Has anyone out there compiled any statistics on the likelihood of the school that is leading in a three-way recruiting battle actually winning the recruit? It seems to me, and I don’t think I have selective memory on this, that the team with the lowest odds of winning tends to win more often than the team with the highest odds of winning. So much so, that it leads me to believe that the engine is running the signing based off of the odds of losing, rather than the odds of winning. Like somehow, they inverted the odds when it comes to the actual signing.

I don’t like the way 3-way battles work, but I don’t think they’re inverted or anything. I think probably WIS would be the only entity with access to meaningful data, as even if you have a collection of coaches compiling data, you’re not ever going to rise to anything above “tiny sample size” in the big picture of all the battles that happen. It’s technically possible I guess, and I’m just not noticing it the way I’ve heard a few others do, but I’m very skeptical of that.

My problem with the way they work is that when a third team sneaks in, they seem to be drawing consideration (and ultimately, odds) pretty evenly between the existing teams in range. And that’s just nonsense. The team in the lead should retain all of their effort credit advantage, and almost all of the signing odds advantage. But that isn’t how it works. A team that was leading VH to H can be knocked all the way down to 50 or under, which can make it even worse than a coin flip. The newcomer should be drawing very little from the leaders, and should be splitting with others sitting down closer to moderate line. The closer the existing teams are together, of course, the more even the split should be. I have no idea what seble was thinking when he put that together, I suspect like some other dumb ideas that got in his head, there were some voices that were worrying him about what colluding teams might try to do, and whatnot, and this was preemptively trying to counter that, resulting in just poor design.

I avoid 3-way battles like the plague. In my 130+ seasons of HD, I've never won one. Not once. And I pick my battles very carefully so most of them I've been 50% or higher. Not worth it.

Two thoughts:

Legit backups are out there, you just got to claim them early or be opportunistic. You just need to shave a little off your big battles and you will have the resources for backups. But also this takes time to compound, if you haven’t been adding bench players to your team every season, you’ll have to build up your reserves from scratch.

I think avoiding 3 way battles is a mistake, you have the opportunity to get in with a chance with less, they are like lottery tickets. I saw a coach (robinhood maybe?) once say something to the effect of “if I get into 3 30% battles, the odds I win each one is 30% but I odds I win at least 1 is 65%.” Changed my perspective on recruiting. It’s better to be slightly losing in 2 battles than slightly winning in 1. Adjust your resources accordingly.

Posted by mlitney on 3/5/2022 12:57:00 AM (view original):
I avoid 3-way battles like the plague. In my 130+ seasons of HD, I've never won one. Not once. And I pick my battles very carefully so most of them I've been 50% or higher. Not worth it.

No idea how you’ve done that. I try to avoid them like the plague as well but there are always people who come in…

I agree that lowest team in the 3-way battle seems to win with a lot more frequency than the odds shown.

I've tracked 2-way battles since HD3 was released. I think that's over 4 calendar years?

A small sample size of just under 140, but even at 140 the margin of error should be greatly reduced.

In the 138 battles in which I have been a favorite, with the average of 63%, I've won 36%.
For the good news, when I'm 70+, I have won a little over 50%.

Until I begin seeing different, when I see odds between 25-75, I'm assuming in reality it really was a 50/50 coin flip.

Posted by oldwarrior on 3/5/2022 11:24:00 AM (view original):
I agree that lowest team in the 3-way battle seems to win with a lot more frequency than the odds shown.

I've tracked 2-way battles since HD3 was released. I think that's over 4 calendar years?

A small sample size of just under 140, but even at 140 the margin of error should be greatly reduced.

In the 138 battles in which I have been a favorite, with the average of 63%, I've won 36%.
For the good news, when I'm 70+, I have won a little over 50%.

Until I begin seeing different, when I see odds between 25-75, I'm assuming in reality it really was a 50/50 coin flip.

I've been tracking data on this, and I've actually won 83% of my VH-H battles (25 of 30, with average odds of 67%) and only 25% of my H-VH battles (5 of 20, with average odds of 34%). Only won 38% of my VH-VH battles which is where I have gotten screwed (9 of 24, with average odds 53%). But my VH-H luck has been really, really good. The people who win an over-expected portion of their battles are just really quiet about it.

Posted by tdiddy3 on 3/4/2022 11:33:00 PM (view original):

Posted by shoe3 on 3/4/2022 8:41:00 PM (view original):
I don’t like the way 3-way battles work, but I don’t think they’re inverted or anything. I think probably WIS would be the only entity with access to meaningful data, as even if you have a collection of coaches compiling data, you’re not ever going to rise to anything above “tiny sample size” in the big picture of all the battles that happen. It’s technically possible I guess, and I’m just not noticing it the way I’ve heard a few others do, but I’m very skeptical of that.

