or steal rating the first time around). When you scout a player using your coaches, you don’t select which coach you want to scout the player, but the aggregate of your three assistant coaches ratings are used, with them being weighted in reverse order. What I mean by this is that your A3 coach’s ratings will actually be the most important, then your A2, and then your A1. This combined rating will be what determines what kind of scouting report you get whenever you scout a player. Once we get to the post-season scouting phase (workouts, draft combine), your head coaches ratings will come into effect, and at that point all coaches ratings will be weighted evenly.

The other way you can scout is to take advantage of national scouting services, like Draft Express. You can hire them to scout a number of players for you, and you will get detailed scouting reports on each player. Every scouting report you purchase will contain all the ratings, however, you won’t know exactly how accurate it is. It’s reasonable to expect it to be somewhat accurate, as these guys do this for a living, but since they aren’t on your staff and they don’t know exactly what your organization is looking for, there’s no guarantee these ratings will be as accurate as you’d want them to be.

You’ll be able to get more scouting reports if you take advantage of the scouting services, and if you have poor coaches at scouting, it might make more sense to just hire these guys and get more bang for your buck. However, if you have good coaches at scouting, you’ll want to use them to get accurate information, but you won’t be able to scout as many players since coaches have a lot of other responsibilities on their plate. It’s up to you to weigh your options accordingly.

Ratings will all be provided in numerical format, with the deviation varying depending on all the factors listed above. With some of your scouting reports, you’ll also get bonus information you can’t get anywhere else, like a player’s shooting breakdown (how he’s shooting on the season from 3, from mid range, from inside the lane) or his defensive abilities (stop %, turnovers forced, pa/sf), and some other exclusive information.

I haven’t determined yet how much everything will cost, but I know that per player it will cost more to use your coaches, but that reports from scouting services will cost more because you won’t be able to order individual player reports, you’ll have to request a number of them at once. The more players you order from the scouting service, the more of a discount you’ll get (for example, it might be $1,000,000 for 5 players, but $1,500,000 for 10).

One word: awesome.

Hmm, that's interesting. Can't wait to see how this is implemented but looking forward to it.

Absolutely amazing.
Let's see how it's going to be introduced but this idea brings much more realism to the game!

Dennis (BOS) wrote:One word: awesome.

I'll go two words - Really Awesome.

Really like the idea with CB. Brilliant, Myles

Nice sounds great

Love this idea and the 2 ways you can scout . With our new teams thou are the coaches already set in place ?

Love the idea of integrating CB2.
That really makes the scouting system another dimension, making it something more 'palpable' or real.
Huge difference to me, and I like it.

You know I've been beating the drum for a concurrent college system/universe like I have in GAH and Manu ran in NLL when he was rookie head - it really helps the immersion factor and builds a completely organic basketball universe.

My suggestion at least for the scouting services - break up the batch of reports into domestic and international. So you have to decide if you want to focus on domestic talent or be like some teams that focus on developing the international scouting.

This sounds absolutely amazing!

Jestor (PHX) wrote:My suggestion at least for the scouting services - break up the batch of reports into domestic and international.  So you have to decide if you want to focus on domestic talent or be like some teams that focus on developing the international scouting.

Good point Jestor. I think having the choice of domestic and international would be very cool. International could be more expensive since it is, well, international, but you could get some very detailed reports?

The idea of concurrent college/international seasons is a fantastic add. Instead of having to gamble on one dimensional random names in the draft pool, one can really get a feel for the talent out there and how (keeping in mind their play in their respective league) they would fit into your system. A truly welcome addition.

Great work, I can't wait to see the finished product.