I've had a chance to work through the "player role" concept that was brought up as item #4 above.  For the initial phase it will work like this:

- A player role is effectively a custom formula for overall rating.  You'll be able to assign weight to each of the 12 ratings as you see fit and then view an overall number using those weights.

- There will be a new page that will be a summary list of all of your saved player role formulas.  You'll be able to edit/delete existing ones or create new ones.

- The edit page will include a table of your roster with the current role formula applied to it.  This will make it easier to tweak the weight values to get the best result.

- When creating a new formula, you'll be able to load an existing formula as a template to start from.  The templates will include any of your existing role formulas as well as a few pre-defined system ones.

- On the recruit search page, there will be a new search option called "Overall Rating".  This option will let you select either the current default (which is just the total of all the ratings) or any of your player role formulas.

I may find other spots where it makes sense to incorporate this feature, but as of now that is it.  I hope this makes a little more sense now.  Some of you may use it a lot and others may not use it at all, but I hope it will prove to be a useful tool.

I've been looking into the NBA draft logic and have made some changes to it. 

The first step was the logic that ranks players.  This formula includes player ratings (weighted by position), team current-season success, prestige, and national player awards.  I'm making the following changes to it:

- As has been pointed out a few times, the logic had been favoring big men over guards.  I've made some tweaks to the player rating component to balance that out a lot more.  I am also now including all ratings (except durability) instead of just a few for each position.  Ratings are still weighted differently by each position, but a fuller picture of the player's talent is now used. For example a good rebounding guard will get credit for that.

- The team success component was looking simply at wins instead of the more complete view of team success that we use most places, so I've made that change.  Looking only at wins would likely inflate the status of players from mid-major teams who dominate their conference.  Using the full picture of success (which includes postseason) will make that factor more meaningful. 

- I've bumped up the weight of prestige factor as it was very small

- I've reduced the bonus bump for winning national POY as it was ridiculously high

The second part of the change is looking at the logic for early entry decision.  Currently, there are a few restrictions in place, such as a freshman/sophomore won't leave early if not projected in the 1st round.  As long as those restrictions are met, the decision was coming down the player's "Greed" rating, which is a relic of a feature of the game from years ago.  Some vet coaches know that you can get an idea of that rating through certain recruiting responses.  I really dislike that a hidden rating (which a lot of coaches probably have no idea exists) is so important.  I've decided to remove that factor completely from the decision. 

The new logic gives the player odds of leaving early based on the player's class and his projected pick.  The higher they're projected, the more likely they are to leave.  The old logic did not differentiate between a player projected to go #1 vs. #28.  To me that's a big difference, so the new logic will reflect that.  Sophomores and Juniors work similarly, but the odds of leaving at a given pick will be higher for each higher class.  For example, a freshman might have a 70% chance of leaving if projected at #10, whereas a soph might have an 80% change and a junior a 90% chance.  So there will still be some random chance that a player will come back to school.  In my testing, the breakdown of draft players by class is in the same ballpark as it is now.

The end result of all of this is that the draft should make a lot more sense in how players are ranked and which players enter early.  I believe that it will also help mid-majors hang onto players longer, but of course it still depends on how good the player is and how much success the school has had.

Just a quick update: I've been doing some further testing on the rule that prevents early entries once a team has lost 5 players already.  After my testing, and the forum feedback, I've decided to bump up the number to 6.  That change should lead to more underclassmen leaving.

I'm still considering tweaks to account for senior transfers, but haven't made a decision yet on that.

I've decided to exclude all senior transfers from the count of leaving players with regards to the previous post.

This wasn't part of the original announcement, but I've been reviewing the logic for determining how a player will react to a redshirt and I've made some changes.  The new logic will be fairly simple. 

- If you told a recruit that he would be redshirted during recruiting, then he will react well 100% of the time. 

- If you told him him he would not be redshirted, then he will react well 0% of the time.

- If you promised start or minutes, then he will react well 0% of the time

In all other cases, the odds of reacting well are determined based on:

1. The player's class (less likely to react well the older the player)

2. Games the player is designated to miss due to injury (the more games means higher chance he'll react well)

3. Number of times you've attempted to redshirt him already (the more times, the less chance he'll react well)

4. Where the player rates out talent-wise on his team.  So a player who is the 11th best guy on your team will be much more likely to react well than the 4th best guy on your team.

I think the discussion of recent changes may have caused some confusion, so here's a little clarification on how things work with this blog and changes. 

Most importantly, changes aren't normally released when I post about them in here.  If a change has been released, it will be in the HD release notes.  One of the big reasons I've been posting info in this blog is to get feedback on changes I'm making, so things are subject to change based on that feedback.  Normally, when I have a date set for changes to be released, I'll create a separate announcement thread and link to it in the conference chat. 

