Because of a 40 year career in advertising/marketing (concluded this past 9/30 when I retired and, yes, I say that to generate envy :-)), my world view has always been "everything is marketing". How you got your prom date, your job, your wife to let you go to Vegas with the guys, it's all turning benefits into selling propositions that result in the desired behavior.
Businesses need two simple elements to thrive: customer generation and customer retention. Generation comes from presenting your unique or proprietary selling propositions to a ripe target and retention comes from refreshing your product/service bundles to make existing customers maintain a desire level that keeps them in the fold. You don't accomplish both, you're finished.
WIS is struggling on both fronts right now and the tenor of the exchanges among its customers is sourced in frustration levels that only the vendor can diminish.
The core of the new game is what it is. Therefore, those who are dissatisfied with the core should move on. Nothing to see here anymore.
Those delighted with it should be the ambassadors for customer base growth. Express what delights you and there you go: selling propositions that can be backed up with customer testimonial. And a united set of voices to win over the skeptical.
Here is where the rubber meets the road if this game is going to survive: evaluate what the veterans who WANT TO STAY are saying and address them quickly and efficiently. Eliminate the noise and identify the keys to keeping guys who have a history of coaching 4, 5, 6, 10 teams.
For me, that's where I fall. Really like the macro of the new game. Scouting and the strategies applied are cool. The elimination of hoarding 5 stars is good for all involved, except the hoarders. Many will get over that if the changes don't have punitive characteristics. If the EE issue, the job change recruiting disadvantage and the job logic were addressed, all this infighting (which is killing both generation and retention at the same time) would evaporate.
WIS: Show us how much you want this game to succeed. And how much the customers on all sides of these issues mean to you.

C'mon, let's just play ball!

Congratulations on the retirement rsvphr! Sounds so simple yet still so hard to grasp. I'm hanging on by a thread since there are no other college basketball strategy games like this online.

I agree with all of this, great post.

"Fix" EEs by making sure a rational number of elite recruits wait to sign long enough for teams with EEs to get their intended effort considered. The better the recruit, the more likely he should be interested in teams that just lost an early entry or two. More prestige, more available PT. Simple fix - increase the odds that a recruit has "late" and "whenever" signing preferences, the higher up the recruit chain you go. "Fix" the coach change recruiting penalty by instituting a one-or two cycle signing freeze on late preference players. Instead of signing the last 10 cycles, code late signing players to sign the last 8 or 9 cycles.

The Powers That Be say they are watching the data from the initial seasons of 3.0, and will make changes if warranted. I'll continue to advocate for these two, that maintain the spirit and principles of increased competitiveness for elite commodities, while improving playability for coaches changing jobs, and dealing with a rational number of unexpected early entries.

Keeping in mind that EE's don't affect everyone. I have one D3 team still and the changes definitely impact what recruiting looks like there. I'd argue there are many that only play D2 and D3 and I don't know that we've heard enough from them as to what they think about the changes. I know of some very very successful D3 only coaches that left, for the ones that stayed how is 3.0 working for you?

I think there's a built in assumption that everyone of course wants to move up to Big6, and that's not always the case.

Good point about D2 and D3. I'm guilty of not giving that a second thought and that's where EVERY new coach starts. A D3 evaluation is critical: look at coaches chats, season by season retention patterns and a pinned comment thread would be valuable.

Some of those D3 dynasties that have checked out were attached to D1 teams in other worlds, as credit producers. I'm not saying there aren't valid reasons for people to not prefer the new system. But the recruiting game at D2/3 hasn't changed that much (I also play as shoe3). You still have to find and land the best players available to you. I suspect guys that don't like 3.0 at that level don't like scouting, it takes them a lot of work to end up *feeling like* they've done a good job (in my opinion, they just haven't figured out all the tools and efficiencies yet, but that's a separate rabbit hole). When it comes down to it, a lot of those guys just didn't want to learn a new game.

