In the effort to share as much about the beta as possible, I'll be keeping this as a running thread as much as possible (or at least that's the intent...we'll see if I can execute this plan...). So I'll just start with some background here so people know how I'm operating and approaching this beta world thing...

-- I have Missouri, St. Louis in the beta world. This is a D2 school that I have coached for roughly 35 seasons in Naismith, taking it from a complete rebuild to a consistent NT team. I specifically selected this school because I feel like I have a good grasp on what does and doesn't work there with the current recruiting scheme and will allow me to see changes and differences of significance.

My plan for the beta is twofold -- time allowing, I want to try to recruit as I would for a team I was seriously trying to craft into a contender. But being that this is a beta world, I would also like to attempt to "poke the edges of the system" and try some screwball strategies to test where the new system might be susceptible to being gamed and needs attention devoted to it.

I will post what I can, when I can. You are welcomed to make suggestions, ask questions, etc. What you will get is my opinion -- good or bad, positive or negative. I will try to be as open book as possible.

The PRACTICE tab

-- Okay, so it looks a little different, but all the information is still here and nobody should get too lost on this one.

OBVIOUS CHANGES

-- There are now FIVE colors for potential -- very low (red), low (purple), normal (black/gray, depending on screen, see below), high (blue) and very high (green). I'm not sure how this go over with the color blind folks in the audience and I'm sure at some point early on I'm going to **** this up by thinking that purple must mean very high since it's close to blue on the color scheme. But it will be nice to know the difference between high and very high in recruits. I see this as a positive change.

-- Practice plans -- you can click the player names to expand the tab. This expansion shows the player's current rating and potential for each category impacted by each attribute (so Defense, for instance, shows both a player's DEF and BLK ability under it, color coded). This expansion is where the color code for normal shifts to gray since the background color of the expansion is black. Rather than having to input numbers of minutes, each practice area is a simply +/- click to adjust. Even GPA is listed here for Study Hall, so it's a one-stop shop. Again, I like it.

-- The Optimize button -- Individual practice plans can now be "optimized" which will quickly divvy up individual minutes based on potential. While this is a nice quick way to do things, a few things I noticed on this one. Optimize seems to over-allocate study hall minutes in a HUGE way -- I run iguana's chart for study hall minute allocation, which many coaches on here will swear already allocates too many minutes for study hall. I found myself having to back down A LOT of minutes from study hall because Optimize allocates iguana's formula PLUS minutes to pretty much every player. It also seems to under-value conditioning (either that or I've been over-allocating here for my entire HD career...). Other than that, if you have an extremely low stat category (a Center with a very-low potential 1 PER rating, for instance), Optimize still allocates minutes for it, which, again, you'll want to go back and adjust. Final Assessment on this one -- Optimize is a useful tool to get a head-start on minutes allocations, but you will definitely be handicapping yourself by taking the lazy route and clicking it without giving individual attention to this area (you will, however, probably earn a metric shitload of Academic All-Americans...so you have that going for your resume when you get canned for losing games).

RECRUITING

The Beta world Scouting period starts 5/30, so expect things to rev up then. For now, I can only say that I know my scouting and recruiting budgets. My team has 2 Sr/5 and 4 Sr's on it, so my scouting budget is $48,000 with a recruiting budget of $12,000 -- so it appears for D2 that the formula is $8,000 scouting per scholarship and $1,500 in recruiting (ETA -- see below for the correct numbers). I have a 0/120 influence points score as well...so maybe 20 of those per scholarship? Not sure what's going on here and will investigate further.

Not trying to hi-jack your thread but the budgets for scouting and recruiting are determined as follows:

Scouting:
Base = 50k for DI, 30k for DII, and 10k for DIII

Per Opening = 5k for DI, 3k for DII, and 1k for DIII

For recruiting, it's all on a per opening basis - 3k for DI, 2k for DII, and 1k for DIII.

That info is straight from seble in the beta forums.

