This is going to be a weird post and I'm not 100% sure what I'm saying in it is correct. And I'm not even sure it belongs here. So feel free to tell me I'm full of it. And I'm not arguing that the status quo is good. It's not. Entire conferences full of Sim AI is a disaster. But I've got a feeling that were there to be a "resurrection" it would introduce some problems in the game that are somewhat hidden.
A lot has changed about the game since the D3 worlds were full:
- Potential and FSS were introduced to the game. It's almost essential to use FSS. At the same time, it's very difficult at D3 to use FSS on 1/3 of the country and typically it is a lot less than that. If you have one open spot and are in a big state, you might only be able to scout your state. (And not be able to sign those in the far corners of the state after paying for FSS.)
- You need high potential recruits to succeed. And not many high potential recruits want to play D3. It is not unusual to scout a smaller state and find zero quality D3 prospects in it.
- The old "forum fact" about avoiding battles at D3 because there is always a comparable recruit available is now false. Even if there is another high potential recruit available that is similar to the one you want, there is an excellent chance you haven't scouted the state so you don't know he exists.
- Pulldowns are much more common now. A coach that relies only on dropdowns is going to miss out on a good number of recruiting targets that are taken away by other schools. And to pulldown at D3 you really need to focus on local recruits because it is simply way too expensive to go beyond local.
- After successfully pulling down a player, you not only risk losing him to another D3 school (always a possiblity) but because of the lack of high potential players may also lose the recruit to a low prestige human D2 school which almost never used to happen.
- If you do choose the "safe" approach with dropdowns you now may find that in the second round of Sim AI recruiting you lose the player to a D2 school.
All those bullet points are really a long way of saying that recruiting is more expensive than ever, there are less good recruits worth having, and if you want somebody you better be prepared to battle.
Right now D3 is barren but in a full world I can see the $3,000 per open scholarship getting spent really, really fast. And a number of coaches striking out when they get into battles over the really good recruits and lose out. And not having any money over to target anybody else.
My current D3 school is in Maine. I can't compete with the human coached schools in New York or Pennsylvania so right now I recruit within 150 miles + flyover those states and recruit in states where there aren't really any human coaches. I've had ok success in Maine with the empty world but for a while now I've thought that if my world was full of humans, I'd probably be in a lot of trouble being isolated in Maine.
My last D3 school was in Pennsylvania and had very good prestige and I was surprised at the number of recruits I targeted that I had to fight over by schools that were farther away and had worse prestige. I won all those battles but it led me to conclude those coaches were battling me because there wasn't much else to settle for.
Like I said, I don't like the status quo at all. But I also have to say that I don't like the idea of the current recruiting setup matched with a world were all states are full of human coaches and competitive.
I guess what I'm getting at is that I think there are some problems with how recruiting works that aren't being exposed due to the lack of human coaches in a world. And it might be best to fix that.