mostly, i am concerned with the modifications of the current system, as i would guess that is the direction we end up in. didn't want to clutter up my last post TOO bad. anyway these are the changes i would make to the current style of recruiting.

1) redo recruit generation, the current model is broken. there are too many teams who end up too talented. a substantial change to the method of recruiting could have ramifications in this area, but i do believe the recruit generation curve (if you will) is fundamentally flawed. you are supposed to have a handful of elite players and then a smooth curve the rest of the way, if you would like to be realistic, and i think that would be good for the game, in this case. there are simply too many "great" players when compared to the amount of "good" players, or else too few "good" players (and i think its both). if the ceiling was lowered a bit, i mean fine have 5-10 players who are as good as the top 5-10 today, but drop it off, so that there aren't 50 players a year who are a lot better than an 80/80/80/80/80 kind of guy. those kind of guys are hardly viable today at top programs and it makes no sense. also, *recruit generation must take into account potential if you ever hope to calibrate the thing worth a *****. there is simply no way around it, i don't know what else to say on that, hopefully that is obvious to everybody, and just simply the effort required to change the pre-existing model is why we are where we are today.

2) open up recruiting nationally. you will never be able to balance this game, balance the game among the elite schools, and balance the elite schools in relation to the rest of the teams, as long as you are trying to calibrate a dozen different "recruiting areas" or whatever you want to call it. simply, you will have a lack of or abundance of top teams in an area, making those elites uneven. also, the whole theory, it seems, between the possible balancing of elites with everyone else, is fine make great players elite schools will get - but make them fight for them. you won't get the battling when everyone is in their own little womb, protected from the vast majority of A/A+ schools out there. sure, the east gets pretty heated at times, but its still not enough. if you want to leave a regional component, make it a preference or something, and give top players the preference that they dont give a damn where they go (or at least, more than half of them don't).

3) for the love of god, expand that first 2 hour cycle!!

4) i would strongly support the capping of effort you could spend on a player. this cap should make it so any school could dump their entire budget into a player, if they started in cycle 1, and went every cycle. someone not too restrictive. i have probably had more success with last minute tactics, playing games with old promises, and winning recruits by outspending a school in the short term, that i could never outspend in the long run - than the vast majority of coaches. so i have no hatred for those tactics, although they certainly have been used against me (where else would i get the idea?). i think if you put a moderate cap, say 10K/cycle, on d1 recruiting - that would really change the game substantially, and for the better. that would stop people winning recruits largely because somebody else was foolish enough to actually want to sleep for 3 consecutive hours =) or from winning recruits from a 2 cycle 1-2 punch that just catches so many of today's coaches with their pants down. thats not the way to win. you dont swoop in in real life and go hey, come visit my campus 100 times in the next 2 weeks and sign before the other coach knows what hit him. i mean sure the whole HV/CV thing is unrealistic but thats ok, its the fact that you can exploit these things to win recruits "in the shadow of night", if you will, that is not ok, in my opinion.

5) promises should work as a multiplier effect on total effort, i think. i feel that certain players should really crave the limelight, want to start and all that. this will help balance things re: elite schools. many can't offer a start without hurting themselves. also, make starts in the NT matter, i mean come on - that should be half the damn equation, not 0%. no offense to current site staff, just seems painfully obvious to me. i have promised starts my entire 5 years as a coach, more freely than anyone ive ever seen, because i know it hardly even matters, because i can just bench the bastard in the NT, when things really count. but anyway, there is really a lot of room for promises to be great tools. its stupid you can sign a players on 110, i think, get rid of that. don't get me wrong, i was crushed when they "fixed" promises, you used to be able to promise start or minutes any time, and man, things could get ugly really quick. i loved it, but it made no sense. make promises have no base weight, so a promise to a recruit you don't know, means well, nothing (literally). if its 10% of total effort for a start, for a guy who cares (just throwing out the #, would have to think long and hard to propose a real #), then promises only really start to matter in the grand scheme, when you REALLY know a player (5K bonus on 50K matters, 500 on 5K is not worth a damn thing).

