Posted by npb7768 on 6/14/2016 10:25:00 PM (view original):
I'm one that had no strong opinion either way going into Beta, but i see the changes as positive and really not all that different than the current game.
Initial concerns from last week are being adjusted.
Two things that i've never been a big fan of, but which i lived with and have just worked around, are now looking like they'll be addressed:
- Superclass teams dominating during their 6-opening recruiting years... again, i dealt with it, and can work around it, but i'm glad it's being addressed.
- the 8pm so-called poaching... this looks like it will be addressed because we will need a minimum amount of Attention Points before being able to offer a scholarship. Again i lived with 8pm poaching, dealt with it, got burned by it regularly, but i'm glad it's being addressed.
I recruited as a six-player superclass in the beta this past season...I don't think anything has changed in that regard. I had 120 AP's to throw around...had I understood the system a little better, I could have made a lot of people's lives a living hell wielding that sort of figure. The thing that prevented me wasn't a functionality issue, it was a familiarity issue. Re-run last recruiting season based on what I know now about the beta...I assure you, the superclass is still a huge hammer to wield. Sure, the randomness of signings could prevent me from signing EVERYONE I wanted, but slapping 120 AP's on a single player, or 100 AP's on a single player, etc. is still a huge advantage to have. There's nothing that's going to stop a 6-person class from throwing all 120 AP's at a target, being first to jack the player to Very High status and then forcing everyone else to decide if they want to try to play catch up at the risk of losing out on other recruits. Considering how rarely battles happen in the current version of HD in situations where one player is the first person on a recruit, I really don't see why we should assume they will suddenly start happening in the newer system of HD. The only way around it is to make the trigger point for offering scholarships so ridiculously low that teams with 1 or two open spots can also hit it in the first cycle. But doing that renders the whole point of having a threshold silly and moot.
The poaching solution also creates an issue, albeit a rare one. As I posted on the beta forum, you've now created an environment where teams who rescind their own players scholarships physically can't fill those slots. You get no AP's for rescinding your own players. Scholarships can't be offered without an AP investment first. Thus, how is a coach ever going to offer a scholarship in the new environment if he cuts his own player? ?[ETA -- missed a proposed change to give 20 AP baseline this time around, so this is good]
I agree that you ultimately get to a place where the new system is really not altogether different from the current game. Strip things away and really the changes here, as I see them, are 1. We have new color coding for high-high and high-low potential categories (which is, admittedly, useful), 2. we get an environment where there basically are no pulldowns and dropdowns (great for D1 mid and low programs chasing the big dogs, but I stand by my prediction that it is going to create havoc at D2 and D3, especially once the game shifts from a decently populated beta world into the Sim-dominated actual worlds of HD), and 3. we get an environment where your recruit list and my recruit list might look massively different, even if we have the same players (because of how you decide to take kids to Levels 3/4 vs. the kids I choose to push to those levels)...I like that, and that's definitely more real-worldish, 4. we have optimization buttons for things like lineup and practice allocation (for those folks who think Simmy has a winning strategy...).
So the question becomes "are the changes to the process worth the additional items we're being given?"
I'm not of the opinion they are. I don't see an existing problem that these changes fix. It seems they've created a more exhaustive and cumbersome system to lead us back to a place we agree is "really not all that different from the current game." Now instead of clicking FSS and getting potentials, I have to FSS and click a couple times on each individual player card. Instead of being able to set a minimum range for players (i.e. -- search for players with a minimum work ethic of 30 and rebounding/athleticism/defense greater than 50) and get a relatively short list of players available that met that criteria, I have to sort through a roster that, for my first time through the beta, was 187 names long, decoding alphabet soup with regard to player level and work ethic, then pop them to level 2, 3 and 4 (stopping sooner if they suddenly stop looking good). Maybe I didn't use the most efficient methodology of getting names since I was trying to do things in true beta fashion and tried out as much of the "new" stuff as I could, but even streamlining the process, it's going to be a hell of a lot more mouse clicking and time consumption than under the current system. Great if I'm getting a value added product for the effort, but that's just to get me back to a point not all that different from the current game. Going from an efficient system to a less-efficient one is rarely called progress. Changing simply for the sake of change is rather silly.
Admittedly, there's some information I'm not privy to that might change some of my perceptions. I would love to see a comparison study done on the uniqueness of teams' respective recruit pools within a division to know just how many unique player views my program has vs. other schools now compared to how much difference there was in who we went after under the old system. The number of players I have information on now under the new system vs. how many players I was pulling full potentials on under the old one, etc.
I've tried to keep an open mind. I have no doubt I'll be able to construct a better team under the new system than I could under the former one (my C-prestige recruiting class just blew away the best class my A+ prestige produced at the same school). I'm not a D1 player, so maybe there were problems at that level that are being addressed by this change. If there are, please, someone, post something detailed telling us what the issue is/was and how the new beta recruiting system has fixed it/improved it. Like I said at the start of the blog, I'm going to call it like I see it -- and what I see is that, after you strip away the new window dressing, after the novelty wears off, after people become accustomed to the new system, what you have is a solution largely in search of a problem and something that provides essentially the same game at a greater time commitment and level of work. We'll see if the tweaks change that perception.
6/15/2016 12:20 AM (edited)