1. Scouting is not fun.
2. Scouting prevents us to set up a list that will enable us to fill our schollies.
3. Recruiting at D2 has became, waiting until the second session. D2 caliber players penciled at D2 are uninteresting. I saw one in two seasons.
4. Ees and new jobs, at D1, is a huge problem. New D1 job is now a wasted rebuild season with the new owner showing up at the 2nd session.
5. Luck should play a lesser part in the signings.
6. Some preferences make no sense.

I don't know what can be done but it's getting late fast...

Here are some of my thoughts:

1) Scouting is not fun. I agree. A suggestion I saw was to eliminate Level 1 scouting. Just start at level 2. Problem solved.
2) Scouting prevents us to set up a list that will enable us to fill our schollies. See suggestion #1.
3. Recruiting at D2 has became, waiting until the second session. D2 caliber players penciled at D2 are uninteresting. I saw one in two seasons. Can't comment. Not at D2.
4. Ees and new jobs, at D1, is a huge problem. New D1 job is now a wasted rebuild season with the new owner showing up at the 2nd session. Agree. Many possible solutions, including, but not limited to, reduce value of APs, shorten early recruiting, lengthen late recruiting, increase # of APs given for an open scholarship in period 2, eliminate EEs, further limit EEs, announce EEs earlier, more players with late signing preferences, etc.
5) Luck should play a lesser part in the signings. Agree. At Very High to High, Very High should always win. At Very High-Very High, you want to have a dice roll, ok, fine.
6) Some preferences make no sense. Agree. Top recruits should want success, big conferences, etc. No #1 Overall recruit wants a rebuild.

1) I think scouting is lots of fun. The people who find it more time consuming, I suspect, are either trying to do it all at once - which is not the way to do it - or having a hard time getting efficiency worked out. For those who want to eliminate level 1, keep in mind your own hosted camp gets you straight to level 2.
2) I have no idea what this means. You can flag recruits, and they show up on recruiting home. That's my target list, color-coded to help keep priorities straight.
3) I have no idea what this means. Are you saying D2 projected players aren't good enough, and you need to wait for second session for D1 "pull-downs"? Fine. Just like before. You still recruit in the first session, as you jockey for position. This goes into how you are prioritizing.
4) New jobs is a problem. EEs are dealt with through adapting your recruiting strategies. It would be realistic and advisable, I think, to code more players to have the late preference, create some "breakout" jucos specifically for the second session as clean slates for everyone, and lengthen 2nd session recruiting by a day with 1-2 signing-free cycles to start.
5) I think people are confusing effort credit and consideration signing odds. If you get to only 35% effort credit in a 2-way battle, you aren't getting past moderate. The threshold is something over 35%, probably around 40-42% I suspect. Then you're high, and your chances for signing are a lot less (probably 10-30%) than your effort credit would indicate. In beta, there was big discussion over eliminating the denomination between high and very high. This was ultimately rejected, because you still have that window of effort credit within the signing threshold, and then you'd have absolutely no idea where you were.
6) I agree some preferences are wonky and could be much more intelligent. It is pretty absurd when half the top 6 players in a world "want rebuild", as in Naismith. The vast majority of top 100 players should want success, want playing time, and want a strong conference, and most of them should be waiting to see how EEs shake out, so they should be coded late. This is my only real critique of 3.0.

I am with you on most of this Shoe. Maybe a suggestion for scouting....when I host a camp as D1 A+ Maryland, I get a ton of crappy unranked D1 players to show up. Can we get it so that only players that a A+ D1 school would sign (top 100 at their position maybe?) come to their camp?

Same thing I expect with a D level D1 school, should not be drawing a lot of top 50 overall players.

A prestige D2 school should draw a lot of unranked D1 guys, etc.

