dev diary #18 - A word on recruiting from Pumph

[subsequent]

Hey guys, special guest here for this week's Dev Diary. Our very own @Pumph who has been hard at work designing how recruiting will work in SimFBA!

 

So I was asked to write up my vision for recruiting for this dev diary. My vision is basically built off of the shortcomings of every other college football game/sim I have played over the past 20+ years. Some were very good. Some were not. Even the best games left me wanting more, wanting more realistic and dynamic recruiting.

 

The recruiting part of a college football game is its very own game within the game. It is very hard to win on the field without talent, but competing for that talent off the field should be just as challenging and perhaps even more in-depth than the gameplay on the sidelines. Yet not every person playing the game has the time, or the desire, to painstakingly comb through a database of thousands of fictional high school athletes that they know little about and compete head-to-head with other coaches to recruit them to their team. So a balance of in-depth, realistic recruiting, and simplicity was the goal when building the recruiting system.

 

Main Features:

 

Recruit Affinities

• Many recruits have predetermined affinities toward certain programs or certain types of schools, giving them bonuses towards those schools. Currently, there are [number] different affinities planned. Some recruits may have overlapping affinities, giving more schools bonuses.
  

Program Identity

• Through the affinity system, programs may have a built-in identity. (Think “Linebacker U”, being a top Academic School, etc.) The goal will be to allow some of the affinities to be dynamic over time, allowing schools a chance to have some influence over them.
  

National recruiting

• While some recruits may have an affinity to stay close to home, others will have the exact opposite, and want to go away. Most will have no location-based affinity at all, nationalizing recruiting.
  
• Recruits have varying (hidden) signing trigger levels, meaning that no one knows how many points it will take before a recruit signs.
  
• Recruits will not always sign with the team that spends the most on them. A weighted system will give leading teams the advantage come signing day, but the door is not completely shut on trailing teams.
  

Realistic scholarship usage

• Recruits will not sign without being offered a scholarship. Teams must plan wisely.
  

There will be other features, and some other things will need to be tabled just from a coding perspective, but this is the basic taste of what the near future holds.

 

Where do we currently stand?

 

Affinities have been developed, recruit affinity distribution calculations have been made, schools have been assigned to various categories. (unsure where coding stands)

 

Hope this helps give some clarity on how we envision recruiting to work, logistically. If you have any questions, let us know!

[DarthJarJar]

I love that a team is never fully out of it!

[Vivid]

Great Start and this is such a big task thank you for all your work. I love most of this but TBH I am not a fan of the "Recruits will not always sign with the team that spends the most on them. A weighted system will give leading teams the advantage come signing day, but the door is not completely shut on trailing teams." I just see this causing a lot of frustration for teams that put a lot of effort into one player and then they sign with someone that spent a lot less. I guess I am just not seeing the benefit of this feature so maybe I'm wrong.

[subsequent]

Yeah, we believe that every team (to a certain point) should be in consideration. Just like in real life, it's never clear cut until really the very end.

[subsequent]

It will be weighted, and not necessarily every team that has put points into the player will get them. It's a more realistic way at envisioning the recruiting system, we believe. If you have a ton more points over the other team, you're going to be that much more likely to get them.

 

On the flip side of your argument - let's say a player has 100 points put on them and it's broken down like this:

 

Team A - 50 pts

Team B - 45 pts

Team C - 2 pts

Team D - 2 pts

Team E - 1 pt

 

In a system where the team who puts the most points on the player, Team B is going to be pretty disappointed because they also invested a lot of points into this player, perhaps even 100% of their budget, if they had fewer total points to spend than Team A.

 

The hope here is that we see a different way of strategizing how to spend your points, instead of seeing the top teams every year just throw everything they have into the top recruits with little penalty.

 

Hopefully this makes sense and it works out in practice. If not, we can always change things up and tweak it to get it right.

[Vivid]

Definitely helps me conceptualize it. Thanks yall! I'm excited to try it out and we can always make adjustments but I do love the transparency and effort.

[Nittany Boiler]

One of the affinities that I would definitely like to see is the demand of Freshman Start or Immediate Playing Time for some players. This will help the stockpiling year over year of five star players to sit on the bench and also allow coaches of lesser talented teams to appeal to players wanting to start or playing time. It makes the coaches make a decision / commitment to a player and his starting and playing at the time at recruiting .

[subsequent]

Of course! We're always happy to field feedback. The sim is for the community.

[subsequent]

Great idea. We'll have to come up with a way to define how that might work. Perhaps it can be a based on the number of players in the position on the DC, maybe it could be based on how good the starters are. Would love to hear how you envision it.

[Weeze]

ARK is now D-Line U. You heard it here first.

[subsequent]

???

[alexfall862]

@Nittany Boiler @subsequent

 

My understanding is that the player database is the same for recruits/teams - so they retain all the 'tags' they had during recruiting. I might be wrong on that since I've been out of pocket for a while.

 

If that's still correct, maybe something for the non-immediate future is tie transfers to recruiting affinities (when we get to transfers)? If a recruit has an affinity for immediate playing time (or maybe 'Going Pro' as well), but ends up redshirted or has <50 downs played in a season (with no injury) they have a high chance to transfer. It could be stored as a 'frustration threshold' and players accumulate and lose points at the end of each season for things like playing time, overall record, or a new head coach. If they get over a certain point total, the database flags them for transfer season.

 

Since playing time is something players of any skill could end up with as an affinity due to the procedural generation, you'd see players transferring off the bench and potentially to 'little sister' schools where they can hit the top of the depth chart or even leaving smaller schools if a team is min/maxing recruiting in some strange way and has recruited 5+ QBs or something.

 

Long-term, I could envision a way of handling transfers that took the coaches' history into affect, where they had a higher chance of transfers from their previous school (if player was on the team then). The nuts and bolts are mostly there to create some really fun emergent narratives, but it's shouldn't be a priority atm obviously.

[subsequent]

Very interesting. I'd love to see that get implemented. Probably not something right this second, but I think it completely makes sense.

 

And, yes, the "tags" retained for the lifetime of the player. Even to the NFL, so perhaps that gets tied in there as well. Team drafts another QB early, so the 2nd string might want to leave. Or even the 1st stringer wants a larger contract.

[Minnow]

WOOP WOOP