Academic vs pro ball preference, and a “pipeline” preference benefitting a coach who consistently recruits from a state are at the top of my list of specific ways to improve the recruiting game. I am opposed to any effort putting the emphasis back on “bidding” for recruits, or tilting the balance in that direction.

Posted by mbriese on 5/16/2018 4:44:00 PM (view original):
No, I seriously doubt anyone spreads resources out equally over 6 players, but having the same amount of money for 6 scholarships vs. someone that has 1 scholarship drastically favors the guy with only 1 opening. Any argument to the contrary is silly nonsense. As for the "structure your classes better", the argument could be made that having 1 class with 6 scholarships makes it possible to have another class with 1 scholarship, which in your system would be a huge deal!

It lowers the importance of preferences by raising the importance of $$$. Removing caps would make it so that someone with more money (or, in your proposed system, less scholarships) can outbid a player I have an immense preference advantage on just by throwing more HVs and CVs at a recruit. (This is where someone should jump in and say something about the game needing to be more "realistic", as if real life coaches convince players to sign by visiting their houses 40 times and getting them to visit the campus a dozen times.)

As for more choices and decisions, I obviously agree, hence my cluster of suggestions (and the one stolen from shoe) that don't involve an imbalance of power for teams that have more or less scholarships available like there was in 2.0.

At least at D1 - most teams intentionally take walkons to roll over recruiting cash. So they're not trying to fill all their scholarships anyway.

But yes, I get your point. Having to fill 6 scholarships and battling for all 6 players would be difficult. But with a cap or not, a team with 6 scholarships has an advantage over a team with 1 or 2. The team with 6 scholarships has enough money to get into 3 dice rolls via max out but the team with 1 scholarship only has enough money for 1 dice roll.

So why do we have a system that supports loading up on super classes and manipulating using walkons for free resources? How is that better than what I'm proposing?

Oh! And by removing the per scholarship basis for allocating funds, you solve the EE thing.

Posted by shoe3 on 5/16/2018 4:50:00 PM (view original):
Academic vs pro ball preference, and a “pipeline” preference benefitting a coach who consistently recruits from a state are at the top of my list of specific ways to improve the recruiting game. I am opposed to any effort putting the emphasis back on “bidding” for recruits, or tilting the balance in that direction.

Definite +1 for the pipeline preference.

Posted by Benis on 5/16/2018 4:52:00 PM (view original):

Posted by mbriese on 5/16/2018 4:44:00 PM (view original):
No, I seriously doubt anyone spreads resources out equally over 6 players, but having the same amount of money for 6 scholarships vs. someone that has 1 scholarship drastically favors the guy with only 1 opening. Any argument to the contrary is silly nonsense. As for the "structure your classes better", the argument could be made that having 1 class with 6 scholarships makes it possible to have another class with 1 scholarship, which in your system would be a huge deal!

It lowers the importance of preferences by raising the importance of $$$. Removing caps would make it so that someone with more money (or, in your proposed system, less scholarships) can outbid a player I have an immense preference advantage on just by throwing more HVs and CVs at a recruit. (This is where someone should jump in and say something about the game needing to be more "realistic", as if real life coaches convince players to sign by visiting their houses 40 times and getting them to visit the campus a dozen times.)

As for more choices and decisions, I obviously agree, hence my cluster of suggestions (and the one stolen from shoe) that don't involve an imbalance of power for teams that have more or less scholarships available like there was in 2.0.

At least at D1 - most teams intentionally take walkons to roll over recruiting cash. So they're not trying to fill all their scholarships anyway.

But yes, I get your point. Having to fill 6 scholarships and battling for all 6 players would be difficult. But with a cap or not, a team with 6 scholarships has an advantage over a team with 1 or 2. The team with 6 scholarships has enough money to get into 3 dice rolls via max out but the team with 1 scholarship only has enough money for 1 dice roll.

So why do we have a system that supports loading up on super classes and manipulating using walkons for free resources? How is that better than what I'm proposing?

Oh! And by removing the per scholarship basis for allocating funds, you solve the EE thing.

What about 75% of budget coming from base and rest from openings? Exactly like scouting budget is set up right now.

I agree that schools with more scholarships have an unfair advantage right now, as they can budget around giving 1 player 80 APs per session and/or choose to go all in on more players, but flipping to the other end of the spectrum only creates a new problem.

I kind of want to pull at the "expanded process" thread - what if campus visits coincided with home games on your conference schedule, and you had to schedule visits with a player? It'd be easier to manage if recruiting started at the beginning of the season, but it'd be interesting to have to schedule a campus visit like that and have a players scheduled slots keep getting claimed as the season goes on.