Posted by tgblackw on 5/27/2016 5:02:00 PM (view original):
Not trying to hi-jack your thread but the budgets for scouting and recruiting are determined as follows:

Scouting:
Base = 50k for DI, 30k for DII, and 10k for DIII

Per Opening = 5k for DI, 3k for DII, and 1k for DIII

For recruiting, it's all on a per opening basis - 3k for DI, 2k for DII, and 1k for DIII.

That info is straight from seble in the beta forums.

No disclaimer needed tg -- I totally remember reading it now that you've posted it, but as I was looking over things, I absolutely didn't recall it and was just looking for things that divided nicely into the six openings I'd have.

You (or anyone else) is always welcome to make corrections for the sake of accuracy!

Holy cow, where to begin on this??!?

Taking a slow and steady approach to this whole thing, so spent roughly $12K out of a $48K budget yesterday. That got me 3 "national" camps, which reveal at different days...not sure what the rationale there is other than to penalize those that blow too much money too soon possibly. It also got me a school camp, which was geared around 100 students, but only attracted 80...gonna have to talk to the university's marketing department about that one. These camps ain't cheap to put on, y'know!. It also allowed me to send my assistant coach on a joyride around the region to locate 25 new recruits...someone check his expense report and the GPS on his university vehicle, because he only found 20. No, the fact that the camp and the coach both found 80 percent of their target was not missed on me. Coincidence? Coding? We shall see.

I was also able to FSS the D1 and D2 players in the four states that I fairly routinely grab. It was nice to not have to pay for the D3 kids.

Now for the fun -- my understanding is that anyone I can "see" as a recruit is now recruitable to me. Thus, I am celebrating that the No. 10 player in the nation chose to go slumming and enrolled in my camp. Of course, I'll never get him because he's automatically visible to everybody, but the simple fact that a player like that is in play for a D2 school is a HUGE change.

So as everyone has heard by now, you get information in 4 "levels" -- Level 1 gets you a basic letter grade around "clusters" of attributes. They'll basically be useless. Defense is lumped in with rebounding and shot blocking, which means all guards are going to look pretty sucky on the basic letter grade. Speed and athleticism are lumped in with stamina and everyone's favorite category durability...bleh...there are separate grades for work ethic and a player's overall rating. All the other attributes are lumped together in one category. Except for free throw shooting which is...nowhere to be found...!!?! Evidently it isn't just the NBA that doesn't care about free throw technique these days.

Level 2 breaks the letter grade down by stat category, pretty much a must-have for anyone you're considering. I'm not sure what numerical scale the letter grades correspond to, however. It seems the letter grade varies by stat (i.e. - a C in "stamina" is not the same as a C in "rebounding" when it comes to the rating's actual numerical value). It might even be tied to the player's listed position (so a C in Ball handling for a PG might differ from a C in ball handling for an SF, which will just be 59 flavors of I'm confused as hell...).

Level 3 finally gets you to potentials for each of the aforementioned categories, which is where the fun really begins. Level 4 gets you the actual numbers for each stat category, making the player card look identical to what you see in the actual game for any of your players. So, basically, the strategy is to race and see how many players you can get to Levels 3 and 4 on. You can also pay individually to upgrade the level on each player you can see with one scouting trip per level. At 260 miles, the trip was approximately $150 so $450 if you want to take a player from a 1 to a 4.

Basically, this whole segment of the game appears to be a bidding war to get to Level 3 and Level 4 on as many recruits as you can to maximize your options. With time, this is probably just case of determining how you get the most bang for your buck, much the same as it is with HVs vs. CVs in the current system. Obviously, Level 4 is the desired spot to be, but my thinking is that there's enough information here, at least at lower levels, that a decent team (for D2/D3) could be made by relying on Level 3 information, especially over time as we learn more and more about what numerical rating corresponds to which letter grade. Levels 1 and 2 are pretty much junk...at Level 2 you at least have enough to make an educated guess about who to bump to Level 3, but there will be some of those that turn into busts when the potentials populate in. Again, not wholly unlike the current system where you find a guy whose ratings you like and then FSS the state to discover he's a rack of red (except in that instance you maybe find a gem in that state at least...in the new system, you'll just be SOL).

