The Scouting Model
In OOTP, you have broad oversight of your organization's scouting, and your scouts' information has a large impact on the decisions you make as a general manager. The general manager has the responsibility of hiring a scouting director and setting the organization's scouting budget. Once those two pieces are in place, your scouting organization goes to work: rating players, searching out new talent, and providing you with scouting reports.
- OSA (The OOTP Scouting Association)
- Scouting Directors
- Scouting Budget
- International Scouting
- Scouting Reports
- Scouting Players
Playing with Scouting Off
Scouting in OOTP is optional. You can off scouting during the game creation process in the Game Options. After a game has been started, you can turn off scouting by navigating to Game Menu >> Game Settings >> Global Settings tab. If scouting is disabled, you will not have a scouting director or a scouting budget. However, OSA will still provide scouting reports on players. Player ratings shown on lists of players will be the actual ratings for all players. Additionally, the various scouting action menus and drop-downs will no longer be available.
When scouting is off or accuracy is set to 100% a human manager can see the true ability of players. A computer manager can not because default settings for a computer manager's evaluation include consideration of stats. The stats produced by a player can vary from his true ability shown in a 100% accurate scouting report.
If a human manager does not want a scouting advantage over a computer manager then the "Player Evaluation AI Setting" can be edited to rely on ratings. This setting is found in the menu MLB --> League Settings > AI Settings. Edit Ratings weight to 100 and the stats weights to 0.