If there's a change that doesn't require any advance warning (e.g. a new page that just shows some data), then I may just release it without an announcement, but anything that will affect how coaches manage their teams will get some lead time to prepare.

Let me also say thanks for all the good discussion and ideas.  It's very helpful to hear feedback from many different perspectives and types of coaches.

After reading feedback on the changes to the redshirt decision logic, I've made a few tweaks.  I've reinstated the factor that makes ranked recruits less likely to accept a redshirt. 

I've also made it so that no matter how many times you attempt to redshirt a player, his reaction will always be the same.  So if he reacted well the first time, he will react well each time and vice versa.  However, I'm going to reset that each season.  Say for example you tried to redshirt player A as a freshman.  Then you removed the redshirt and let him play that season.  If you then try to redshirt him as a sophomore, the first time you do so, he will look at the various factors and react based on that, regardless of how he reacted to that redshirt attempt as a freshman. 

Hey guys - just wanted to post a quick note to let you know that I am still alive and well.  Things have been busy and I don't currently have anything of substance to report for HD.  There are some things brewing, but I don't have anything concrete to pass along at this time. 

We really appreciate your patience while waiting for updates to the games.

Just put out a minor release of the website with some UI improvements.  Check the release notes for details.

I know it's been a long time, but I have an update to pass along.  There are some non-HD tasks on my plate for the next few months, but the good news is that there is some time for HD as well. 

The plan is to tackle a major update to recruiting.  We're still in the early stages of designing and planning that update.  When I have more details on that, I'll pass them along.  In the mean time, I'll be working on some smaller HD updates while also working on some non-HD WIS tasks.  I've been reviewing the backlog of suggestions and feedback from the past few years as well as my own list. 

The first thing I've been working on is archiving player stats by season.  This will allow you to see season-by-season stats data for past players.  The bad news is that I'm just starting to save that data, so we aren't able to recover all the past seasons data that was not saved.  My plan is to validate that the saving process is working behind the scenes before exposing that data to you guys.  Shouldn't be too long though.

I'm also working on a similar thing for player ratings.  I'm going to start saving a ratings snapshot at the end of every season and the beginning of every season.  I'll archive this info similar to stats, so this info will be viewable both for current players and past players.  Again, I want to make sure the data is saving properly before exposing that.

You should see a flurry of minor updates coming over the next few months in addition to these changes. 

Thanks again for your patience.

Coming soon: a new settings page that will allow you to set some preferences that will apply across all worlds.  The first set will include:

- A setting to turn on/off the potential color-coding on the team profile page

- A setting to indicate whether to show overall rating as total (i.e. all ratings added up, which is the current) or to show a player role formula instead.  If using player roles for overall rating, you'll be able to specify which role to use for each position.

Currently that's all that will be included, but I may add another item or two.  If anyone has other ideas for this type of setting, let me know via support ticket or forums.

Just a heads up - I released the User Settings page (under the Office menu).  I'll be monitoring the forums for a while for any issues/questions related to this release.

I just released some changes that will expose the historical data that I started to archive a month or so ago.  Hopefully this will add some more value to looking back at the history of a team.  Over time we may be able to leverage this data for some other interesting purposes.  The biggest drawback is that we don't have season-by-season data prior to a month ago.

I've had some good suggestions recently for minor changes to the game.  At this point I'm going to re-evaluate the list to determine what makes the most sense.  There may be a slowdown in updates soon as I start working on a new project, but hopefully I can continue to devote some time for minor improvements.

As you can see in today's release notes, I added the restriction of a .425 win% to be eligible for the PIT.

I also added a new Draft Big Board page that shows the current ranking of players in that world respective to the draft.  It doesn't incorporate the factors of team season success and player awards, but should give you an idea of where players rank and an indication of likelihood that they'll leave.  I know this may not be a highly requested page, but there have been suggestions for it and it was a fairly easy page to add.

Well, it's been a while, hasn't it?  I won't bother to apologize again about the lack of updates, because I'm sure you're tired of hearing that by now.  Instead, I have some real news to share.

We have several things coming for HD. In the somewhat near future (hopefully within a few weeks), I'll be releasing an update that will improve some of the back-end processing.  That's not very exciting to you guys, but it should significantly shorten simulation time for games. This update also positions us much better to work on updates to the game.

We're also in the process of designing a major overhaul of recruiting. This one will take some time to implement and test, but I'll be giving regular updates here and seeking feedback on how it will work.  In parallel to that update, we'll be doing a user interface re-design, in part to make the game easier to play on mobile devices.  We'll have some kind of beta testing once development is close to finished.

I also have a long list of smaller suggestions that we've accumulated over the years, so we may be able to sneak in a few of those as well.

Commence discussion of these changes and sarcastically tearing me to shreds for the lack of updates.