I know a lot of folks are grousing about the time-intensiveness of this, but I really don't think it will need to be. There's nothing that I did yesterday that I also couldn't have done later in the week. The only time-sensitive things I saw yesterday were signing up for the national camps. Everything else can be input at a later time. You'll have to devote more than one day to scouting in-season, but this isn't going to be an every day sort of time commitment (but it could be for the more obsessive, I'm sure...)

Closing thoughts now that I've had time to go back, analyze and ponder...1. I think we're just getting a different route to the same information, I don't feel like I"m handicapped by the new system at D2. It incorporates some things that I've asked for (the ability to FSS kids at specific levels) and has some stuff that I just find needlessly silly (the broad categories for Level 1). The game theorist in me thinks that, especially in Sim-dominated worlds, there's the potential for some really, really good players to fall through the cracks and land in the laps of lower division players (D2 and D3), but I'm not sure the same effect will happen for low-level D1, which in my understanding is the part of the game most in need of help. I will defer to those in the beta who took such teams though to give their firsthand impressions on how they feel.

CONCERNS:
1. Biggest concern is the impact that the change will have on the multi-team HD owner. This will, most definitely, make recruiting more cumbersome and time consuming. For people who own teams in every world, I'm not sure what sort of time investment you'll have to make in order to adequately scout, scour and target players under the new setup. My gut instinct is that several players will find that it's just too much work to maintain their current team load and will cut back. Given the emptiness of some (i.e. - ALL) worlds already, that's not something that I necessarily find conducive for the good of the game.

2. Next-biggest concern is for the new HD player who will be stepping in. Compared to the beta recruiting process, the recruiting process we have now is pretty slimmed down and streamlined...and new users almost inevitably screw it up the first time around. Nobody starts the game as an expert recruiter. Hell, I'm still not sure I'm an expert recruiter 100+ seasons later. For an absolute newbie to the game though, this is going to be a LOT of information flying at them and the potential here is very real to blow a lot of money on the wrong kind of information, which will have very real ramifications when the process flips from scouting to recruiting. For a casual fan looking for a fun Sim to spend some money on, getting smacked in the face by a lot of numbers and letters might be statistical overwhelm and a violation of K.I.S.S. principles.

Posted by rednu on 5/31/2016 1:22:00 PM (view original):
Holy cow, where to begin on this??!?

Taking a slow and steady approach to this whole thing, so spent roughly $12K out of a $48K budget yesterday. That got me 3 "national" camps, which reveal at different days...not sure what the rationale there is other than to penalize those that blow too much money too soon possibly. It also got me a school camp, which was geared around 100 students, but only attracted 80...gonna have to talk to the university's marketing department about that one. These camps ain't cheap to put on, y'know!. It also allowed me to send my assistant coach on a joyride around the region to locate 25 new recruits...someone check his expense report and the GPS on his university vehicle, because he only found 20. No, the fact that the camp and the coach both found 80 percent of their target was not missed on me. Coincidence? Coding? We shall see.

I was also able to FSS the D1 and D2 players in the four states that I fairly routinely grab. It was nice to not have to pay for the D3 kids.

Now for the fun -- my understanding is that anyone I can "see" as a recruit is now recruitable to me. Thus, I am celebrating that the No. 10 player in the nation chose to go slumming and enrolled in my camp. Of course, I'll never get him because he's automatically visible to everybody, but the simple fact that a player like that is in play for a D2 school is a HUGE change.

So as everyone has heard by now, you get information in 4 "levels" -- Level 1 gets you a basic letter grade around "clusters" of attributes. They'll basically be useless. Defense is lumped in with rebounding and shot blocking, which means all guards are going to look pretty sucky on the basic letter grade. Speed and athleticism are lumped in with stamina and everyone's favorite category durability...bleh...there are separate grades for work ethic and a player's overall rating. All the other attributes are lumped together in one category. Except for free throw shooting which is...nowhere to be found...!!?! Evidently it isn't just the NBA that doesn't care about free throw technique these days.

