Posted by dacj501 on 6/14/2016 7:45:00 PM (view original):

Posted by rednu on 6/14/2016 7:39:00 PM (view original):

Posted by taniajane on 6/14/2016 1:34:00 PM (view original):
I agree Rednu on the speed of cycles in the recruiting,but I Assume that is simply a Beta thing and trying to rush thru to find as many bugs as possible before actual implementation. Implementation I think will also be rushed thru as well, so system may have bugs for quite a few seasons of paying

I've seen nothing that leads me to think the 3 hour cycles won't be the norm -- I don't think it's a function of the beta world. The expedited time frame to scout players is beta-specific, but I don't think the recruiting phase has been sped up at all (which is why the game doesn't get accelerated through those days...it just runs its normal speed.

I did think I'd heard sable say something about possibly going from 3 hour to 6 or 8 hour cycles, but I can't find where in the myriad of threads on the beta that comment may have been (or maybe it's hiding over here somewhere and that's why I haven't been able to find it...). Either of those time frames would be fine by me...I don't think we need more than 8 hours per cycle considering how quickly most of the recruits seem to go from first contact to signing. I'm not sure how long the multi-player battles for, say, the best player in the country, are taking to resolve, but I'm not sure I've had a player linger longer than 12 hours from first contact to signed, sealed, delivered in my recruiting. And I think I've done a decent job of pulling in a D2 recruiting class that's a notch above what I can get comparably under the current system.

there is a current poll question posted by seble where 6 hour cycles is leading.

ETA: considerably...

It's been suggested a few times to make recruiting cycles every 6 hours instead of 3. What's the group preference?
Every 3 hours

39%

Every 6 hours

61%
Votes: 18
(Last vote received: 6/14/2016 7:44 PM)

Good, glad to see this -- I think 6 is definitely more possible, especially combined with what appears to be an ability to preload actions the first 24 hours (the latter being something coaches have clamored about for years with recruiting in HD).

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.

eh superclass hate is overblown.... they are really freaking hard to beat in their 2 recruiting seasons but they give up a lot in return to do so:

• can't recruit juco's(unless they mess up recruiting and need to rebalance, which they then lose some carryover)
• can't redshirt(again unless they screw up recruiting and grab a juco with their 1 open scholly and lose carryover)
• suck so/fr year and then sr/fr and jr/so years generally are good not great unless you have high WE recruits then you see the jr/so sr/jr repeat teams, or sr/fr with heavy stamina
• go all in on 1 season(upset sr/jr year wastes 4 seasons)
• dependant on good recruit generation since they only recruit 2 out of every 4 seasons so if recruit gen is bad they suffer in a class and wait 4 seasons to repeat

yes they can be very unstoppable, but it isn't a cheat code here's the 2 notorious superclass teams

daveredden (10 NC)
S Conn St Naismith 41 seasons
1 NC
3 runner ups
3 F4
5 E8
3 S16

so 15 out of 41 seasons were really good 36.5%

Moorehouse in Smith 6 seasons
1st round- > PI Champ loss -> F4 -> 2nd -> no post season -> S16- > NC

also has extremely high bonus cash from probably 2nd best D2 conference in HD

Hobart William Smith Allen D3 28 seaons

1 NC, 1 runner up, 2 final four, 4 elite eight 1 Sweet sixtenn

Wash Adventist Tark 15 seasons

1 runner up 1 final four 1 elite eight

St Augustine Knight 40 seasons

4 titles 1 final four 4 Elite eight 4 Sweet sixteen

___________________________________________

twiddlebug Naismith Adelphi 37 seasons

5 titles 2 runner up 1 final four 2 elite eight 3 sweet 16

~35% really good

2 final fours in wooden in 7 seasons

rochester in allen 34 seasons

3 final fours 3 sweet 16

Catawaba in tark 15 seasons

1 NC 1 final four 1 sweet 16

Fayetteville State Knight 40 seasons

1 title 1 runner up 5 final four 4 elite eight 4 sweet 16

~37.5 really good


I've seen much better dynasties, yeh maybe a better coach could do a better job(I don't think anyone would say both are "elite" coaches compared to jsajsa or dgravs running a superclass. Yes they have some very good seasons and are extremely tough to beat in recruiting almost near impossible, but they have strict guidelines they follow and sacrifice a lot of seasons to have those really great seasons. Yes they probably shouldn't be as untouchable in recruiting but I believe all those really good showings outside Adelphi were in strong conferences and a few were top in their world as well so they were full carrying over 2 seasons of bonus cash which was probably close to 15K in for that first large class to recruit with. Being the ******* I am I'm just gonna say the person who is most against the superclasses on the forums is tarvolon and honestly it seems just because he is in the same conference as both of them in Smith and he doesn't want to deal with recruiting against them because it "hurts" his dynasty. And anything that hurts his ability to be the best he doesn't like, but he's fine with unrealistic D1 players signing D3 because then he gets to create mega D3 teams which makes D3 easy to create super dynasties.... yes a lot of people don't like them for the ability to get pick of the litter in the first class and a lot of people think less of them since they "require" less skill, but I figure I throw that in since I believe in yeezus.

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.

good post Rednu.

Yeah, with 120 AP's it could play out similarly... though i think someone with 60 AP's could distract you from your other targets, and without draining his bank account... could be a cat and mouse situation... good post.

I think there are Beta changes that are not getting a lot of attention, but will be pretty significant, and maybe we're just lucking into them unintentionally... off the top of my head, for example, at 4 Recruiting Levels ($400 for locals) we'll learning all our high-high potentials exactly, rather than getting repeats through the old scouting visits (at $180 a pop for locals). Those old, useless Scouting Visit repeats are/were infuriating.