6) change home/away and favorite school preferences to actually add enjoyment to the game. or get rid of them. or add other things like it. just make it make some sense, the current model makes no damn sense at all, with respect to those two things. away preference is not meaningless but still distance seems to significantly outweigh it. favorite school is dangerous territory, you dont want a player being a lock for a certain school before things begin. and player preferences being spread over all 350 or whatever d1 schools, basically makes it a non factor in recruiting in almost every way - on the extremely rare occasion you get in a battle where someone is favorite - it doesn't even matter! at least if it was a small factor on a semi regular basis, or mattered occasionally, you could see some world in which it made sense (although, maybe not ours). but when its a non factor almost none of the time... i mean come on :)

7) modify bonus money for conferences, its too severe, IMO. not sure to what extent, i love the conference friendly atmosphere this brings.

8) make it so evals don't make you want to stab somebody. when you send your assistant 10 times to scout a big, and he doesn't know if he can rebound... you want to stab somebody. i really am not picky how you fix this - cut down scouting trips to a set of ratings that matter - or let you pick which ones - or make super scouting trips that get everything - ive heard all those ideas and really any of them are fine with me.

9) please have as many ranges of medium as you do of low!!! it makes no sense, except that these unintelligible english messages get even worse. take the damn english out of it. just say it, please. "bob jones is high/high in perimeter". great. fantastic. i'd love to see the original idea of 3 ranges implemented even, but for a higher price maybe (maybe cheap evals split range in 2, expensive ones in 3, which gives you REALLY good data if you get both). in general, it might not fit here in #9, but its very important to me - scouting and researching players should be a bigger part of the game. i spend a ton of money doing this, but i dont think most coaches do. i think i get a lot out of what there is today in some cases, but sometimes its just frustrating, largely because evals won't tell you about a bigs rebounding or when you have a guy with a bunch of mediums. i dont think you want to over do it, like if a dude had 10 preferences and 5 ranges of potentials, and you had a half dozen different tools to find them, i think that would be horrible. but beef it up just a bit, please!

10) soft caps should be added - nothing drastic. however, the rate at which you grow when you are roughly 3 points from maxed, that should be how you grow forever. make it so off season won't improve above the cap if that is the concern, but this way, it eliminates the frustration of "hey, don't practice rebounding or low post or defense with your big". right now if you are like 3 from the max, with 30 minutes, you probably won't get +3, so i can't really see this causing balance issues or whatever. it would just make it viable to practice, you know, more than 0 minutes in the most important things to a player. and before anyone says, you still need to practice them so they don't go down - you don't, really, and going down .1 in a year is not worth 7 minutes to prevent!!

11) also, a nitpick, you might want to fix the bug where assistant coach emails don't line up with recruiting. its not because players had a practice in between, this has been proven beyond a doubt. there is a rounding error or something where borderline cases can show up differently in recruiting and assistant coach emails, and it just seems sloppy... worth fixing, but not critical.

Posted by jdno on 6/27/2012 9:46:00 AM (view original):
I wouldn't mind if the initial ratings were a bit more unclear unless you put in more scouting effort or whatnot.  For example, for a given kid, maybe his base LP rating that every coach can see is 60-90.  If you scout his state w/FSS, maybe it narrows to 63-73.  If you do some evals, maybe you eventually determine it's actually 67 (after 1st eval, maybe you see it's 63-70, 2nd eval 64-68, 3rd eval hones in to 67).  Something along this line that makes it a bit harder right off the bat and with minimal FSS spending to determine who to go after.  Right now it's probably a bit too diagnose kids ratings and project where they'll end up.  Also, perhaps more diamonds in the rough will be available under this system.

I also think it would be good to make recruiting of the 4* and 5* kids more national vs. regional like all of recruiting seems to be.

I like both of these thoughts.

Posted by llamanunts on 6/27/2012 11:16:00 AM (view original):

Posted by jdno on 6/27/2012 9:46:00 AM (view original):
I wouldn't mind if the initial ratings were a bit more unclear unless you put in more scouting effort or whatnot.  For example, for a given kid, maybe his base LP rating that every coach can see is 60-90.  If you scout his state w/FSS, maybe it narrows to 63-73.  If you do some evals, maybe you eventually determine it's actually 67 (after 1st eval, maybe you see it's 63-70, 2nd eval 64-68, 3rd eval hones in to 67).  Something along this line that makes it a bit harder right off the bat and with minimal FSS spending to determine who to go after.  Right now it's probably a bit too diagnose kids ratings and project where they'll end up.  Also, perhaps more diamonds in the rough will be available under this system.