Level 2 breaks the letter grade down by stat category, pretty much a must-have for anyone you're considering. I'm not sure what numerical scale the letter grades correspond to, however. It seems the letter grade varies by stat (i.e. - a C in "stamina" is not the same as a C in "rebounding" when it comes to the rating's actual numerical value). It might even be tied to the player's listed position (so a C in Ball handling for a PG might differ from a C in ball handling for an SF, which will just be 59 flavors of I'm confused as hell...).

Level 3 finally gets you to potentials for each of the aforementioned categories, which is where the fun really begins. Level 4 gets you the actual numbers for each stat category, making the player card look identical to what you see in the actual game for any of your players. So, basically, the strategy is to race and see how many players you can get to Levels 3 and 4 on. You can also pay individually to upgrade the level on each player you can see with one scouting trip per level. At 260 miles, the trip was approximately $150 so $450 if you want to take a player from a 1 to a 4.

Basically, this whole segment of the game appears to be a bidding war to get to Level 3 and Level 4 on as many recruits as you can to maximize your options. With time, this is probably just case of determining how you get the most bang for your buck, much the same as it is with HVs vs. CVs in the current system. Obviously, Level 4 is the desired spot to be, but my thinking is that there's enough information here, at least at lower levels, that a decent team (for D2/D3) could be made by relying on Level 3 information, especially over time as we learn more and more about what numerical rating corresponds to which letter grade. Levels 1 and 2 are pretty much junk...at Level 2 you at least have enough to make an educated guess about who to bump to Level 3, but there will be some of those that turn into busts when the potentials populate in. Again, not wholly unlike the current system where you find a guy whose ratings you like and then FSS the state to discover he's a rack of red (except in that instance you maybe find a gem in that state at least...in the new system, you'll just be SOL).

I know a lot of folks are grousing about the time-intensiveness of this, but I really don't think it will need to be. There's nothing that I did yesterday that I also couldn't have done later in the week. The only time-sensitive things I saw yesterday were signing up for the national camps. Everything else can be input at a later time. You'll have to devote more than one day to scouting in-season, but this isn't going to be an every day sort of time commitment (but it could be for the more obsessive, I'm sure...)

Closing thoughts now that I've had time to go back, analyze and ponder...1. I think we're just getting a different route to the same information, I don't feel like I"m handicapped by the new system at D2. It incorporates some things that I've asked for (the ability to FSS kids at specific levels) and has some stuff that I just find needlessly silly (the broad categories for Level 1). The game theorist in me thinks that, especially in Sim-dominated worlds, there's the potential for some really, really good players to fall through the cracks and land in the laps of lower division players (D2 and D3), but I'm not sure the same effect will happen for low-level D1, which in my understanding is the part of the game most in need of help. I will defer to those in the beta who took such teams though to give their firsthand impressions on how they feel.

CONCERNS:
1. Biggest concern is the impact that the change will have on the multi-team HD owner. This will, most definitely, make recruiting more cumbersome and time consuming. For people who own teams in every world, I'm not sure what sort of time investment you'll have to make in order to adequately scout, scour and target players under the new setup. My gut instinct is that several players will find that it's just too much work to maintain their current team load and will cut back. Given the emptiness of some (i.e. - ALL) worlds already, that's not something that I necessarily find conducive for the good of the game.

2. Next-biggest concern is for the new HD player who will be stepping in. Compared to the beta recruiting process, the recruiting process we have now is pretty slimmed down and streamlined...and new users almost inevitably screw it up the first time around. Nobody starts the game as an expert recruiter. Hell, I'm still not sure I'm an expert recruiter 100+ seasons later. For an absolute newbie to the game though, this is going to be a LOT of information flying at them and the potential here is very real to blow a lot of money on the wrong kind of information, which will have very real ramifications when the process flips from scouting to recruiting. For a casual fan looking for a fun Sim to spend some money on, getting smacked in the face by a lot of numbers and letters might be statistical overwhelm and a violation of K.I.S.S. principles.

yep

very well said Rednu...

