Posted by Basketts on 6/28/2020 2:43:00 PM (view original):
An AP's value will definitely change depending on how your prestige and preferences line up, though probably less noticeable at A+ prestige. So I'm not sure how it would be a fixed number recruit-to-recruit. This is easy to calculate once you've placed AP on a recruit and can compare it to the percentage it unlocks.
I don't know if there are any other factors, like a hidden player attribute, that works in a similar way to how redshirt acceptance works. I haven't noticed one if it exists.
about a decade ago, when facing this exact same problem but in 2.0, i was like 'there has to be some logic'. i tried to figure it out, but i failed. so, i just threw my hands up and called it the 'recruits sense of self'. i accepted it might be based on ratings but not in a way that made any logical sense to a human, clearly worse guys (by seemingly any way of looking at it) would refuse you while better ones would talk to you. i basically assumed there was either 1) a hidden variable (these used to clearly exist - they had been added and then removed, but not completely - i mean we were told they were removed, but they weren't - EE preference was an example), or 2) some stupid math that made no sense. i figured it didn't matter much which it was - so i just call that the recruit's sense of self which is relative to your prestige (the behavior of each recruit seemed consistent with programs, so it seemed like a recruit thing).
real quick for you newer folks - before 3.0, d2/d3 teams, and actually all d1 teams up into B- range prestige somewhere, had players clearly 'above' them. this was only clear after contacting the player - but it was really obvious after. there were a dozen or whatever messages and some meant 'you can recruit me now', some meant 'you can recruit me later' (or pull me down), and others meant 'you can never recruit me ever no matter what' (d1 teams could not get this message, if i recall). anyway, this was insanely important to d2/d3 because the route to getting the best players was basically calling often a couple hundred of them up front and finding who could talk to you and who wouldn't, and it would be all over the place. one year, a d2 team could talk to the 130 sf and and the 160 pg and the next year, it might be the 155 sf but no ranked pg would even talk to them (maintaining a+ prestige the whole way).
fast forward a couple years, someone pointed out - which i guess seems like it should have been obvious but it wasn't - that on a seasonal basis, you could guarantee the following - outside of the special 70 mile zone - if the #130 SF would talk to you, but the #129 would not, then you could guarantee the 1-128 SF would not talk to you while the #131-200 and all unranked SFs would talk to you. i confirmed this and used it in recruiting for the rest of my recruiting days. this made me skeptical there was a hidden variable, but by then i wasn't as active / didn't care / didn't want to deplete my strategic reserves of sanity trying to understand what was at best some really stupid math.
since then, the big board came out - and i went back, did the same thing as my early days - tried to find any linear mathematical formula to rank them (via program). obviously, i failed. its clear now that there are multiple formulas, and its on my to do list (which you know, means nothing) to try again but with a variable number of formulas chose by... who knows what. i'm not really sure if i knew the paragraph above at the time i did this - if i did, i probably would have done it by position (which is tricky - player rankings seemingly go off of listed position - big board does not).
anyway, now that 3.0 is out, it does seem clear - now that others have pointed it out to me (thank you!), that the unlocking threshold of a recruit appears to be very closely tied to preferences and that player ranking number.
at this point, my position has evolved - i am skeptical of the hidden variable theory. note that sometime between the beginning of the story and the end, seble went in and 'removed all hidden variables' on players. i suspect there is a ruling set of 5 or so formulas, incredibly dumb, terrible ones, one per position, and this governs not only the player ranking, but also the big board. i am probably wrong, but this same theme has recurred too often, too many times. my silly animal brain was able to make pretty good sense of the board - back in 2.0 when i actually coached d1 teams for real, i was really good at projecting out where my guys would be, even though i could not explain it. however, to me, this suggests there is an internal order to the big board, at least.
last random thought - the old school player rankings did not include potential. i am unsure if they do now - it feels like 4/5 star recruits are more consistently not-awful, so i'm questioning if that changes. if so, that would make the player rankings that much harder to sort out, because presumably the actual cap is what would be used and we'd have to either do lots of painful tracking or else have imperfect data, and either of those makes an already non-trivial program that much worse.