I just picked up a 3rd D3 team and have no plans of moving up on the other 2, at least for awhile.

I've said it many times that I think a big problem at D3 is imbalance. As you say rsvphr, this is where EVERYONE starts. So why not make it more difficult to dominate these new guys? I think it's now EASIER to dominate sims (which is what the new coach is taking over for their first season most likely, a sim coached team). Without the caps on divisions, will the human coached D3 teams be getting better?

And I know that people have said that the top D3 teams have always dominated and that is no different in 3.0. While I don't necessarily 100% agree, I will agree for the sake of argument. So it was already difficult to compete in the first couple seasons and now it's AT LEAST the same. I'd still say it's worse because you can't recruit right away but new people don't know how to recruit so maybe it's a wash.

Anyway, getting destroyed every game and winning 5 games on the season is not fun for a new person and I'm sure it's not that appealing. They pop on for a few minutes, check out how much they lost by and then forget about it until the next day. Seems like an issue to me but maybe I'm wrong.

That's where the veteran ownership comes in.

I've been told that I could probably go 0-27 and move to D2. No reason for me NOT to believe that. If there's a super D3 in my conference, I can move on. Or they could explain to me why I'm getting smoked. Or they could just beat the snot out of me in silence. But, if someone drops some logic on me, I'm more likely to at least give S2 a try. Maybe at a different level, maybe with a different team but, if I'm still around, a SIM team isn't playing somewhere.

Honest question Benis, when you first signed up, was your intention to stay at D3? If not, what has made you decide to park? I start with the assumption that most new users start with a destination, or at least a type of destination in mind. In that context, D3 is useful as a place to learn the game - learn how to scout, how to gameplan, etc. But the idea is to make D1 the best and most competitive game it can be, so those guys can feel like they have a career trajectory, and can play out their hoop dream fantasies in a rational amount of time, without getting frustrated by logjams, or a heavily gamed process along the way.

If levels are capped, aren't the "elite" D3 players mostly going to go to experienced guys like you, who have parked?

So far as I know you can always still move to D2 after one season of D3, regardless of record. Of course you probably can't get an A+ prestige team after going 0-27, but you can go.

So you pay $12.95 to try the game, you start at D3. You inherit a roster from SIM or a prior coach. You go through recruiting during the season, maybe sign some guys, maybe not. You're new, you may not read the forums or know they exist or may not have conference people to chat it up with. Maybe you win $1.50, maybe more, maybe nothing. Any guys you sign will show up next season. So the first season is clicking around recruiting and probably losing a good amount of games since you're new.

Next season you decide to try D2. Still not a team you see on TV, but maybe you're close to a school or you pick one you went to or some other reason. You buy another season, maybe $12.95, maybe less. You still inherit a roster. Maybe all SIM, maybe not. But now you're sort of stuck. You aren't moving to D1 season 3. You can stick it out at the school you chose, or maybe go back to D3. But you're still paying season one for (most) benefits in the following season.

I personally don't like not starting with recruiting. Maybe because it's the way I knew the game from before, but I like choosing my guys, even that 5 ATH 76 SPD PG my first season, because he started every game that season because he was mine damnit, I picked him. As it stands in 3.0 you're watching somebody elses guys for a year. And paying to do that.

What guyo says is true if you are starting in the new player phase. If you're moving up via jobs application, you can cut existing players (though not incoming freshmen already signed) and recruit some of your own players, if that's important to you.

True, I haven't changed teams in 3.0, so I don't haven't been through that.

I mean it seems subtle, but for the brand new guy off the street, is that going to be unappealing? I don't know. Recruiting has always been the most fun part of the game for me. Yes, the brand new coach is recruiting as the season progresses, but you're paying for 5 seasons to get your first class graduated in 4. Maybe the new person doesn't know that it used to be different, but I sure do.

I was surprised that I didn't get to recruit. With my previous experience, I wouldn't have been flying blind. My assumption is the developers/programmers didn't want to throw complete n00bs right into the fire of recruiting. And maybe they felt it would encourage owners to stay put because they got "their guys" coming in.