1. The problem isn't scouting itself. Here I tend to agree with admin. The problem is veteran coaches adjusting to the new game. Scouting now plays a bit of a gatekeeper function in limiting the field of who you can find to recruit. Everyone is having difficulty adjusting to this.
2. Again, scouting isn't the reason you cannot fill open scholarships. This is the same problem as #1. The game is now designed that your recruiting budget is playing a role in limiting who you can find. Getting efficient with it, and preserving some scouting budget for later on, is a major adjustment.
3. The game at D2 does seem to be a problem. The assignment of recruits (D1 - D3) is not well spread. I'm not sure what developers intended, but it forces D2 coaches to wait at Spud's redlight to sign their actual targets in the majority of instances. Probable fix is to adjust the division assignments of recruits slightly and make all OVR ranked (and possibly top 100 position ranked) recruits unresponsive to D2 effort, then eliminate the redlight.
4. Wrong. A new D1 job *should* have a coach arriving at the beginning of period #2 and able to rescind a few scholarships and sign a few. EEs remain a problem, but there are some minor fixes (as #3 above) like taking D3 teams out of the running for any positional ranked recruits. That, and dramatically increasing the scale of AP effort values based upon division. That would help D1 schools come up with backup options in period #2. Currently, the battles with D2 or sim AI teams make it very difficult to move to backup options with sufficient AP.
5. Yeah...broken record alert...the threshold to get to "high" should be raised, at least when the top school has put in substantial effort, and the probability spread should be wider. I am fairly confident, but cannot be certain, that a team, that would otherwise have a 15% chance, would be bumped to "Moderate" and taken out of the RNG. However, that means that any team in the RNG has a fairly significant chance to win from "high". I could be wrong, but I think a VH - H spread is at worst 65-35...maybe 70-30. A VH-VH-H spread might be 40-40-20, but I think it could be 35-35-30 in most instances.
6. The weight of preferences is too strong. Cleaning them up would be nice too, but step 1 is to nerf most of them.

I'll go.

1. I sort of agree that it maybe isn't 'fun'. However, I do think there is a lot of strategy and paths to take to scouting which can separate the good coaches from the mediocre ones. I think the time consuming part is just the learning curve. Yes, it's definitely more time consuming than before but once you know how to do it, I don't think it really takes that long. you can get 85% of the way there by clicking just a few buttons in about 10 minutes if you know what you want to do.
2. Do you mean that you can't find enough guys that are any good? If so, I do think D3 budget is on the low side and would like to see a bit more there.
3. I haven't recruited at D2 so I can't really say what the quality of players look like but I do think D2 teams should be able to get unranked D1 guys pretty easily. And if you're going for those guys and have no battles, then yeah it's probably boring waiting until 2nd session.
4. Yup, agreed.
5. I think this one is very polarizing. I'm personally okay with it as long as it makes sense statistically speaking. A high shouldn't beat a VH 35% of the time, maybe more like 20%. I think maybe there is still some tweaking to do on signings but I do think it makes battling more interesting. For example, I was going after a guy recently and another school hopped on and was beating me. In the old system I would have backed off and moved on since he had some advantages like prestige and preferences. But I had a huge location advantage so I decided to stay with it. Ultimately I did get the guy. So I do think it's going to encourage coaches to stay in battles longer and go for players they might have gone for due to the chance they could get them. I also think this is going to hurt more at D3 since you may have fewer backup options due to the small recruiting budget.
6. I'd also like to see some preferences tweaked. Particularly play style. But I mentioned in another thread about the Team Success and it seems pretty hard to get Very Good for rebuild or success. So not sure what the threshold is here but I think it could be tweaked perhaps.

Overall, I like it a lot so far during my first season at D1. It feels a lot more dynamic and is a lot of fun.

Rog : you basically are saying scouting is designed so that teams become weaker. I spent all my remaining budget in d1 phelan to find talent and my assistant, on 60 recruits came back with two bad b overall, rest c and d players. My first list... Either recruited or a sure loss if i decide to battle. There is either something not working out with scouting, a lack of talent or it's a way to weaken teams at d1.

Ancedotal, but I've had the same experience in Beta and in Rupp zorzii. Sending out assistant really hasn't found any (many?) good D1 recruits, but LOADS of bad ones. I've reverted to camp, top100 and FSS'ing states like before.