At that point, there could be preferences determined by what he sees during the game on his campus visit - did your C get a lot of the distribution? Did you give a lot of minutes to underclassmen? Did you win a game in which you were the underdog? All of this could be aggregated into a grade for your visit, which provides an added layer to preferences. Just spitballing, but I'd love to see that play out.

Posted by mbriese on 5/16/2018 5:15:00 PM (view original):
I agree that schools with more scholarships have an unfair advantage right now, as they can budget around giving 1 player 80 APs per session and/or choose to go all in on more players, but flipping to the other end of the spectrum only creates a new problem.

I kind of want to pull at the "expanded process" thread - what if campus visits coincided with home games on your conference schedule, and you had to schedule visits with a player? It'd be easier to manage if recruiting started at the beginning of the season, but it'd be interesting to have to schedule a campus visit like that and have a players scheduled slots keep getting claimed as the season goes on.

At that point, there could be preferences determined by what he sees during the game on his campus visit - did your C get a lot of the distribution? Did you give a lot of minutes to underclassmen? Did you win a game in which you were the underdog? All of this could be aggregated into a grade for your visit, which provides an added layer to preferences. Just spitballing, but I'd love to see that play out.

I think the following could help narrow the gap:

1. Multi-year promises (similar to GD). You can promise a guy which seasons he will start or play X minutes (fr-so-jr-sr). Player will hold you to promises, as long as you were the coach who recruited him. This gives a C+ prestige team more of a fighting chance against a A+ team because that C+ team might be able to promise that a guy will be a four-year starter, while the A+ might be able to only offer minutes for fr-soph and starts for jr-sr. This will also help D2s and D3s prevent D1s from targeting their recruits. And the very best recruits -- guys who are likely EEs -- will expect to be 4 year starters.

2. Players getting exhausted by over-recruiting. Right now, if you have a player in your backyard (less than 200 miles), you can unlock everything, put all 20 HVs and 1 CV into a single cycle (roughly $5500), see what happens and then make a decision about whether to continue investing APs. In real life, if you did that, the player would likely get so sick of you that they would throw you out of the house. In 2.0, you had players reject home visits, where you still got charged for the amount of the visit, but gained no credit. Have a recruit's tolerance for your visits in a single cycle be tied to preferences (the more you match up with preferences, the more willing the recruit is to hear from you multiple times within a single cycle). But at some point, the recruit closes the door and won't let you in that cycle, but you are still charged for the visit.

3. Cutting players that you recruited should result in more of a reputation hit. Right now, the only real penalty for cutting a recruited player is the lack of additional resources, which isn't a huge deterrent. For me, I get a recruit to VH and then cut the current player, so I don't make a move until I've already used up the resources I had. Lets say I have a freshman who didn't develop the way I liked -- the greens turned blue pretty early on, so he didn't have the potential I hoped for. All I need to do is find a new recruit with good potential and try again; there is no downside for me. But if my reputation would take a hit, hurting my recruiting, I might choose to keep the first player around.

Posted by snafu4u on 5/15/2018 1:56:00 PM (view original):
Chapel--looks like you didn't have anyone else pursuing him though. 40AP doesn't get you in the discussion if other teams are involved. A B- pumping 80AP per cycle could have bumped you down to moderate unless you had a crazy preference advantage.

I did actually have this particular prospect like both my offense and defense.

Posted by grimacedance on 5/15/2018 3:44:00 PM (view original):

Posted by snafu4u on 5/15/2018 1:56:00 PM (view original):
Chapel--looks like you didn't have anyone else pursuing him though. 40AP doesn't get you in the discussion if other teams are involved. A B- pumping 80AP per cycle could have bumped you down to moderate unless you had a crazy preference advantage.

But that is still a major difference than 2.0. In 2.0, only having one opening meant that you always had to worry about being outspent with someone dropping 30 HVs and 5 CVs in a cycle and running away with the player because you didn't have the $$$$$ to compete.

The introduction of APs + the limits on spending + the weights given to preferences mean that a team with one opening has a fair shot at landing a good player in a contested battle. As you point out, it's not a guarantee -- if a team wants to throw 80 AP at the player every single cycle, max out promises and max out visits, yeah, they'll probably knock you down -- but it's a much fairer fight.

Yes, and let's say that there is a team with 5 openings. Are they going to want to use 80 out of their 100 AP every cycle and hope that they beat me by enough to not lose on a coin flip. And I believe that a B- with 80AP is about equal to an A+ with 40, so the AP would be about even weight, and then I would have an advantage with the 20HV and 1 CV at the higher prestige. Plus I did have the perfect preference match.

