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.
5/31/2016 1:22 PM (edited)