I also think it would be good to make recruiting of the 4* and 5* kids more national vs. regional like all of recruiting seems to be.

I like both of these thoughts.

i like the national recruiting idea obviously. not sure about the unclear initial ratings. it makes sense, from a realistic standpoint, and i am intruiged by the possibility. but i am not sure 60-90 is not overkill. i really would not want to look at a big and go, well, hes between 30 and 60 ath, 50 and 80 reb, 40 and 70 def... i mean well, hes either god awful, and should be killed on the spot out of pity, or else, hes amazing. but i have no idea which... and it could be anything in between. maybe like, 70-80 ath, 80-90 reb, etc... i could go for that! :)

I am in favor of a soft cap for player development (this goes hand in hand with recruiting).

I think we need a soft cap, I know seble is against it but I don't see any downside to it. If we could get the soft cap I think that would help a lot. Something like: once you get the no improvement message you can still get 2-3 points a year with 20 minutes (work ethic matters to) as opposed to 1 for the career. (thoughts on this anyone?)

 

I think increasing the number of battles would be preferable.  But to do this, I think you need to at least tweak the auction-style system so that teams are able to pursue more targets without appearing "weak" to potential poachers.  Diminishing returns or an outright cap on effort could accomplish this.  Then let the player pick the school.  Another way to do it would be giving each team a certain amount of "free" effort units that cannot be stacked on top of each other -- there'd be nothing to lose by spreading it out.

Season-long recruiting would be fantastic.  This way, even if you created more battles, you'd be able to trickle the amount of signings on a day-by day basis so that the losers of battles could reallocate resources in a more realistic fashion, rather than having to lock down a certain number of guys before the first signing period as is the case now.

More opaqueness on potential would be more realistic and provide smaller schools a chance to find a diamond in the rough.  Your scouts should have the ability to be wrong, just like in real life.  There's too much certainty right now, which benefits the big guys even more than real life.  I think people fight over whether HD should be more liek real life or more of a total sandbox.  I don't think anybody thinks HD should benefit the big guys MORE than real life. 

Stop tying $$$ to number of schollys -- in real life, Duke can compete for any recruit even if they only have 1 spot open.

No question scouting vists should NOT overlap the same info time and time again.

I have an idea to help make recruiting a more "national" affair rather than "regional", mainly for just D1 (and I'll say upfront that I've never played D1).

Create a "frequent flyer" program similar to FSS where you can purchase a state and then recruit from that state at a discounted price. The exact discount I'm not sure (maybe 50% off, or maybe you recruit as if you were 500 miles from every recruit in the state).

There would have to be a limit on the number of states you could buy, that way Big 6 schools can't purchase every state at the expense of mid-majors. Maybe a maximum of 3 states per cycle? And of course the prices would vary based on # of recruits, with states like CA, TX, NY, etc. being especially pricey.

This would create a system where schools for the west coast have a legit shot at signing top recruits from the east, and vice versa. Top level D1 recruiting would no longer be "luck of the draw" based on whether or not you get a favorable recruit generation in your area. This would also promote battling amongst the top schools, since schools like UCLA and Duke could battle for a recruit in TX like never before.

Thoughts?

Posted by coach_billyg on 6/27/2012 11:23:00 AM (view original):

Posted by llamanunts on 6/27/2012 11:16:00 AM (view original):

Posted by jdno on 6/27/2012 9:46:00 AM (view original):
I wouldn't mind if the initial ratings were a bit more unclear unless you put in more scouting effort or whatnot.  For example, for a given kid, maybe his base LP rating that every coach can see is 60-90.  If you scout his state w/FSS, maybe it narrows to 63-73.  If you do some evals, maybe you eventually determine it's actually 67 (after 1st eval, maybe you see it's 63-70, 2nd eval 64-68, 3rd eval hones in to 67).  Something along this line that makes it a bit harder right off the bat and with minimal FSS spending to determine who to go after.  Right now it's probably a bit too diagnose kids ratings and project where they'll end up.  Also, perhaps more diamonds in the rough will be available under this system.

