Six easy game improvement suggestions Topic

rogelio
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These suggestions are intended to be fairly straightforward to implement and, I submit, would dramatically improve the game without involving a complete engine overhaul or significant interface changes.  They are as follows:
  1. The most significant distortion of college basket to HD is that there is a significant advantage for teams that run a Full Court Press (“FCP”): there simply are not enough defensive break downs.  Without doubt, to more closely mirror reality, the combination defenses (press/M2M & press/zone) should be run as the norm, and not FCP.  FCP teams should get fatigued much more quickly than they do at present as they are giving up control of the game tempo as a tradeoff for generating more turnovers.  Suggestion: FCP teams (whatever offense) should not be able to run slowdown.  Moreover, Fastbreak  & FCP teams should not even be allowed to run at normal tempo, but should always be compelled to run at up-tempo.  For teams that select FCP for the end of game situations, the end of game offense “time remaining” duration should be compelled to be identical to the defense “time remaining”, so that the tempo should be similarly limited.   
  2. Player Roles Scouting Trip – This would be an additional recruiting function that would adjust the likelihood of your assistant coaches responses according to your own defined player roles.  Assume that you have defined a player role “PG” to be heavily biased towards SPD, DEF, PER, BH & PASS, then you select the “Player Roles Scouting Trip” and the likelihood that your assistant coach responds with potentials in those categories is substantially increased over ATH, REB, SB, LP, STAM.  It would have to be priced at, say, 150 - 200% of a regular scouting trip, have no increased “recruiting effort” credit over a regular trip, and would need to have a maximum likelihood of a particular category response appearing among the 4 and a minimum likelihood (to prevent coaches from putting 100% into one category of the player role to guarantee that response).
  3. During the initial, 2 hour, recruiting cycle, home visits (“HV”) and campus visits (“CV”) should be prohibited.
  4. W-L records against human coaches, currently available under the “Next Game” tab, should always be available under the “Stats” tab on a world-by-world basis, of course.
  5. Players with initial “capped” or “low-low” stamina when recruited, often lose stamina points during the offseason, but are unable to recover to the level at which they were originally recruited.  This should be patched to prevent players that reach their maximum stamina from losing conditioning during the offseason or to make them more likely to recover to their initial rating.
  6. The very first “coach call” for any recruit should provide the H.S. or JuCo team’s offense & defense, but without opinion as to the target recruit’s system IQ until the second and subsequent calls.  
Discussion:
  1. Many forums, such as this one, discuss HD’s skew towards FCP defense as compared to real life.  The gist of most of these discussions is that, in reality, almost all “FCP” teams play what, in HD, would be a combo defense.  However, in HD most coaches shy away from combo defenses to maximize team IQ.  The change suggested would place a limitation on FCP teams that would require greater team stamina and depth than necessary at present.  That would provide a substantial benefit to attempt to run a combo defensive system that does not currently exist.  To wit, a combo defense could be run at slowdown, whereas a FCP defense could not.  That should also generate more FCP defensive breakdowns based on fatigue, as one would expect to occur when trapping full court.
  2. I anticipate universal acclamation for this addition.  [Yeah, not so much, but I'm still right!]  It might require a little work to make a recruiting tool with a dropdown frame that allowed selection of a coaches defined roles, but it would make use of the new “player roles” functionality to provide the targeted scouting report for which most coaches now clamor.  I believe that it would still be necessary that the responses still be random, but that this would allow the coach, for an additional fee, to tip the scales in favor of useful responses.  It would make no sense to have the extra cost increase the "effort" perceived by the recruit over a regular scouting trip.
  3. It makes little sense that the short cycle (representing, say, the first week that recruiting contacts are permitted in real life) would have HV or CV as a feasible option.   That would come after initial contact by text, phone, email and/or coach calls in real life (no such requirement is suggested on a recruit by recruit basis).  Further, many coaches likely operate at a disadvantage to others that can jump that first cycle and that may operate as a barrier to game entry for some segment of the interested population.  Also, it is my supposition that D1 battles for high level recruits would be promoted by allowing coaches a first cycle to scout without need to lock down recruits early to scare away competition. [OK.  Just extend the 1st cycle to between 6 - 20 hours.]
  4. No comment needed.
  5. No comment needed.
  6. This makes intuitive sense to me; that a H.S. or JuCo coach (if they answered the phone at all) would be only to happy to talk about their program.  So, there is no way that more than one call would be needed to garner the team’s system.  The current responses would remain identical for all subsequent coach calls.
Edited for numbering and to add the link back to the identical regular HD forum post for comments.  [Edited again as noted.]
 
6/3/2015 12:04 PM (edited)
rogelio
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So, I thought I would revisit these suggestions.  Skip #1.  #4, #5, #6 are such low-hanging fruit that they should be added immediately.  If #3 is changed to just extend the 1st cycle by a few hours to overnight, then that would be a huge improvement and not difficult.   I want to revisit #2.
6/3/2015 12:13 PM
rogelio
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Player Role Scouting Trip (or Head Coach Scouting Trip):  In the recruit search function there is a dropdown menu labeled "Overall Rating".  It allows you to sort by your user-defined player roles.   The Head Coach Trip would require the user/coach to simply check the box, and then choose from that same dropdown menu.  The cost would be something like 33% above a regular scouting trip (and may, or may not, count for additional effort over a regular Asst. Coach ST), but the user-definitions would be applied to weight the likelihood of responses received to the identified role.  So, I've include a table below to show examples of how this would work.

I make the assumption that the likelihood of receiving any particular response on each of the 4 draws is identical: 1 in 12 or 8.333% [In the table, I gave the SF have this definition.]  If true, then the odds of receiving the desired category response on a standard scouting trip are 33.3%.  The tables assume that we want to know Speed potential, but work from the results that first REB, DEF & PER are chosen and next that ATH, LP & ST are chosen.  The reason I did that is just a mental exercise for weighted odds on the final odds in favor.  
 


[It makes sense to limit any particular response on an individual draw to ~20%, which, as the table shows, gives a final odds over 4 draws of ~62 - 66% of receiving a response in the desired category.  On the other side, there at least must be a default chance (here 1 is selected) of receiving a response on FT or IQ.]

Conclusion:  IMO, the ability of the coach to send a scouting trip in which user selected categories received a much greater likelihood of receiving a response (33% pushed up to ~66% as a cap) would dramatically improve user satisfaction with the scouting process, without disrupting the current gameplay of recruiting.  On the gameplay side, this would effectively mean that you are able to tell an assistant coach "I am looking at this guy as a guard...I don't care if he can improve in REB or LP!"  

User/coaches would not need to know how the sausage was made, but the ability to use the player roles to weight the probable responses to a scouting trip would be a subtle, but big improvement.  Also, the fact that such a trip would be a little more expensive and would need to be assigned 1 at a time, would limit unintended consequences.   User/coaches would likely employ a mix of regular scouting trips and 1 Head Coach/Player Role scouting trip each cycle.   
6/3/2015 12:40 PM
Six easy game improvement suggestions Topic
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