Posted by drichar138 on 6/2/2019 11:05:00 AM (view original):
I agree with what is stated above, but I think there is more to be said on preferences. They essentially determine the value of your recruiting efforts along with prestige. An important aspect of the game is being able to identify what preferences the school you are battling with have in their favor. There are some threads that give info on how to calculate preferences such as perimeter offense, paint offense, strong defense, long time coach, etc. You will want to find those and document them for reference, so you know exactly what you are up against in a battle.

i would post the preference thresholds, but i am away from home and on my phone right now. If nobody else posts it by the time I get home, I’ll post the ones I know.

It is good to know where your rivals are at with preferences, absolutely. The caveat is that having a better preference match is no guarantee the player will choose you. Your rival may prioritize the player higher, make more promises, extend more effort, etc, or may simply get lucky and beat you on a 30-70 shake. So you kind of set yourself up for disappointment if you spend too much time or put too high stock into it. I personally don’t take any players off my list because of a preference disadvantage. But I do think knowing where preferences are is a good way to decide *how to battle* for players you want. If it’s a good preference match, and you can determine you have an advantage over your rivals, spending a good bit of early effort and getting out in the lead can pay off. Likewise, if you don’t have a preference advantage, but you’re willing to make promises and spend resources anyway, you can catch a rival complacent, trying to skimp on effort, especially if no one steps up to battle, by keeping AP investment up, but offering a scholarship and doing visits later.

Ultimately, if it’s a player you want, and it’s not a particularly bad preference disadvantage, I say you should consider bidding what the player is worth to you, and let the chips fall where they fall.

thanks for all the good info! definitely interesting.

Posted by Benis on 6/1/2019 2:46:00 PM (view original):
I'm not sure recruit generation changed per se but there are some differences.

During beta I noticed that there were about the same total # of players generated but more were projected as D3 in Beta vs 2.0.

Also, players get to 100 ratings much more frequently now. This could be just due to a rounding thing but you will definitely see more 100s across all divisions.

i wonder if the 100 is related to folks optimizing their practice plans better? it sure feels like the rate of improvement on lows hasn't gone up (watching ~12 games on 1 team, so very limited sample, but it feels the same across the board). some folks used to 0 out ratings on a regular basis, but i got the impression that wasn't the norm before 3.0.

Posted by ggallagh on 6/1/2019 6:39:00 AM (view original):

Posted by gillispie1 on 5/31/2019 9:55:00 PM (view original):
an old friend offered to let me play around with his teams a bit to see if i had interest in one of my own. the team setup part is like riding a bike, been enjoying that a bit, but now its time to try recruiting and i don't know literally anything.

1) whats the deal with preferences? how much are they worth roughly, and like, what would one consider 'good' preferences and 'great' preferences on a player one would recruit? like im assuming a dude with a net 0 preference for you, that probably is considered bad and a reason not to recruit a player, and that folks are mostly recruiting dudes who have preferences. or maybe preferences are negligible and i should ignore that crap, at least for now?

2) whats the deal with AP, are they worth much - about how much?

3) scouting - is there a relatively accepted way to quickly go through scouting the local guys and stuff without spending a stupid amount of money? not looking to spend 10 hours optimizing my scouting money, but not looking to spend 10 minutes and only have 20% efficiency. i have maybe an hour or so i can spend on scouting, is that way too little to be effective?

4) is recruit generation unchanged from before? like meaning the amount of good players is the same as it was? this is high d1 question. i know its harder to find and get a lot of great guys, just from anecdotally hearing a lot of people say that and teams in general looking less perfect. but i don't know if that is due to the recruiting changes or also recruit gen changes (the ratings and potential players are generated with).

thanks!