Posted by rogelio on 10/10/2016 11:14:00 AM (view original):

1. The problem isn't scouting itself. Here I tend to agree with admin. The problem is veteran coaches adjusting to the new game. Scouting now plays a bit of a gatekeeper function in limiting the field of who you can find to recruit. Everyone is having difficulty adjusting to this.
2. Again, scouting isn't the reason you cannot fill open scholarships. This is the same problem as #1. The game is now designed that your recruiting budget is playing a role in limiting who you can find. Getting efficient with it, and preserving some scouting budget for later on, is a major adjustment.
3. The game at D2 does seem to be a problem. The assignment of recruits (D1 - D3) is not well spread. I'm not sure what developers intended, but it forces D2 coaches to wait at Spud's redlight to sign their actual targets in the majority of instances. Probable fix is to adjust the division assignments of recruits slightly and make all OVR ranked (and possibly top 100 position ranked) recruits unresponsive to D2 effort, then eliminate the redlight.
4. Wrong. A new D1 job *should* have a coach arriving at the beginning of period #2 and able to rescind a few scholarships and sign a few. EEs remain a problem, but there are some minor fixes (as #3 above) like taking D3 teams out of the running for any positional ranked recruits. That, and dramatically increasing the scale of AP effort values based upon division. That would help D1 schools come up with backup options in period #2. Currently, the battles with D2 or sim AI teams make it very difficult to move to backup options with sufficient AP.
5. Yeah...broken record alert...the threshold to get to "high" should be raised, at least when the top school has put in substantial effort, and the probability spread should be wider. I am fairly confident, but cannot be certain, that a team, that would otherwise have a 15% chance, would be bumped to "Moderate" and taken out of the RNG. However, that means that any team in the RNG has a fairly significant chance to win from "high". I could be wrong, but I think a VH - H spread is at worst 65-35...maybe 70-30. A VH-VH-H spread might be 40-40-20, but I think it could be 35-35-30 in most instances.
6. The weight of preferences is too strong. Cleaning them up would be nice too, but step 1 is to nerf most of them.

Re #5: I'm not sure exactly what you're saying here, because there seems to be widespread confusion between percentage of recruiting credit and percentage of signing chances. But seble has confirmed that having 35% of recruiting credit (in a two-team battle) bumps you to moderate and takes you out of the RNG. He has not given an exact number that you need to hit to get into the RNG, but I suspect it's roughly 40%.

Re: #1 and #2, I agree.

Re: #4 and #6, I agree that there's a balance problem, but I'm not sure whether we need to nerf preferences and APs or whether increasing the value of prestige would solve the problem.

Posted by zorzii on 10/10/2016 12:49:00 PM (view original):
Rog : you basically are saying scouting is designed so that teams become weaker. I spent all my remaining budget in d1 phelan to find talent and my assistant, on 60 recruits came back with two bad b overall, rest c and d players. My first list... Either recruited or a sure loss if i decide to battle. There is either something not working out with scouting, a lack of talent or it's a way to weaken teams at d1.

I think what he is saying is that the game has changed and some have adapted more easily than others. You can't see detailed and accurate assessments of every recruit in the world from the get-go anymore, you have to find them. That's the game now. The amount of recruits hasn't changed, the quality of recruits hasn't changed.

I've been the coach at Arcadia in Smith World literally since day one (seasons 1 to present -- 90 seasons), and recruits with "Wants Long-time Coach" preference are all listed as Very Bad.

I know in the Beta world, everyone initially had "Very Bad" because it was a new world..... but I assume the upgrade to 3.0 wouldn't "reset the counter", so to speak.

I may be missing something when it comes to preferences. I have one recruit who like my fullcourt press defense (VERY GOOD), but in High School he ran a Zone.

Does that just means he wants to play the Press even though he's never played it before?

Posted by skinndogg on 10/10/2016 1:25:00 PM (view original):
I may be missing something when it comes to preferences. I have one recruit who like my fullcourt press defense (VERY GOOD), but in High School he ran a Zone.

Does that just means he wants to play the Press even though he's never played it before?

Yup. Check out the dev chat. They answered this question.