My initial thoughts - without having time to do too much yet - is that the first couple of levels are worthless. I definitely need to see level 4 info. IMO the level 3 info is also very limited and I certainly would hesitate to take on a player with that info. I took a D1 school and quickly regretted it... the real challenge will be D2 and D3 it sounds like.

I really do NOT like the letter system. I think you nailed it when you said it's overwhelming to look at a bunch of letters --- WHO should I pick to scout further??? That seems fairly random to me.

I know this argument doesn't always hold water - but in REAL LIFE you really can find out quite a bit of info from scouting services. No, they are not always right in their assessments, but I don't think coaches are as limited as THIS new scouting system at the moment.

Generally, I think the camp idea is cool and I could live with some levels of discovery. But I still think D3 schools should have visibility of several hundred recruits, and so forth up each division.

Lastly, this really feels like the scouting system used in the soccer game. given the complete failure of that product, I'm not sure I get the plan to mimic some of it's characteristics.

Actually, I think Level 3 is going to be good enough in most cases if you know what the values of the letter grades are. Some have already figured out that this is a close approximation:

	Ath	Spd	Reb	De	SB	LP	Per	BH	Pass	WE	Sta	Dur
A+	76-100	80-100	72-100	66-100	79-100	72-100	75-100	62-100	65-100	82-100	87-100	100
A	70	67-68	70		67-69		70	59-61	61		81-82
A-	64-66	62-66	61-63	58-59		65	62-63	56	59-60	70-73	78	69-70
B+	59-61	58-61		54-55	59	60	58-61	51-52	53-56	67-68		65-67
B	54-57	54-55	52	51-52		55-56	57	47-50	49-52	60-64	74-75	58-62
B-	49-50	51-53	48	46-49	48	49-52	55		47-48	55-59		59
C+	45-47	46	46					41	42-44	50-51	69	52-53
C	42			39	42	41-43		38	38-40	45-49	67-68	49-51
C-	39	39-40	33-37		34	36-40	40	33	34-36	41-43	64-66	44-47
D+	32	34	29-32	32		34			33		62-63	40-42
D	30	28-30	26	27-28	26-27	30	30-31	25-26	28	30	61	32-39
D-	26	24-25	20-23	24	21-22	24	24-26	21	24-25	27	57	33-35
F+	22		15-17	18-20	15	19	19	19			55-56	28-30
F	15-18	18	11-14	14-17	10-14		17	14
F-	0-12	0-12	0-6	0	0-8	0-14	0-13	0-12	0-13	0	0	0

5/31/2016 1:23 PM

ah yes lets guess whether or not I can take an A+ ath or not because 76 ath is totally an A+ at D1. Big mistake making it a bell curve on current player ratings, another mistake in a long line of them unfortunately at least try to make the unneeded update bearable.

I loved getting excited seeing guards with A- through A+ spd/per/bh/pas/sta and then getting to level 4 and realizing he wouldn't even be good on my D3 teams.

Posted by chapelhillne on 6/1/2016 12:53:00 AM (view original):
Actually, I think Level 3 is going to be good enough in most cases if you know what the values of the letter grades are. Some have already figured out that this is a close approximation:

