Quote: Originally Posted By coach_billyg on 1/03/2010
again, it is not a crap shoot. there is not a lot of coinflipping in battle decision. everything you addressed about the mechanics of WIS recruiting (and i've never played the EA version) does not pertain to the battle in question. and, i was not questioning your knowledge or understand of those mechanics.
when you say its a crap shoot, and a lot of coin flipping, i assumed you were still talking about the battle, or battles in general. not the rest of recruiting. is that true?
anyway, i was not trying to knock you for not understanding the reason the battle turned out how it did. none of us have a full understanding of those mechanics. for example, there is no consensus on things like, how much is prestige worth between the average B and average A d1 school? how many home visits equal 1 campus visit? evals? and so on.
well, all i am pointing out is, if your reaction to the battle is that the outcome is not highly deterministic, then it is because you don't understand it. there may be a random factor on who wins a battle, but it is very slight if any. the decision is very concrete, i think some of us know all of the variables involved, but none of us know exactly how much they are worth. but it is certainly concrete. and without significant coin flipping
I'll explain the EA Sports NCAA Football 2004 recruiting format...its the one I like best and I apologize for using football, however HD and GD recruiting is very similar, and I would want to use a similar recruiting style for both...its not going to happen so just enjoy the clarification.
Please note that in consequent games, recruiting has gotten more complex and I don't really care for it, but I really haven't played the newer NCAA Football games.
In NCAAF 2004, at the end of the season, you get a certain amount of points to recruit with based in team prestige (1-6 stars) and overall team performance (W-L/Rank). Every recruit has a "Top 3 schools" list and the game will highlight the guys that are interested in your school. When you click on the player profile, there's a bar/meter in there to show how great the player's interest in your school is. While in the player profile you can recruit 4 different ways...HC visit, HC call, AC visit, AC call. The amount of points it costs to do each action depends on your team's location in comparison to the recruit's location...thus if you're the coach at Florida State, it would cost 8 points for an HC visit, 4 points for an HC call, 2 points for an AC visit, and 1 point for an AC Call to recruit players in your state...in this case Florida. Depending on how far you are away, the points get greater...I think the max it goes to is something like 48-32-24-8 (for like Canadian recruits or the USA NW) there's another 40-20-10-5...kind of how WIS does theirs, only with points. You can recruit a guy on 4 different principles: Program prestige, location, playing time, coaching style (consequent games have added coach prestige). So again, let's say I'm at Florida State and I'm recruiting Juran Ovito, CB from Tallahassee, FL. His team interests are in order Florida, Texas, and Florida State I decide to put 15 recruit points on him (all 4 actions 8-4-2-1) and I'll recruit based on LOCATION since he's in my state. You'll do this for however many guys you recruit in a given week and then you simulate the week where every team's RECRUIT PLAN is taken into account and factored accordingly. After the Plans simulate, you receive commitments...sometimes you'll sign a boat load in week one, sometimes you'll sign none...hopefully its the former. Your recruiting points regenerate EACH WEEK, however if you have signed some players, your overall recruiting points remaining will decrease. Ok, so I take a look and see that Juran Ovito hasn't signed, but that I am now the top team on his Top 3 team list. I click on the player profile and I get recruiting feedback..."(-)Playing in Tallahassee isn't important to Juran". Thus I'll once again load up 15 points on him...change my recruit strategy for him to PROGRAM PRESTIGE, and sim my recruit plan for week 2. Week 3 of recruiting begins and he still hasn't signed...still tops on my list. I click on his profile and look at the recruiting comments "(+) Juran loves Florida State's tradition"...so I load up Juran Ovito with 15 points again, still pitching PROGRAM PRESTIGE and sim the recruit plan again....HE SIGNS! The crowd goes wild.....
The EA NCAA football recruiting process has....
-5 weeks/cycles of recruiting, with signings/commitments after each week....WIS has 40 cycles? 16 of which before any signings happen? I think you can understand why I wouldn't like WIS' recruiting process after "growing up" on the EA NCAAF series, which is much simpler and I know what I'm recruiting and why they are/aren't interested in my program.
I'm not sure the "Top 3 Schools" thing is good for the game here but I would like to see some transparency in the process...for instance in HD terms with EA concepts....
Let's say you get 5 points per half/third letter grade of your prestige * the number of open scholarships your team has (D- 5, D 10, D+ 15, C- 20, C 25, C+ 30, B- 35, B 40, B+ 45, A- 50, A 55, A+ 60) So let's say your team has a D prestige and you have 4 open schollies...you get 20 points per cycle...or let's say you have a B and 2 schollies to fill, you get 80 points per cycle. For argument's sake, let's say WIS does opt to include the TOP 3 SCHOOLS THING...so we'll say that the number 1 school on the list already has 15 recruit points in the bank, school 2 has 10 and school 3 has 5...all the rest have 0. Hell you wouldn't necessarily need the HC visit, HC call, etc if you wanted to keep this thing simple, you could just put recruit points toward a player based on one of the 4 categories (Program Prestige, Location, Playing Time, Coaching style) and have WIS simulate the recruiting plans each week, giving feedback like EA Sports does and signing each week. It would cost more points to recruit a guy based on location....300 miles points are worth 1....1500 miles, points are worth 1/5 or 0.2...I'm beginning to ramble I think so I'll stop there. After the recruits have been signed, WIS should post the recruit points that each school put forth in each recruits player profile to make the hows and whys transparent.
I hope this clears up what I mean when I talk about crapshoots and coin flipping. I know what I'm putting into a recruit in EA Sports NCAAF, I know what its worth, I get solid recruit feedback as to whether he likes or dislikes what I'm doing...so to go from a format like that to a format where I'm not really sure what I'm spending money for, I get random/scattered feedback from recruits, and that I can now over-recruit in some forms...seems like a crapshoot to me, given my gaming background. I would hope WIS would switch to something like this but I highly doubt it. I hope I cleared it up. I know this was a long post but if you have any comments or questions, please post, thanks.