re: preferences - can definitely sway a battle but does not mean players with poor match on preferences will not sign with a team. Poor preference match may mean that it will take a little longer/ little more effort to unlock a scholarship, home visits, promises, etc. Some have tried to get a handle on how much preferences are worth, but not sure anyone knows for sure since unlocking above actions also depends on your prestige and the recruits' lofty ideas of himself. If two recruits look equal in terms of projected ratings, then I would probably aim for the one with a good preference match over the poor preference match, but I tend to not pay too much attention to the preferences unless / until I am in a battle. Then it can make a difference to sway the signing odds. Perhaps others will chime in, IMO the preference for playing time seems to be the biggest preference, especially if minutes are promised before other actions since this can increase the effective of future actions. The offense / defense preference seems to be big. Not sure about the relative worth of the other actions

re: APs - these are like the old letters - they are used to generate interest from the recruit in your school. Relative worth also depends on your school & prestige compared to the recruit - eg. A D3 school recruiting a D3 recruit w/ good preference match might unlock scholarship with 20-40 APs but that same D3 school recruiting a D1 recruit w/ same good preference match might take 100-150 APs. There is no cap on how many total APs you send to a recruit (max 80 / recruiting cycle however). Once you unlock actions you can continue to put APs into the same player - some think 50-100 APs may equal 1 HV? This is up for debate and see what others say. You can also choose to redistribute APs to unlock other recruits as back-ups as recruiting progresses.

re: Scouting - The quickest way that I have found to scout is to do a local camp & scouting service for local states - A local camp scouts players by two levels, scouting service by one level so this will give you a smattering of players who are discovered to levels 1, 2 or 3; I then usually send assistant scouts out in batches of 25, under 500 miles, scout discovered players only and this will quickly move players up from levels 1, 2, 3, to levels 3 and 4 which is when you know potential (level 3 is kind of like old game where you have a general idea but may not know whether high-high, while level 4 gets you that info)

re: I can't really speak to recruit generation - more D2 / D3 experience for me

this is very interesting, thanks. the scouting technique will probably be a big help, manually going through those ratings deciding who to scout sounds pretty time consuming / awful.

considering credit (credit growing 1-2% per cycle just because, to deter poaching in the old game) is gone right?

“considering credit (credit growing 1-2% per cycle just because, to deter poaching in the old game) is gone right?”

Yes.

The only players for whom early vs late effort matters are players with a “wants to play” preference. Since promised minutes (not starts) affects the value of effort, early minutes promises are more valuable than late minutes promises. All promises do have stand alone value for all players, but getting that extra modifier in on effort for players who want to play can be big.

Posted by shoe3 on 6/2/2019 4:48:00 PM (view original):
“considering credit (credit growing 1-2% per cycle just because, to deter poaching in the old game) is gone right?”

Yes.

The only players for whom early vs late effort matters are players with a “wants to play” preference. Since promised minutes (not starts) affects the value of effort, early minutes promises are more valuable than late minutes promises. All promises do have stand alone value for all players, but getting that extra modifier in on effort for players who want to play can be big.

awesome, thanks. i assume you can't reduce promises once they are made, except to pull the whole scholarship and totally bail?

also, is the listing in order, for teams that are at the same level? i.e. are two very highs listed in order or is it random?

Posted by gillispie1 on 6/2/2019 4:17:00 PM (view original):

Posted by Benis on 6/1/2019 2:46:00 PM (view original):
I'm not sure recruit generation changed per se but there are some differences.

During beta I noticed that there were about the same total # of players generated but more were projected as D3 in Beta vs 2.0.

Also, players get to 100 ratings much more frequently now. This could be just due to a rounding thing but you will definitely see more 100s across all divisions.

i wonder if the 100 is related to folks optimizing their practice plans better? it sure feels like the rate of improvement on lows hasn't gone up (watching ~12 games on 1 team, so very limited sample, but it feels the same across the board). some folks used to 0 out ratings on a regular basis, but i got the impression that wasn't the norm before 3.0.

Nah I don't think so. Beta was running concurrently with 2.0 and it was the same people doing both. I can't remember the exact number but there would be like 4 players with 100 Reb in the 2.0 world and then >25 in the beta world. Definitely something in the code changed.

