I've only used FSS with my DI teams and VERY conservatively at DII and DIII (especially conservative at DIII).

It appears from reading other messages here I'm very naieve about the whole thing (it didn't exist when I used to play HD years ago from when it first began for several years afterward).

I didn't know FSS would provide info on who was winning recruiting battles, etc. Where are these messages?

I thought FSS just gave you accurate player potentials without having to do scouting trips, but apparently there is more.

Sorry if this seems foolish, but like I said, it didn't exist "back in the day" and I'm just trying to learn how to use it better.

You still want to make scouting trips. They give you higher granularity on potentials. Instead of just "high" they can give you "low high" - 21-27 points - and "high high" - 28+ points.

If you look on the tab regarding potentials you will also get a message at the bottom regarding who is leading, after some time.

I just don't understand the use scouting trips instead of FSS people.  I get if you haven't played since FSS came around and you are just used to not using it, but in what way is this possibly better for your team.

It takes as much money to scout a few players (sometimes 1) as it takes to scout an entire state. Just seems like you miss out on so many people because you can't possibly scout everyone. How do you decide which of the 20 guys among 3 close states with 50 ath and 40 spd to scout to see who has high potential, and how many do you send so that using FSS wasn't a better option.

To answer the question on the info on who is winning battles - that is the WOTS (Word on the Street) message at the bottom of the FSS tab.  It updates twice a day at the 2 am/pm EST cycles (when games are played).

There are different messages that indicate varying statuses.  There are some where it's close (he's going back and forth between school A and school B) and then some where one school has a big advantage (he's definitely leaning towards playing at school A, school B is a fallback option at this point).

You can also tell how invested a school is in a player even if that school is the only one being considered.  If there's a WOTS message talking about how he's had some interest from school A but he's keeping his options open, odds are the school hasn't put a ton of money into the kid.  However, if the message says that he's a very high priority for school A or he's *tight* with school A, he's going to be very hard to pull away.

I think ars is saying that you still want some evals on guys you know have high potentials from FSS if you can to see who has the high-highs that are where the good stuff is at...

Okay I understand a bit more now.

I don't use FSS sometimes much at all at DIII because it can get expensive, especially if I'm only interested in one or two players yet I have to pay for the entire state just to find their potential, which costs more than paying for scouting trips (which I'm often using as a pull down effort anyway).

I wish I could give you a link, but the forums don't allow it.  If you go to the Search tab above and search for Future Stars in the Topic, time frame = All (or whatever you want, but All might be best in this case), you will find a bunch of information on FSS.  Might be helpful to sort by Number of Views in your search.

The forum search, while a generally crappy implementation, is actually very useful.  Most of the time, you can find the information you want without even having to pose a question to the community and then waiting for answers.

That's a great idea llamanuts, but the search feature makes you put in at least five characters, and FSS is only three.

Search is still a great feature, but I would love to learn more about FSS.

Right, that's why I searched for Future Stars rather than FSS.

I did too but it brought me back no results.

Search for %FSS%

Posted by bistiza on 9/20/2012 12:52:00 PM (view original):
I did too but it brought me back no results.

over on the right I think - change the time frame from 1 month to all...

Posted by ryrun on 9/20/2012 1:03:00 PM (view original):
Search for %FSS%

yes - do this - for time frame all. I got tons of hits. 

Right, that was part of my instructions.

Edit: Neat trick, ryrun!  Didn't think that would work.

Posted by llamanunts on 9/20/2012 1:24:00 PM (view original):
Right, that was part of my instructions.

Edit: Neat trick, ryrun!  Didn't think that would work.

I know, but I figured it must be what kept him from getting results...