	Ath	Spd	Reb	De	SB	LP	Per	BH	Pass	WE	Sta	Dur
A+	76-100	80-100	72-100	66-100	79-100	72-100	75-100	62-100	65-100	82-100	87-100	100
A	70	67-68	70		67-69		70	59-61	61		81-82
A-	64-66	62-66	61-63	58-59		65	62-63	56	59-60	70-73	78	69-70
B+	59-61	58-61		54-55	59	60	58-61	51-52	53-56	67-68		65-67
B	54-57	54-55	52	51-52		55-56	57	47-50	49-52	60-64	74-75	58-62
B-	49-50	51-53	48	46-49	48	49-52	55		47-48	55-59		59
C+	45-47	46	46					41	42-44	50-51	69	52-53
C	42			39	42	41-43		38	38-40	45-49	67-68	49-51
C-	39	39-40	33-37		34	36-40	40	33	34-36	41-43	64-66	44-47
D+	32	34	29-32	32		34			33		62-63	40-42
D	30	28-30	26	27-28	26-27	30	30-31	25-26	28	30	61	32-39
D-	26	24-25	20-23	24	21-22	24	24-26	21	24-25	27	57	33-35
F+	22		15-17	18-20	15	19	19	19			55-56	28-30
F	15-18	18	11-14	14-17	10-14		17	14
F-	0-12	0-12	0-6	0	0-8	0-14	0-13	0-12	0-13	0	0	0

5/31/2016 1:23 PM

Great chart chap (and everyone who had input into helping to make it)!! I could add to it if I had my notes, but they're on my desk at work. "Nice" to see this confirms my theory that most of the letter grades are tied specifically to an attribute rather than a specific number range across the board. But, yeah, that means I'm basically going to need this chart (or its more filled-in version) permanently glued to the computer since t'll be impossible to commit it to memory.

I agree that Level 3 will be enough at D2/D3 to make a solid team -- not a national champion, but I think you could likely build a perennial NT team off the Level 3 information and this chart. That's not the case at D1 though -- the spreads atop the board are just too crazy broad. You hit the top of them and you have Michael Jordan's clone. you hit the bottom end of those and you're doomed to a mediocre bench player. The D1 folks look like they'll be forced to go to Level 4 to compete...I'll let them comment about whether the money stretches far enough to adequately accomplish that goal.

Rednu, Brian- I agree that level 1 is completely worthless and posted on the beta forums saying so. I also posted that Seble previously said that "Even at level 1 scouting, you'll have a decent idea of how good the player is." I find this to be 100% not true.

Seble replied to the thread saying that level 1 is a weighted average so durability is taken less into account. And that's it. Nothing to address level 1 scouting being worthless.

If you guys believe we should change level 1 scouting like I do, then come post on that thread to help influence a change. I don't have much faith it will change but MAAAAYBE it will.

I don't know that it's that important to change level one. It would be nice if durability was not part of the equation, unless durability starts to mean something. That would be a better change in my opinion because if you knew that a high level one score in physical probably meant your guy would not get injured much, that would be important to know. But, it seems easy to get to level 2, since you have a couple of camps you will probably do, and I think a number of players in the area will go to both camps. A good strategy might be to wait to do scouting trips until after both camps, when a lot of players will be at level 2. Rednu - that chart is on the Beta forum somewhere, and it is being updated a bit, but most coaches are saying there numbers fall in those values.

Posted by chapelhillne on 6/1/2016 8:21:00 AM (view original):
I don't know that it's that important to change level one. It would be nice if durability was not part of the equation, unless durability starts to mean something. That would be a better change in my opinion because if you knew that a high level one score in physical probably meant your guy would not get injured much, that would be important to know. But, it seems easy to get to level 2, since you have a couple of camps you will probably do, and I think a number of players in the area will go to both camps. A good strategy might be to wait to do scouting trips until after both camps, when a lot of players will be at level 2. Rednu - that chart is on the Beta forum somewhere, and it is being updated a bit, but most coaches are saying there numbers fall in those values.

I'd definitely like another go around at the scouting to see if that works out as it'll take some practice to use your money efficiently.

But with 13 grand, it's not like you have a ton of money at D3. I think you'd need to hold your own camp and then attend another camp as you say to try to get a lot of guys to level 2. That would basically be about 5 grand and a good chunk your budget. I'll experiment next time and see how many "D3" guys you have at level 2 at that point. If you're at like 50 guys at level 2 and have spent close to half your budget, is that good? Compared to today, it's a HUGE difference.

I think you need to get to potentials so to me, level... need to get you to potentials.