I also think it would be good to make recruiting of the 4* and 5* kids more national vs. regional like all of recruiting seems to be.

I like both of these thoughts.

i like the national recruiting idea obviously. not sure about the unclear initial ratings. it makes sense, from a realistic standpoint, and i am intruiged by the possibility. but i am not sure 60-90 is not overkill. i really would not want to look at a big and go, well, hes between 30 and 60 ath, 50 and 80 reb, 40 and 70 def... i mean well, hes either god awful, and should be killed on the spot out of pity, or else, hes amazing. but i have no idea which... and it could be anything in between. maybe like, 70-80 ath, 80-90 reb, etc... i could go for that! :)

Agree completely.  I was thumbs-upping the original thought rather than the specific range.  A range of 10 points or so is probably the sweet spot, or close to it.

Then again... I guess we'd all just figure it as the middle of the range and nothing would be different in recruiting.  Once the player showed up we'd be disappointed or elated or neutral, but it wouldn't affect recruiting in any practical way.

I think I just talked myself out of supporting this idea, even though it *sounds* right.

A note: any suggestion to increase the number of battles really should address what happens to the losers.  As it stands now, the loser is just plain BONED.  It's too large a price to pay.

A few thoughts:

1) A stronger favorite school(s) preference (even down to d3) where every team has say a minimum of 2 players who likes the school (scaled to prestige/division of school) and that preference is equal to an entry considering level. The better the school, the more kids like them, maybe up to 5 or 6 for the A+ prestige schools or schools just winning the PT or NT. Many of the players would have 2 or 3 favorite schools at the start. This would set up a potential battle right from the start but also give some of the lower schools a small pool of players whom they may want to focus on.

2) A small (very small) random factor for busts/diamonds in the rough. Say, 2% of recruits each year are either busts (who despite everything, regress in talent or have career nagging injuries) or diamonds in the rough how explode in talent well beyond the FSS and evals (or at least explode in W/E so maybe some of the low WE guys figure it out in college and really start improving to reach max when otherwise wouldn't). There would need to be a limiter though so that no team gets hit with more than 1 bust every 4 years, otherwise it could really hurt some programs unfairly. I think I like the exploding W/E thing the best though. Have a few guys each year who have sub 30 W/E but high potentials, all of the sudden start making massive gains in W/E. This would really help the low prestige schools at all levels as those are the ones that take the most risks on low w/e guys.

3) A limited number of free FSS for each level given during the season. Somewhat of a compromise on the season long recruiting angle. As a starter, you'd need to have paid for a future season to limit scouting across IDs. Then, at D3 you'd get your home state + 1 more state. D2 home state + 3 states. D1 home state + 5 states. You get this FSS information during the season so you can scout better during the season. Then, perhaps make a small increase in FSS costs since some are already given. This would also help the D3 teams by saving some money and giving the free extra state helps reduce the penalty for having a low number of recruits in your home state.

4) As an off the wall idea, perhaps a "Choose your own adventure" dialogue options for home and campus visits. You are given say, 4 tactics for the conversation during these visits. Each recruit would respond somewhat differently to the 4 tactics, with some liking any of the 4, some loving 1, and some hating 1. Depending on the response, the value of the visit would be scaled from negative to very positive. This would interject some more randomness into recruiting and somewhat simulate the real world coach convinced me with his speech to not play for UC but come play for historically bad School X and be the guy who turned it around.

5) Relatedly, some kids (maybe 5-10%) would have a strong preference for being at turnaround schools while others want to be at historically great schools. This preference would be easily discoverable but would be rock solid. Thus, only certain kinds of schools would appeal to these kids. This would hopefully spur more battles between these schools as it narrows the playing field a bit.