Posted by tarvolon on 10/10/2016 12:56:00 PM (view original):

Posted by rogelio on 10/10/2016 11:14:00 AM (view original):

1. The problem isn't scouting itself. Here I tend to agree with admin. The problem is veteran coaches adjusting to the new game. Scouting now plays a bit of a gatekeeper function in limiting the field of who you can find to recruit. Everyone is having difficulty adjusting to this.
2. Again, scouting isn't the reason you cannot fill open scholarships. This is the same problem as #1. The game is now designed that your recruiting budget is playing a role in limiting who you can find. Getting efficient with it, and preserving some scouting budget for later on, is a major adjustment.
3. The game at D2 does seem to be a problem. The assignment of recruits (D1 - D3) is not well spread. I'm not sure what developers intended, but it forces D2 coaches to wait at Spud's redlight to sign their actual targets in the majority of instances. Probable fix is to adjust the division assignments of recruits slightly and make all OVR ranked (and possibly top 100 position ranked) recruits unresponsive to D2 effort, then eliminate the redlight.
4. Wrong. A new D1 job *should* have a coach arriving at the beginning of period #2 and able to rescind a few scholarships and sign a few. EEs remain a problem, but there are some minor fixes (as #3 above) like taking D3 teams out of the running for any positional ranked recruits. That, and dramatically increasing the scale of AP effort values based upon division. That would help D1 schools come up with backup options in period #2. Currently, the battles with D2 or sim AI teams make it very difficult to move to backup options with sufficient AP.
5. Yeah...broken record alert...the threshold to get to "high" should be raised, at least when the top school has put in substantial effort, and the probability spread should be wider. I am fairly confident, but cannot be certain, that a team, that would otherwise have a 15% chance, would be bumped to "Moderate" and taken out of the RNG. However, that means that any team in the RNG has a fairly significant chance to win from "high". I could be wrong, but I think a VH - H spread is at worst 65-35...maybe 70-30. A VH-VH-H spread might be 40-40-20, but I think it could be 35-35-30 in most instances.
6. The weight of preferences is too strong. Cleaning them up would be nice too, but step 1 is to nerf most of them.

Re #5: I'm not sure exactly what you're saying here, because there seems to be widespread confusion between percentage of recruiting credit and percentage of signing chances. But seble has confirmed that having 35% of recruiting credit (in a two-team battle) bumps you to moderate and takes you out of the RNG. He has not given an exact number that you need to hit to get into the RNG, but I suspect it's roughly 40%.

Re: #1 and #2, I agree.

Re: #4 and #6, I agree that there's a balance problem, but I'm not sure whether we need to nerf preferences and APs or whether increasing the value of prestige would solve the problem.

Thanks, tarv. That bolded sentence is interesting. I think we agree on everything (the fixes for 4 & 6 could simply be adjustments to scale it by division/prestige or lower the value of AP & preferences on the whole...were I a developer...I would be looking at all 3).

My thought in #5 is simply that the threshold you point out may be too low. If the threshold is, in fact, at 40% of the effort of the leader to be in the RNG, then that could be bumped to 50% as a partial fix. My concern is that I have the sense that the spread of probabilities within the final RNG is far too narrow. My guess is that the team just barely getting in at 40% effort will have a 1/3 chance of winning.

Even if the initial threshold is at 50% effort to be in the RNG, while it makes some sense to put a straight line on it and give it a 2-to-1 probability within the RNG, the reality is that it remains a very significant chance! The numbers I saw discussed in the Beta never sounded any worse than a 65/35 in a 2 horse race. However much sense that may make, I think the odds in that RNG need to be skewed a bit more to the higher effort team.

However, the same game-play result might be achievable by simply raising the threshold a few point (e.g. 40% up to 50% effort to even make the RNG) and scale the AP and other effort more by Division / prestige / conference prestige. I can imagine either working.

It's not 40% of the effort leader, it's 40% of the effort credit (roughly...we suspect...). So if there is, for example, 1000 points of effort credit accumulated by 2 teams in a battle for a player, team B has 400, team A has 600. Team B is likely right on the cusp of having enough to get in the hunt at high consideration. But while they have 40% of the effort credit, their signing odds are not at 40%. At the low end of high, probably under 20, maybe closer to 10%. Because it's weighted to favor the leader already.