I'd still have liked to recruit and play "my" guys on my disaster. That said, recruiting 7 would have been a nightmare.

Posted by pkoopman on 11/16/2016 11:06:00 AM (view original):
Honest question Benis, when you first signed up, was your intention to stay at D3? If not, what has made you decide to park? I start with the assumption that most new users start with a destination, or at least a type of destination in mind. In that context, D3 is useful as a place to learn the game - learn how to scout, how to gameplan, etc. But the idea is to make D1 the best and most competitive game it can be, so those guys can feel like they have a career trajectory, and can play out their hoop dream fantasies in a rational amount of time, without getting frustrated by logjams, or a heavily gamed process along the way.

If levels are capped, aren't the "elite" D3 players mostly going to go to experienced guys like you, who have parked?

When I first heard about the game from a co-worker, I didn't know you started at D3 so I was thinking I'd go grab Syracuse and that'd be pretty cool. But then I realized it was D3 so I took RIT to check out the game since that was my alma mater. I really liked the game so I talked a couple other friends to play and we randomly chose Capital conf in Iba to play in. Then over the seasons I've talked a bunch of other friends to play. In total I've recruited 11 friends to join the conference. Only 3 of them remain and played more than 2-3 seasons. So that's part of the appeal of D3 is that I can have friends join up and give it a shot in my conference. So we just stuck around and don't plan on moving.

Agreed that if levels were capped, most elite D3 players would still go to guys like me. However, there are fewer of them and we'll all fight for them, especially now with the new system. It's basically like the top 100 players now in D1, people are going to be battling for them more now. So, the D3 talent pool is more limited and it's unlikely teams will be able to hoard them... again just like the problem of high level D1 in 2.0. But 3.0, we know have a much bigger talent pool to choose from. I could go for D2 guys while my conference rival goes for D3 guys and we'll never cross paths. I get some really good D2 guys and he gets some stud D3 guys and we're basically the same. But now we both have super good teams compared to the SIM teams in our conference since we don't need to compete with each other for recruits. Then when a new user picks up the SIM team, we crush them.

One of my friends in my conference has only won 1 NT game in his career. He's had some decent teams over the seasons but he's nowhere near Elite. This past season, on 1 opening, he signed a D1 international and will probably be the best player he's ever had. If this trend continues, he'll go from a pretty good but beatable team to a much more dangerous/dominating team compared to the Sim teams in our conference. This is basically what I mean when there will be more really good teams. Again, I could be wrong, it's very possible that this doesn't happen. But this is my prediction and in my opinion, doesn't do anything POSITIVE to assist with new coach retention.

I picked up a new D3 team in 3.0 just to see what it was like recruiting and developing a team at that level since I spent the beta exclusively at the D2 level and evaluating the game from the perspective of a team I had coached in a live world for 40-some seasons.

My initial impression (I've gone through one recruiting cycle) is that the cash is a little thin for scouting. I really think the $5K (or $3K, or whatever it was) that seble magically pulled from the scouting budgets "to see how this works and then we can discuss" (but never discussed because the product was so busy getting rushed to roll out...) hurts here the most. I have a scouting pool, but it isn't overly large with regard to people I'd actually want to sign when building a competitive team.

I'm also not sure I'll ultimately like the feel of D3 after 2-3 seasons. Right now the game is very much the same in so far as what a "good" team looks like, what an "average" team looks like and what an "elite" team looks like. In 2-3 seasons once the bottom-dwelling D1 and legit solid D2 recruits start filtering down, the average teams will continue exactly as they are today, but the taffy pull on the top end of the scale is going to really distort the game. At that stage, I'm just not sure how much fun its going to be for coaches at either end of the distribution curve. And, unlike D1, I think the mechanics of the game will allow for dynasties at the D3 level (and, by extension also D2) to entrench themselves pretty solidly.