Basically, the hope is that these moves would all make it a little easier for lower prestige teams to compete more quickly (especially at D1) and also, to increase battles in recruiting and increase the fun of recruiting

"Then again... I guess we'd all just figure it as the middle of the range and nothing would be different in recruiting.  Once the player showed up we'd be disappointed or elated or neutral, but it wouldn't affect recruiting in any practical way."

I don't think the point of more opaque values is that would change recruiting choices all that much, but it would introduce more variability into the quality of teams, which is more realistic.

I totally agree that if the current system is kept, the first cycle shoudl be expanded.

I think a "max effort per cycle" idea does not really work in the current system because the cycles are so short.  It would unduly benefit the people who can be at their computer every cycle.  If you made recruiting a season-long event with cycles of, lets say, 48 hours, then I love the idea.

Recruits should be allocated differently and way more realistically.    And it shouldn't be tied to how many D1 schools there are in a particular state.  It's ridiculous that western Minnesota is 1000% more likely to have a high-quality D1 recruit than an eastern North Dakota town 10 miles away.  Also, more players should probably be centered around cities.  There should probably be fewer good international recruits.

There should also probably be more transferring if people pull shenanigans like starting a promised-guy all year and then benching him in the NCAAs.  Basically, look at where the loopholes are and fix them.

Posted by taniajane on 6/27/2012 9:28:00 AM (view original):
well I like the idea of recruiting During the season.....even if perhaps only after league play started. it would keep interest in the recruiting phase longer and more simulate real life.

I do not

Something must be done about the types of players who are being generated. Mid-majors cannot compete given the current setup. Check out this research done by ekswimmer in Naismith, thanks to the new update that shows old brackets... 

Going back 10 years, there are 6 non-BCS Sweet 16 appearances. (G Wash, BYU twice, St Joes, Eastern Michigan twice) and 0 Elite 8s. Have to go back to Season 48 to find the last non-BCS Elite 8. Of course the seniors in Season 48 were the last class of players who were generated under the old system before the changes made to recruiting generation, so not a single coach in Naismith has been able to overcome the new recruiting system to build a nationally competitive program. 

Fix recruit generation. Make it possible for mid-major teams to build a program, maybe with players who aren't initially as good as some of the top players but with super potential that can become star players by their junior/senior seasons. 

1. no radical change - big risk of unintended consequences

2.  expand the first cycle or allow pre-loading of moves

3.  show us the NEXT season of recruits during the current season - especially in some locations this really matters and would enrich the experience.  Now, what i would LOVE would be if the next season recruits had fuzzy information.  No FSS.  Maybe round the ratings to the nearest 5 or 10.....There looks like there is a good local PG next season....ah, fooey, we learn next season that 70 in passing was a 65 rounded up and his potential there is low....

4.  find some ways to make national recruiting more feasible - many ideas out there

5.  more texture and quirks to recruits (which could help item 4) - make favorite schools matter, make close/far from home matter - have kids who like hot weather, cold weather, strong academics, party schools, some kids who care a ton about starts and minutes, other kids for whom it has little effect, some kids who have great great IQ - like B as freshmen - a handful of those super hoop IQ kids are also highly rated recruits.......texture!

6. improve slightly the quality of recruits in the 50-200 range

not that you need me but if recruiting is completely overhauled then i'm out.  i've rolled with the changes since season 1 in all of the worlds but to "relearn" a whole new system and lose all of the information i have accumulated over the years would put me out the door.  tweaks, improvements, changes etc. i will deal with but a whole new game is not why i've stuck around.

just my two cents.

How would season-long recruiting work with job changes/new coaches?  that's an idea that seems to create more problems than it solves.  Wouldn't a new coach at say, Kentucky, be at a massive disadvantage against existing coaches at Ohio St, Indiana, Louisville, Vandy, etc, since they'd have been presumably recruiting all through the prior year? 

I like the current system, and think it should be tweaked at most -- seems a lot of problems are caused by recruit generation.  I like the idea of creating a few preference templates for recruits that mirror real life -- i.e., Player A only wants to go where he can start right away, so start/minutes promises are more important to him; Player B cares most about his school sending players to the NBA; Player C's parents are pushing him to get a good education (so you get a bonus for high team GPA).  I came up with these off the top of my head -- seems there are any number of "templates" you could use, as well as the current default.