2021 Recruiting Post-Mortem and Feedback

[alexfall862]

Congrats on the inaugural recruiting season for SimFBA! As I've stated before, our hope was to provide something closer to real-life than other online or EA sports historical recruiting systems, where you could min/max your point spending and lock in your class without too much sacrifice.

 

Changes Already Planned for Next Season:

 

- First, I know you all love #REF errors, but we're going to move into the interface next season, thanks to @TuscanSota, we should have an interface for recruiting ready to go.

 

-There was a problem competitively with not being able to tell which of your recruits is being poached. There is a desire in the system to create a fog of war, but this season left a lot of folks without an ability to protect recruits beyond guessing. Going forward, all scholarship offers are public instantly (limitation of google sheets system prevented this). This should provide a heads up if a team is invested a lot of points into a player on your board, and provide additional value to the limited budget of scholarships.

 

- Affinities need to be reworked in two ways. First, we're going to expand and adapt the existing affinities to better spread across schools in a realistic fashion. The second I'm going to roll out a suggestion on moving from the 5 week point drops into a 'effectiveness modifier' that will take into account team performance and the static program affinities to tie some on-field stakes into recruiting and provide a more realistic "recruit is/isn't really responding to the pitch over time" effect, as opposed to the current system.

 

- I'm going to suggest a slight change to the threshold numbers to increase the amount of commits in the final 5 weeks. We had some users drop out, which caused a generally slow down in recruiting since the system was set up with the amount of teams being constant.

 

Recruiting In-Action

 

Throughout the next couple weeks, I'll be sharing different case studies on recruits and what happened in different battles. This isn't coming tonight because I don't have time, but also gives us fodder for content over the offseason!

 

Feedback!

Below is a survey to get general thought into one place, but please do also use this post to drop thought here for all of us to iterate on.

 

Please fill out this survey before specific items are suggested below: https://forms.gle/7owphvjbiZe5uXN98

[Bundy]

I don't know how we're going to do the Transfer Portal but after slotting some of the guys from my class into a projected DC for next year, I was wondering if there will be a away for us to voluntarily submit players to the portal as well - not instead of players deciding to enter maybe against their coaches wishes, but in addition to. I have a few upper classmen who I don't know will get significant if any playing time and want to do right by them instead of wasting them on my bench. Maybe it could be a "hey you're probably not starting here, take a look for opportunity elsewhere and if you don't fine it, you can finish out here" thing.

[TuscanSota]

I want to thank you @alexfall862 for being able to set this up all through Google Sheets and to run it over 20+ weeks. Seriously, I recognize this as a huge endeavor and I really appreciate the work that you've placed into the initial system. I'm going to do what I can to ensure that the recruiting system migrates smoothly into the interface.

 

With that said, I'm going to keep an eye on this thread for any feedback and suggestions on the recruiting experience and what people would like to see improved for next season.

 

As for my own feedback so far: As someone recruiting with no bonuses or affinities, I found it very difficult to keep up with teams that did have affinities to benefit from. Outside of the general "Close to Home" affinity, I think there's a plausible argument that teams can get full commits faster when they are assigned two to three affinities. I look forward to seeing a revamp of the affinity system, whether it be through adding more affinity options or fixing some the school assignments on existing affinities (Party school affinity please)

[Sarge]

Thanks for all the hard work this season on the recruiting aspect of our CFB season @alexfall862 .

 

I'd protest the performance incentives for recruiting based on the field results but I may be biased as a school that went 1-11. I don't think it encourages parity unless the bonuses for winning were small enough to not enable a consistent loop. With that being said, Alabama pulling in great croots irl daily because of their status so idk. I'd like to see "consecutive bowls" or winning season or a sustained metric of success before bonuses are applied. That way there's sufficient reasoning instead of a one-off good season.

[tsweezy]

It might be a huge pain to think about, but I like the idea of recruits cutting down choices to a top-X schools, similar to in real life. For example, once a recruit hits 100 overall points spent on him, he narrows his list and only focuses on schools who have bid. Then at 200 he narrows again and only focused on schools on the leaderboard. It’s a big change and idk if people would like that system since it encourages investing a lot early as opposed to trying to snake a croot later on