Posted by gillispie1 on 6/2/2019 5:06:00 PM (view original):
also, is the listing in order, for teams that are at the same level? i.e. are two very highs listed in order or is it random?

Alphabetical. No way to tell who is “in the lead” between teams at the same considering level.

thanks! one more question - it is pretty different to me not easily being able to see what other teams are doing, at least at a macro level. how much do folks spend time like, searching the local players to see who is considering who, and kind of trying to judge your opponent's strategy for the battle(s) in question based on that data? is that sort of expected in the top tier of recruiting?

You’ll get widely varying answers on that. Personally, I don’t do it, outside of some Top 100 scans, looking for guys that may not be getting battled for. There just isn’t a lot of value-per-click there for me to run through individual recruits off recruit pool searches. I know at least one guy who tries to FSS every state in the nation so he can see what everyone is doing. Not my bag.

Posted by shoe3 on 6/2/2019 6:50:00 PM (view original):
You’ll get widely varying answers on that. Personally, I don’t do it, outside of some Top 100 scans, looking for guys that may not be getting battled for. There just isn’t a lot of value-per-click there for me to run through individual recruits off recruit pool searches. I know at least one guy who tries to FSS every state in the nation so he can see what everyone is doing. Not my bag.

ah, i didn't even realize you had to FSS guys (or otherwise scout to level 1) to see them. good to know.

Posted by gillispie1 on 6/2/2019 5:56:00 PM (view original):
thanks! one more question - it is pretty different to me not easily being able to see what other teams are doing, at least at a macro level. how much do folks spend time like, searching the local players to see who is considering who, and kind of trying to judge your opponent's strategy for the battle(s) in question based on that data? is that sort of expected in the top tier of recruiting?

I think it's probably easiest to do that at high D1 since you can always see the top 100 recruits and look to see who they are considering.

I definitely do try to look and understand who else is in battles to see who many be vulnerable to a poaching. But with the 20 HV cap, it might be a little less important cause all the top guys usually have a couple teams who have gone all in.

Posted by Benis on 6/2/2019 9:12:00 PM (view original):

Posted by gillispie1 on 6/2/2019 5:56:00 PM (view original):
thanks! one more question - it is pretty different to me not easily being able to see what other teams are doing, at least at a macro level. how much do folks spend time like, searching the local players to see who is considering who, and kind of trying to judge your opponent's strategy for the battle(s) in question based on that data? is that sort of expected in the top tier of recruiting?

I think it's probably easiest to do that at high D1 since you can always see the top 100 recruits and look to see who they are considering.

I definitely do try to look and understand who else is in battles to see who many be vulnerable to a poaching. But with the 20 HV cap, it might be a little less important cause all the top guys usually have a couple teams who have gone all in.

it really sounds like a pretty crazy enterprise, trying to build a team when you don't know who you are gonna get. but i actually kind of like the idea of it, now that i am 2 years removed from playing or whatever and the cynicism i build by playing too much has mostly washed away. its more realistic and its harder, although im guessing some folks get really frustrated when they have a cycle where they lose all 3 coin flips (or whatever a bad cycle is). i definitely see less excellence in the top d1 teams - which was always a major problem. its never liked how there were 15 teams 10 deep with 5 stars. there was always room to differentiate yourself, but it just wasn't enough, IMO.

definitely have a different perspective now, with the benefit of some time away. overall, sounds like the new recruiting system could be decently better? is that a majority opinion of those who remained?

Frankly, between the RNG-based statistical decisions recruits make at signing and the caps on spending on individual recruits, there is somewhat less need for deep analytical decision-making prior to entering a battle. Unless there is a massive preferences mismatch, and/or a massive prestige mismatch, if you max out your effort you usually at least get some numbers on that RNG. And you'll still have resources left to go after your other targets. Obviously you want to prioritize targets, but most people prioritize more heavily on which recruits they like the most and less on who they will have the biggest edge on than they used to. In the non-deterministic system, small differences are small, not crucial.