Scouting In OOTP
Scouting In OOTP
I’ll be really blunt with you. As I’ve played OOTP, I haven’t had the faintest idea of what I’m doing.
I’m used to Football Manager, where scouting works through an obvious “fog of war” system. You know nothing about players who aren’t scouted, and then the picture becomes gradually more clear as you scout them. In the end, you wind up knowing a lot about whatever player you’ve scouted, to the point where you pretty much know what his attributes look like.
OOTP isn’t like that at all — and this part has always tripped me up.
The first things to worry about in OOTP are the scouting director and the scouting budget. Once you’ve got both of those put in place, your scouts start rating players and looking for new talent.
The scouting director winds up being in charge of a team of scouts that you can’t see. You can only hire the director; you can’t hire the scouts under him. Directors are rated for a number of abilities, just like everybody else in OOTP is. You can read more about the ratings here.
If you decide to change your scouting director, you might notice immediate and huge changes in how players are rated. OOTP seems to be a bit more aggressive in this approach than Football Manager.
The scouting budget is where I really get tripped up.
This budget is really just a general amount of money that is used for scouting activities, such as travel, administrative expenses, scout salaries, and so on. The game doesn’t dig deep into those figures, however.
Your scouting budget will be distributed into the following four areas:
Major League Scouting (i.e. looking at players at other Major League teams, as well as Major League free agents)
Minor League Scouting (scouting minor league players)
International Scouting (scouting players in different countries)
Amateur Scouting (scouting players who are amateurs, primarily for the upcoming first year [Rule 4] player draft)
You can choose how you allocate your money between those four categories. If you want to prioritize major league players, for example, you can stick a ton of scouting money on them. If you want an international flavor, you can put more of an emphasis on international scouting.
The more money you put in a category, the more accurate your scouting will likely be. However, it’s not a given. Sometimes throwing money at the problem doesn’t do anything.
Now, the way that scouting actually works has always puzzled me. It just happens.
This isn’t like Football Manager, where you find a certain player to target and send your scouts after him. OOTP scouting just happens on its own. I’m not sure why it’s programmed like that, and it strikes me as pretty counterintuitive, but that’s how it works.
If you really want to, you can choose “Request Scounting Report” from the Action menu in a player profile to get a scouting report on that particular player. There’s no particular need to do this unless there is a signing you are thinking about making really soon featuring somebody you know little about.
Now, the scouting reports look something like this:
There are a few things to notice here:
The “Scouting Accuracy” will tell you how confident your scout is in the report.
Even with high accuracy, the scouting report might not be right on — and might conflict with the stats you see. Your scouts will make mistakes and will have their own biases.
You can compare the “Head Scout” scouting report with the “OSA Ratings” to get a second opinion from a more generic scouting report.
OSA, or the OOTP Scouting Association, scouts players once a year. It will give you a second opinion on whatever player you’re looking at, and can also give you a quick idea of which players are worth investigating and which ones you shouldn’t bother with.
If you turn scouting off completely in your save, OSA reports still come through. However, they will be 100% accurate and will include no “fog of war.”
Most scouting directors will provide more accurate information than OSA. However, make sure you’re looking at your scout’s information when consulting scouting reports. It can be confusing at first to switch between both types of reports.
There’s also an ongoing debate in the OOTP community between using scouts and just looking at raw stats. You should always pay attention to player statistics before making your final decision. There are times when the stats will showcase weaknesses and problems that your scouts might miss.
We’ll look next time at what statistics most OOTP veterans recommend focusing on.