My problem with the way they work is that when a third team sneaks in, they seem to be drawing consideration (and ultimately, odds) pretty evenly between the existing teams in range. And that’s just nonsense. The team in the lead should retain all of their effort credit advantage, and almost all of the signing odds advantage. But that isn’t how it works. A team that was leading VH to H can be knocked all the way down to 50 or under, which can make it even worse than a coin flip. The newcomer should be drawing very little from the leaders, and should be splitting with others sitting down closer to moderate line. The closer the existing teams are together, of course, the more even the split should be. I have no idea what seble was thinking when he put that together, I suspect like some other dumb ideas that got in his head, there were some voices that were worrying him about what colluding teams might try to do, and whatnot, and this was preemptively trying to counter that, resulting in just poor design.

If you remember back in the earlier days of WIS a team that offered earlier, the offer held more weight than a team who came in later and offered. I think that was too powerful back then, but I think a school recruiting a player from the beginning should get more weight than a school coming in late in the game. It is very frustrating to lead all the way and then have a school bombard the recruit right before signings happen or come in as a backup option.

I'm also growing more and more frustrated at the lack of being able to recruit legit backup options. If you miss out on your primary targets, you're going to get left with scrap. It makes the game way too difficult to sustain long term success. You can win every dice roll one season and then miss out on every dice roll for the next 3 seasons and then you're screwed because you don't have enough resources to go after legit backups.

If I could design the game, I would make recruits that have the higher prestige teams recruiting them sign earlier. I wouldn't make it that the lower prestige schools couldn't beat out the higher prestige team, but the top teams should be able to go after better players once they lose out on dice rolls. And I believe that team prestige should also factor in how much recruiting budget a school has. North Carolina, Duke, Kentucky, Kansas etc... should not be limited to the same amount of recruiting funds that Old Dominion, Rice, Texas Southern etc... based on the number of scholarships available. The top teams should be able to have a wider amount of players available to them. An "A+" prestige team will have a much larger recruiting budget than a "D-" prestige team. Teams like my "A-" Southern Cal team should not be struggling to beat out a D2 team because I had to use all my budget on big targets and now just have promises and AP to fight to beat a D2 team for a player ranked above 150 at his position.

"I think that was too powerful back then, but I think a school recruiting a player from the beginning should get more weight than a school coming in late in the game." - i don't know, i think the old considering credit was pretty mild. if seble didn't advertise it, i don't even think most people would know it existed. i tried to measure it, i kept coming back to 1% per cycle. i think this would be totally fine to re-introduce around that same level.

i don't really have any problem with the late situation we have now though, personally, i just think adding considering credit back in would be fine

Posted by bpielcmc on 3/5/2022 5:30:00 AM (view original):
Two thoughts:

Legit backups are out there, you just got to claim them early or be opportunistic. You just need to shave a little off your big battles and you will have the resources for backups. But also this takes time to compound, if you haven’t been adding bench players to your team every season, you’ll have to build up your reserves from scratch.

I think avoiding 3 way battles is a mistake, you have the opportunity to get in with a chance with less, they are like lottery tickets. I saw a coach (robinhood maybe?) once say something to the effect of “if I get into 3 30% battles, the odds I win each one is 30% but I odds I win at least 1 is 65%.” Changed my perspective on recruiting. It’s better to be slightly losing in 2 battles than slightly winning in 1. Adjust your resources accordingly.

if you are talking about two 33% battles vs one 66% battle or so, it seems to me this line of thinking would be pretty wrong. your expected players are the same and there is a lot more variation in the two 33% battles, which is not necessarily bad but when it comes to filling open spots, it almost certainly is (with the increasing pain of marginal open spots). if you can get the two battles cheaper than the one, then sure - but if they cost the same - then not buying it.

however, this line of thinking and the strategies inspired by it, very well may be optimal, if in a 15% 3-way battle, you have better than 15% odds, that sort of thing.

Posted by gillispie on 3/5/2022 2:19:00 PM (view original):

Posted by oldwarrior on 3/5/2022 11:24:00 AM (view original):
I agree that lowest team in the 3-way battle seems to win with a lot more frequency than the odds shown.

I've tracked 2-way battles since HD3 was released. I think that's over 4 calendar years?

A small sample size of just under 140, but even at 140 the margin of error should be greatly reduced.

In the 138 battles in which I have been a favorite, with the average of 63%, I've won 36%.
For the good news, when I'm 70+, I have won a little over 50%.

Until I begin seeing different, when I see odds between 25-75, I'm assuming in reality it really was a 50/50 coin flip.

wow... i agree that anything 100+ is a lot. i was gonna reply to shoe but didn't i guess, that i didn't buy his claim on the low sample size. its irrelevant that its a small sample compared to all battles, completely irrelevant. i was gonna say, even a single coach can get to 100+ and that is a plenty big sample size, and CERTAINLY a consortium of coaches could get up there.

anyway. someone like cub or someone else who knows statistics, should be able to put a % on it - the odds that your data is explainable by luck alone, some measure along those lines? by 140 i am thinking those numbers should be pretty damn meaningful, i don't see how luck is going to explain 63% vs 36%. i am sort of thinking all the lines of inquiry would mostly question the data set itself, the integrity of it, are all the battles really included etc. - but knowing you are the source, this sounds pretty damn problematic to me.

