Hi,
I just returned to GD after about 9 years away. I really enjoyed it when I was playing back then but eventually gave it up because of too many other demands on my time.
Now that I have a bit more time available, I thought I'd come back and try my hand at it again. I've been a bit surprised - even shocked - by what I see and I want to share some observations:
1. GD is a Ghost Town
I'm playing D3 in Bryant and there are only 26 human coaches among 228 teams. Back in the day I recall so many actual humans playing that GD opened up new worlds to accommodate them.
Looking at GUESS Reports I see the same situation across the other divisions and worlds. It really deprives GD of any competitiveness, and since most of the conferences have 1 human coach at most there's no trash talk and no opportunity to develop rivalries.
And recruiting against sims is harder than ever, and almost all the coaches are sims.
I wonder if the management of WIS even values this business. They should have considered combining worlds in order to reduce the ghost town aspect.
2. The "Updates" Have Not Improved the Site
I think there have been two major site upgrades since I last played. Some things are better but the GD learning curve is steeper than ever. The challenge of learning the game is of course part of the fun but the new game planning is obtuse and opaque even at D3 where it's dumbed down. If there was a decent help site that explained everything maybe that would be OK but you have to search high and low for bits of information and some of the most basic information is only available from other coaches in the forum. For instance I couldn't find information about when recruiting cycles take place and only after a time-consuming search of the forums I found the answer - plus the information that there are no recruiting cycles during the first 24 hours. (I think that is "new" within the 9 years I was away.)
3. yatzr's Tool Doesn't Work
I was really looking forward to using yatzr's recruiting tool to cut the mundane grunt work of listing and analyzing recruits. Everyone in the forums says it's a must-have. So then I found out that the latest "upgrade" makes yatzr's recruiting tool unusable. Back to mindless click-to-copy and click-to-paste into an Excel sheet. Really too bad, it doesn't require any skill other than a tolerance for grunt work. Why didn't GD incorporate it into the site upgrade or better yet just buy the tool from yatzr?
4. Where's the Smartphone App?
Guys, it's 2019. Shouldn't I be able to manage my team from my phone, especially during recruiting when cycles are short and I can't be chained to my laptop?
5. What's Up with the Veteran Coaches in D3?
There are only a handful of human coaches in D3 Bryant but most of them have been with their current teams for 70, 80, 90 seasons (one of them 146!) and naturally they have built powerhouse teams that are invincible for even a pretty good D3 team. So I guess they're enjoying it but they're essentially not part of D3, they're really D2.5, which means that for the rest of us the best we can hope for is a top 20 team. That would be OK if there were other humans to compete against but (see point #1) there aren't.
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I don't want to sound whiny, and I'm enjoying being back, but the upside here is very limited due to the neglect by GD management and I'll probably stay around only long enough to have some 5th year seniors who can kick the butts of some of the better Sim teams. It's really too bad.