I have always found the scholarship messages to be confusing, and I'm sure that I'm not the only one.  Even with this helpful scholarship message thread, sometimes it is hard to make sense of everything.  Are these messages only automatically sent when you go from being ahead to behind, and vice versa?  It seems like sometimes I have gotten a message when I didn't think there was any reason for me to.  Does going from way ahead to only slightly ahead ever generate a message?

On a related note, what is the difference in content between calling a recruit and sending material?  Is one better than the other for figuring out where you stand during a battle?  Like the scholarship messages, the responses for these two actions can also be very ambiguous at times.  Is there a guide for player call/material responses similar to the scholarship message thread I shared earlier?

Thanks to anyone who is able to help with any of these questions!

Posted by clouseb on 4/2/2014 12:09:00 AM (view original):
I have always found the scholarship messages to be confusing, and I'm sure that I'm not the only one.  Even with this helpful scholarship message thread, sometimes it is hard to make sense of everything.  Are these messages only automatically sent when you go from being ahead to behind, and vice versa?  It seems like sometimes I have gotten a message when I didn't think there was any reason for me to.  Does going from way ahead to only slightly ahead ever generate a message?

On a related note, what is the difference in content between calling a recruit and sending material?  Is one better than the other for figuring out where you stand during a battle?  Like the scholarship messages, the responses for these two actions can also be very ambiguous at times.  Is there a guide for player call/material responses similar to the scholarship message thread I shared earlier?

Thanks to anyone who is able to help with any of these questions!

calls and letters dont tell you anything about where you stand... at least, nobody has made any sense of them thus far. basically you have to ignore all the responses except for scholarship messages.

actually I think there are some messages with calls that are more definitive than others.  A player call can sometimes say "you're top of my list", which I've found correlates extremely well with being in the lead.  I think there's a similarly worded coach call but I forget how that one goes.  So sometimes I'll send 3 or 4 calls to each in a cycle when I'm in a battle to make sure I'm in the lead.  But yeah, certainly the scholarship messages are more reliable, but some of them can be tough to decipher, and when a battle keeps dragging on too much for my liking, I'll do these calls to help reinforce that I'm still leading.

One thing I still haven't quite figured out is why you sometimes get the same scholarship message twice in a row. What's that supposed to communicate? Your position is unchanged? Your position almost changed but didn't? 

Posted by tarvolon on 4/2/2014 9:49:00 AM (view original):
One thing I still haven't quite figured out is why you sometimes get the same scholarship message twice in a row. What's that supposed to communicate? Your position is unchanged? Your position almost changed but didn't? 

I've always taken it as an extension of different recruiting actions being performed at different times during the overall cycle calculation (much the same way as your call to the player can give you a "yeah, but playing for your school doesn't sound any better than anywhere else," but after your 8 scouting trips, campus visit and scholarship offer the kid is wishing he could sign today. I figure it means that somewhere in the process one party or the other did something that, for those few milliseconds, skewed the battle for a player to a different level, triggering a subroutine to send an update note...but then when all other actions were subsequently calculated in, things had rebalanced to in the realm of where it all started.

Posted by rednu on 4/2/2014 11:02:00 AM (view original):

Posted by tarvolon on 4/2/2014 9:49:00 AM (view original):
One thing I still haven't quite figured out is why you sometimes get the same scholarship message twice in a row. What's that supposed to communicate? Your position is unchanged? Your position almost changed but didn't? 

I've always taken it as an extension of different recruiting actions being performed at different times during the overall cycle calculation (much the same way as your call to the player can give you a "yeah, but playing for your school doesn't sound any better than anywhere else," but after your 8 scouting trips, campus visit and scholarship offer the kid is wishing he could sign today. I figure it means that somewhere in the process one party or the other did something that, for those few milliseconds, skewed the battle for a player to a different level, triggering a subroutine to send an update note...but then when all other actions were subsequently calculated in, things had rebalanced to in the realm of where it all started.

me too

I'm not sure that works in the case I just ran into. Pretty recently, I received a scholarship message, took an action, got no new scholarship message, took no action the following cycle, and then got the same scholarship message again (after the cycle in which I took no action). 

was the message positive or negative, tarv?

Posted by tarvolon on 4/2/2014 9:49:00 AM (view original):
One thing I still haven't quite figured out is why you sometimes get the same scholarship message twice in a row. What's that supposed to communicate? Your position is unchanged? Your position almost changed but didn't? 

This is exactly what prompted me to make this thread.  I was sent the same message two cycles in a row, with no recruiting action from me.  It was a winning message, and since I didn't have any recruiting actions there was no way I could have gone from winning, to losing, to winning again in the same cycle.

Posted by oldave on 4/2/2014 1:56:00 PM (view original):
was the message positive or negative, tarv?

It was a "slightly behind" message