Seble please consider the opinions of long time players of the game here. In season recruiting is a terrible idea. In general, a huge change is not a good idea. The recruiting process needs multiple small incremental change. Here is one of the posters above comments which nailed it:
I need to study more fully, but on first review this appears to throw out much of the existing scouting and recruiting process
1. Big risk of unforeseen consequences
2. Looks like a lot more time consuming - not a good idea because some (like me) may decide that even if we like it, we dont have time to run several teams.
3. Risks the business model - fixing problems is good, adding some nuance and texture would be great - total revamp unwise.
Expand the distance that local recruiting spans from 360 miles to maybe 500 - consider being flexible with that, growing it to possibly even 1000 miles, but I honestly think 500 miles itself might really help the game. This is a small change, and could even be implemented to give you yourself feedback as to how a more 'nationalized' recruiting process might work. Right?
Don't go too crazy on SIM recruiting changes, the game doesn't have enough good players already, if the sims take a bunch of them, it'll only get worse. The game would get fixed pretty quickly if you simply went back to the old model, where the middle of the recruiting pool was better, it would help the sims, help the mid major and low d1 schools, and help the new coaches.
Making recruiting more competitive leads to bad blood in this game. The distance limits for local recruiting has somewhat limits the bad blood to a locality. I don't think making the users dislike each other is a strategy for long term success in the game. In some ways, the conf cooperation you talk about has done some good in the game, and if you watch closely even non conf guys in a local market tip toe around each other pretty carefully. It (the cooperation) has more to do with long term mutual success than the post season money.
Auction based recruiting is flawed, but it is 100% in the hands of the customers, rather than in the hands of the programmers with things like the color of the flowers that the recruit's mom likes being important. Again, if the quality of the recruits was better in the middle of the pool, the distribution of recruits in any given locality would be less important, thereby not making national recruiting as important or making the need to add non numerical things of importance.
One of the true beauties of the current game, is it is strickly a numbers game, get the best team rating, add the right depth chart, distro numbers and game plan, and let er fly. If you were to add changes, allow us to make more depth chart moves - like seperate ones for each defense or even for defensive settings, and expand the game planning options, that is the 'meat' of this game.
Also, the high end recruits should require more money to say yes, this alone would fix 50% of the high end d1recruiting process. Again, this could be tweeked with a few releases, I might start with doubling the amount it requires, and consider even triple the amount. This would immensely even out the d1 field. This change too is very simply, and could be done almost immediately. If you did this, changed the local distance limits from 200 and 360 to 300 and 540, and made the middle of all three of the divisions recruiting pools better, recruiting would be 80% fixed. That would be a remarkable return on your programming time investment. Small tweeks afterwards could probably get that number to near 90%. I doubt max exodous would occur with such minimal change.
D2/d3 recruiting is largely not broke, except maybe that if anyone is cheating with multiple users to scout, they would have an immense advantage - since d2/d3 is more national recuiting. I would make d2/d3 recruiting free. Making the sims better, would really hurt new coaches, as new coaches get better largely by learning to beat the sims.
The first session of recruiting should not be 2 hrs, or should be allowed to be done 12-24 hrs in advance, which is sort of the same thing, isn't it?
I'm going off memory on the proposals, and hesitate to say much more since the last major update was such a disaster in terms of how user feedback was considered and it seemed to get personal in some cases, which is never a good thing. Good luck, as I do think recruiting needs fixing, so I am 100% behind the idea of attacking the issue. These types of updates are tricky, as it seems to largely only lose customers, at least that is the perception I have from watching the game play out for over ten years now. Again that's why I urge you to consider making smaller incremental changes and tweeks to the current game, rather than sweeping changes. The basic formula the game has been based on which includes local auction style recruiting has made HD the best SIM basketball game ever invented. I hope that you strongly consider user feedback before you get too far along that it will be impossible to reverse course.