One coach’s tracking is a minute sample size. It doesn’t matter how many seasons it goes. The most you could draw from that is that the system was *possibly* biased somehow against that coach’s recruiting efforts (however the mechanics would look) over that period of time. Is that problematic in its own way? Sure, and I’m not saying that’s not possible, but that’s not the question at hand, which is a system wide brokenness, the idea that the odds are “inverted”.

In the context of 300+ coaches in a single world, with likely 1000+ battles in a season/world, a single coach’s 3-4 battles are meaningless. Taking that out to 150 battles over the span of 45 seasons doesn’t really matter in terms of showing odds inversion, because the system now has ~45,000+ battles to look at. Less than half of 1% of overall occurrence is not enough power to show clinical significance.

Now again, if we want to discuss whether it’s possible that the system can be made to be biased against individual users, that’s a different discussion.

I think that there should be diminishing returns on multiple visits in one cycle. Like practice minutes, have some threshold where they start to lose effect and become even almost minimal.

Also, maybe there should be a consecutive cycle bonus. If you give the same effort in consecutive cycles it slightly increases effectiveness. Giving a HV in 20 consecutive windows should have way more of an effect than dumping 20 at one time.

This could drastically alter recruiting. I had some local guys over the past couple seasons get grabbed away late. Maybe because someone who had an EE or broken promise(not sure they get more resources or not), and maybe saved resources too, idktbh. But the point is, I had been investing AP and visits in these guys from the get go, but I was in great positions to get top 20 guys.

BTW, one of the guys I lost was a4-way battle where I was the favorite out of 4 and he signed with the guy with 4th best chance. Add that anecdotal evidence to the multi-way battle mythology!!

Posted by hawkfan1992 on 3/4/2022 5:55:00 PM (view original):
Has anyone out there compiled any statistics on the likelihood of the school that is leading in a three-way recruiting battle actually winning the recruit? It seems to me, and I don’t think I have selective memory on this, that the team with the lowest odds of winning tends to win more often than the team with the highest odds of winning. So much so, that it leads me to believe that the engine is running the signing based off of the odds of losing, rather than the odds of winning. Like somehow, they inverted the odds when it comes to the actual signing.

Does any of this actually matter? I'm not sure you've lost ANYTHING since you began playing HD hahaha.

If you were up against a D1 team and you were playing in D3, I'd bet my life savings on you, without even looking at your team!

Posted by shoe3 on 3/5/2022 3:47:00 PM (view original):

Posted by gillispie on 3/5/2022 2:19:00 PM (view original):

Posted by oldwarrior on 3/5/2022 11:24:00 AM (view original):
I agree that lowest team in the 3-way battle seems to win with a lot more frequency than the odds shown.

I've tracked 2-way battles since HD3 was released. I think that's over 4 calendar years?

A small sample size of just under 140, but even at 140 the margin of error should be greatly reduced.

In the 138 battles in which I have been a favorite, with the average of 63%, I've won 36%.
For the good news, when I'm 70+, I have won a little over 50%.

Until I begin seeing different, when I see odds between 25-75, I'm assuming in reality it really was a 50/50 coin flip.

wow... i agree that anything 100+ is a lot. i was gonna reply to shoe but didn't i guess, that i didn't buy his claim on the low sample size. its irrelevant that its a small sample compared to all battles, completely irrelevant. i was gonna say, even a single coach can get to 100+ and that is a plenty big sample size, and CERTAINLY a consortium of coaches could get up there.

anyway. someone like cub or someone else who knows statistics, should be able to put a % on it - the odds that your data is explainable by luck alone, some measure along those lines? by 140 i am thinking those numbers should be pretty damn meaningful, i don't see how luck is going to explain 63% vs 36%. i am sort of thinking all the lines of inquiry would mostly question the data set itself, the integrity of it, are all the battles really included etc. - but knowing you are the source, this sounds pretty damn problematic to me.

One coach’s tracking is a minute sample size. It doesn’t matter how many seasons it goes. The most you could draw from that is that the system was *possibly* biased somehow against that coach’s recruiting efforts (however the mechanics would look) over that period of time. Is that problematic in its own way? Sure, and I’m not saying that’s not possible, but that’s not the question at hand, which is a system wide brokenness, the idea that the odds are “inverted”.

In the context of 300+ coaches in a single world, with likely 1000+ battles in a season/world, a single coach’s 3-4 battles are meaningless. Taking that out to 150 battles over the span of 45 seasons doesn’t really matter in terms of showing odds inversion, because the system now has ~45,000+ battles to look at. Less than half of 1% of overall occurrence is not enough power to show clinical significance.

Now again, if we want to discuss whether it’s possible that the system can be made to be biased against individual users, that’s a different discussion.

'Less than half of 1% of overall occurrence is not enough power to show clinical significance.'

respectfully, this is just not how statistics works. as long as the sample is a random sample it should serve. a coach diligently tracking their entire set of battles with odds would qualify.

math is not your thing, this one is unambiguous.