Anyway, thanks for your post.

Posted by npb7768 on 6/15/2016 11:21:00 AM (view original):
good post Rednu.

Yeah, with 120 AP's it could play out similarly... though i think someone with 60 AP's could distract you from your other targets, and without draining his bank account... could be a cat and mouse situation... good post.

I think there are Beta changes that are not getting a lot of attention, but will be pretty significant, and maybe we're just lucking into them unintentionally... off the top of my head, for example, at 4 Recruiting Levels ($400 for locals) we'll learning all our high-high potentials exactly, rather than getting repeats through the old scouting visits (at $180 a pop for locals). Those old, useless Scouting Visit repeats are/were infuriating.

Anyway, thanks for your post.

That's true -- getting exact information for high-high's the first time (to level 4) vs. getting 8 reports on your PG's rebounding and 0 on his perimeter or ball handling should have gotten a shout out.

Well, everyone reported. The guys coming back actually improved (after some drama to the contrary)...ready to see how the changes affect the feel of recruiting in beta Season 2. I definitely have a scouting strategy for this time around that is different and hopefully better than what I used the first run.

Scouting for Season 2 has started. Here's the strategy that I began with this time (keep in mind that I am a D2 school)...I have two scholarships to fill and need one post player and one PG/SG/SF type with the other.

-- I avoided all the major camps, considering them to be "traffic magnets" that will draw many coaches to the same crop players and, ultimately, increasing battles over the best players found at them. Given how much fell through the cracks the first time, I see no need to wade into a likely battleground and will fill my pool another way.
-- I held a maximum-sized camp at my school (Cost -- $10,000), and then scouted D1 and D2 recruits in my state and 8 other nearby ones.

Time spent on inputting scouting actions to this point ~ 10 minutes. Contacts generated: 495 (420 freshmen eligible, 75 ineligible/JUCO) [ETA -- My understanding is that some of the JUCO types might be players I looked at last season...]

From this pool, I applied my personal filters deciding who to take from Level 1 to 2, 2 to 3 and 3 to 4. I avoided applying filters to most of the top 100 players I came across, again figuring that they would be battle magnets. I don't want battles. I want freebies that fall through the cracks. That said. I did take a couple of the top 100 out from Level 2/3 to Level 4 because I saw some obvious defects that led me to think they might slide and be available. That said, I'm not sure they're players that I, personally, want...but I at least want to track how they fare throughout the recruiting process.

Having done that, I trimmed the 420 eligible freshmen down to a target pool of 67, from which I will now further analyze to decide which ones I want to make my first AP attacks on and offer scholarships to.

Time spent to this point recruiting for the season: 2 hours, 20 minutes (roughly).

THOUGHTS AND IMPRESSIONS THE SECOND TIME AROUND...

It helps to have a strategy, and whether mine for this whirl is a good one or not remains to be seen (I actually think the best bang for the buck could be saying "screw all camps" and FSS'ing all nearby states...if seble carries through on axing one Level, I virtually guarantee it is). I definitely think I got through this phase faster, more efficiently and more organized than I did the last time. Some of that might be because I was juggling a trip to China amid the beta last time, but I also think the familiarity made things easier to determine what to do and resource allocation.

Having offense and defense preferences appear on the ratings screen of the card as you scout to higher levels was nice as it helped make decisions in borderline cases whether to press to the next level or not.

NEXT MOVE...

Going back through the 67 targets and ranking each accordingly, taking note of signing preference and tendency to figure out who I want to swing big for or if I need to prepare to play a waiting game. Will probably start that task tonight and carry on through the weekend, unless we jump the world ahead suddenly to the recruiting phase.

Secondary evals and sorting has been performed. I now have my hierarchy of players to go after arranged by want and signing times. Just want the recruiting to begin now and see how this works. Had to re-calculate some players due to the yellow-turning-to-red bug with Level 4 scouting right now, but I don't think it added much to the process

Total time investment from start of scouting until now -- 3 hours, 50 minutes.

Posted by rednu on 6/18/2016 5:00:00 PM (view original):
Secondary evals and sorting has been performed. I now have my hierarchy of players to go after arranged by want and signing times. Just want the recruiting to begin now and see how this works. Had to re-calculate some players due to the yellow-turning-to-red bug with Level 4 scouting right now, but I don't think it added much to the process

Total time investment from start of scouting until now -- 3 hours, 50 minutes.

and if those fall thru...that's 4 hrs per team and no clue if will be ok

Posted by taniajane on 6/18/2016 5:09:00 PM (view original):

Posted by rednu on 6/18/2016 5:00:00 PM (view original):
Secondary evals and sorting has been performed. I now have my hierarchy of players to go after arranged by want and signing times. Just want the recruiting to begin now and see how this works. Had to re-calculate some players due to the yellow-turning-to-red bug with Level 4 scouting right now, but I don't think it added much to the process

Total time investment from start of scouting until now -- 3 hours, 50 minutes.

and if those fall thru...that's 4 hrs per team and no clue if will be ok

If all my first tier targets fall through, I've got way bigger issues than just the time commitment! (~shuddering at that thought~)

There is no point in scouting until recruiting starts. Just my opinion.

Posted by beachhouse on 6/21/2016 4:25:00 PM (view original):
There is no point in scouting until recruiting starts. Just my opinion.

Explain please.

If you're a D3 level coach and you have the possibility to get a 'D1' level player, then why bother wasting scouting money on D3 level players. You're much better off waiting and then scouting all of the players who aren't good enough for D1, but are great for D3.