The more I think about it, the more I am intrigued with the idea of recruits getting worn out by overrecruiting within a cycle. Here is how I propose it would work:

1. A recruit will determine how many home visits it will accept from you each cycle based on how preferences match up. For example, if Team A is VG, VG, G with the rest neutral and Team B is G, G, B with the rest neutral, the recruit will let Team A take more visits each cycle. Maybe Team A can get away with four visits each cycle, but Team B can only get away with two. Each team would be guaranteed a minimum of one visit per cycle, regardless of preference matches. You will not be told in advance how many visits they will accept.

2. If you go beyond the visits that the recruit will accept, they will turn you away at the door. You are still charged for the visit.

3. Each rejected visit causes a penalty because you are annoying the recruit, making them think less of your school. Lets say the recruit will allow you 3 visits per cycle, but you use 4. The actual value of the visits would be 2.7 instead of 3, because you took a 10% penalty for that fourth visit. A fifth visit drops your value down to 2.4. If you use 7 visits, it drops to 1.8, so you have just negated the positive value of that third visit.

4. The value of promises go up because getting in your promises early unlock more potential visits when a player has a "wants to play" preference.

5. This will reduce poaching/sniping/swooping in late because a team cannot drop 10 visits in one cycle unless they have insane preference matches.

6. You can remove caps on how many totals visits are used. Use as many visits as you want and see what happens. The only time you run into a true resources problem is where teams are evenly matched on preferences, but one team has six openings and ton more cash to spend on visits than the team with one opening does. But I don't think the goal should be to eradicate those advantages, but to create fewer situations where it matters. Under this model, if the 1 scholarship team is Team A and the 6 scholarship team is Team B, then Team B's $$$ advantage is reduced because Team A can get away with more unpenalized visits each cycle. If they both put in 4 visits per cycle, Team A gets credit for 4 visits, but Team B only gets credit for 1.6 visits.

I would rather see them cap AP points at 6 scholarships and remove scholarship dollars at 6 scholarships. If you have 1 of those seasons where you need to recruit 8 or 9 players the lack of scholarship dollars is a killer.

My preference is a cap on visits.I would prefer a expansion to the preference system. In my opinion the strategy of comparing preferences among teams concerned is a lot more strategy than the ability to throwing unlimited money at a player.

Those are some cool ideas Grimace, I like it.

I do think we need an improvement of preferences like many people have mentioned. The preference of a particular Offense & Defense is just random and boring. Or players want to play on a team with a strong defense... but are terrible at defense. Or wants perimeter.. but are terrible at per shooting.

I'd also replace fast tempo with high scoring - which is just the opposite of strong defense. Some other ideas - big school vs small school. Academics. Location. Getting to the NBA. I'm sure there are plenty more to think of.

I'd also love to have Coach Loyalty mean something for recruits and actually have a coaching profile that goes along with the team's prestige. You get dinged pretty hard when moving to take over a rebuild and I think your coach prestige/loyalty should follow you. It'd be like if Mark Few took over Rutgers - I'm sure he'd pull in quite a few recruits because of his reputation as a great coach.

But within your system proposed you could have all those things - coach, school and preferences- impact whether a kid wants you knocking on his door 7 days a week.

Posted by Benis on 5/18/2018 11:41:00 AM (view original):
Those are some cool ideas Grimace, I like it.

I do think we need an improvement of preferences like many people have mentioned. The preference of a particular Offense & Defense is just random and boring. Or players want to play on a team with a strong defense... but are terrible at defense. Or wants perimeter.. but are terrible at per shooting.

I'd also replace fast tempo with high scoring - which is just the opposite of strong defense. Some other ideas - big school vs small school. Academics. Location. Getting to the NBA. I'm sure there are plenty more to think of.

I'd also love to have Coach Loyalty mean something for recruits and actually have a coaching profile that goes along with the team's prestige. You get dinged pretty hard when moving to take over a rebuild and I think your coach prestige/loyalty should follow you. It'd be like if Mark Few took over Rutgers - I'm sure he'd pull in quite a few recruits because of his reputation as a great coach.

But within your system proposed you could have all those things - coach, school and preferences- impact whether a kid wants you knocking on his door 7 days a week.

As far as coach loyalty, I think the best way to do it is to revive/rethink reputation.

Coach reputation is a relic of the old days when you could offer a recruit illegal money to entice them, so it reflected how clean or dirty you were. Ever since they got rid of illegal cash, reputation is meaningless.

Reputation should be based on the success you have had at all jobs in that world, with more weight given to more recent jobs. A coach like only/viva would be an A+: a coach with many FFs and multiple titles. In Tark, I would be a B/B+. I have a lot of conference titles and NT appearances, but nothing past the Sweet Sixteen.

Some players would value coach loyalty more than reputation -- they want reassurance they will play for the same coach for 4 years. Others would value rep more highly -- they'd play for a mercenary if he could get them to the Final Four.

+1 for academics.

Why is anyone still talking about 2.0 ?

It seems like 10 years ago.