[2022] Recruiting Feedback

[subsequent]

This is where you can put your feedback, suggestions, wishlist, etc. for the recruiting system.

 

If you have any direct examples, please try to provide those with as much detail and explanation as possible.

 

Thanks!

[Sarge]

Recruiting has to change or revert back. Teams are steeply penalized if they miss on a recruit.

 

A) Unrecoverable points spent. There's no way for a team who lost on a recruit to even remotely recover with their class. We're likely to see many teams fall short of filling out 25 man rosters

B) RES does not help reason A because of the point gap, regardless of how insignificant you think RES impacts it absolutely does. A difference of 4 points can be percentage points that sways the pure RNG system

C) Every commitment is left to pure RNG leaving no room for strategy or diversity.

D) In tandem with C), it's not realistic to focus on 2 recruits at a time with 20 bombs or something because that's not how irl recruiting works. If we're trying to replicate that process, the current system deters from anything accomplished irl.

 

I was always taught in the Army if you provide problems you also supply solutions:

 

A) Bring back bonuses for consistent activity on a recruit. This allows teams to build their boards wider and can still encourage battles: see last year's system. Teams should be rewarded and be able to pull away if consistently recruiting a guy for 5-6 weeks instead of being able to be immediately caught with a 20 bomb.

 

B) RES needs to be rescinded until generated rosters are gone or just completely. It's kinda awful to be a team with a poor roster to be penalized in recruiting and perpetuate the poor roster because they can't spend as many points as a team that was fortunate to have a good roster.

 

C) Bring back bonuses, as said in A or make the recruiting pool of players larger. Increase the ratio of croot to player coaches. Anyone left over goes to JUCO or something.

 

D) This is resolved with A and C.

[tsweezy]

Agree with a lot of that, and I think we should really have it clearly defined whether recruiting should be “fair” (not dependent on on-field results / previous coaches at that school), “random” (the extent to which RNG should play into it), and realistic

 

to add some minor points:

5-stars could have higher thresholds so it’s actually a trade-off going for them

Bonuses for continuing activity I do like, but maybe tweak the size to be the smallest points you gave them in that last 5 weeks (so if you put 10 a week, after 5 weeks it adds an extra 10. If you put 20-9-10-15-7, it adds 7)

[smackemz]

I want to start and say I really like the changes that happened for affinities for this season. I appreciate that feedback was heard and they were nerfed - I feel they have been a lot more successful this season. I do feel we should probably look at a few and remove some of the ones that don't make a ton of sense (small school for example).

 

I also appreciate RES and don't have an issue with the calculation itself, I feel it does a good job of accomplishing its intended outcome. Props for building a calculation that does a good job rewarding recent success with long-term record. I like it a lot as a recruiting driver - down the road once the game grows.

 

I do have concerns with the long-term health of the game by driving so quickly to a performance aided recruiting system. A lot of others have shared their opinion on roster generation and how the push towards performance based recruiting this early basically double blesses teams who were generated with strong rosters, after they were already blessed initially. I've also shared this sentiment in discord so I'm not going to repeat those here.

 

What I am going to express is my concern we are going this route too early based on the state of the community. We have roughly 60 open teams right now! Some of the teams have never had a coach and are reliant on AI croots - which is generally weak when compared to human recruiting. It's going to become a challenge to fill these teams as we go on because their rosters will continue to get worse over time. I believe I also saw a stat where they were only what, ~10-15 true freshmen starting this season? If that trend continues, you're talking real-life years before a new coach can make an impact on their team. We're going to struggle to ever fill out our community if new coaches that get bad rosters are also handicapped in recruiting because of a performance based system. There's a fine line between the challenge of taking over and building a team and getting creamed every game and being put at a disadvantage in recruiting. We'll lose new folks before they get a chance to get entrenched into the community (which is good and a positive towards keeping folks)

 

On top of the state of the community itself, there will likely be a lot of changes made to the game itself over the next few seasons. Logic updates to fix a lot of the issues we are seeing in the sim, gameplanning updates, etc. I understand we'll never reach perfection because football is complicated, but just another reason to give the sim some time to grow before rewarding/punishing wins and losses.

 

I don't know what the best solution is - maybe it's just to make the recruiting "fair" until we reach a certain percentage of capacity for a certain length of time? Maybe my opinion is dumb and no one joining would actually care - either way I just wanted to float out a different reason for why it might best serve us to wait.

[TuscanSota]

Disclaimer: I built the interface and continue to support its development.

 

In the event that teams do not fill to their class limit at the end of a season, walk-ons should auto-fill based on the team’s needs. Whether it should be made up of any croots that are still unsigned or be auto-generated is in the question. I think the problem with taking unsigned croots from the existing pool would be: a) If I did execute a walk-on algorithm, which team is first in the algorithm? Do we go by spots remaining or the strength of the recruiting class or alphabetical? b) Which unsigned recruits would we allow to walk on? What if a five star or four star is still unsigned?

 

if we go with autogenerating, it then becomes a question of how do we setup the auto-creation functionality? What should be the expected talent of a walk on? Do we allow the very rare occurrence of walk ons to be starting quality (see Clay Matthews, Ezekiel Ansah, Jordy Nelson)

[Ezaco]

I legit thought teams auto-filled to 25 if they didn't complete their class... if this isn't the case then I honestly think it's something we need to have (even if it's a randomly generated number between 20 and 25). Like Sarge said, a lot of teams are going to fall short of that 25 - for example it's already Week 11, and I only have 1 signed recruit and I'm only targeting, at most, 10 more right now and might sign half of them.

 

I like the idea of unsigned croots walking on, no reason to auto-generate more if you already have them there. As for how, well... what if you went back to the buckets?

[TuscanSota]

The current favor right now is that the threshold required to sign a croot continues to drop, and will be low in the final weeks. By 19, the threshold should be at ~20 points, with the final week being 0.

 

I think in the case of auto-generation, the best thing to do would be to get the needs of the team first, and then by position need, generate a recruit. As far as talent generated, I do like the idea of using buckets, or at least weighted buckets. The talent generated will likely go between 1* and 2* value, with the extremely rare chance of 3*, 4*, or 5* talent.

[smackemz]

Maybe a round of bidding on left over croots at the end and then generate walk ons?

[subsequent]

Would be cool if it told you on the player cards (on the recruiting interface) what week a player committed.

[TuscanSota]

Instead of showing the potential of a player, what if we hid the attribute BUT did the following:

 

- Scouting Feature:

- Every week a coach is allowed to scout 1-3 recruits. Scouting will allow the user to get a description on how well they perform in certain attributes (Speed, Agility, Pass Rush, Potential Grade, etc.). The description is revealed only to them and is associated with the user's profile on that recruit.

 

This will give coaches the ability to further inspect recruits for what they're specifically looking for, rather than only having potential and overall, as the only frame to work with.

[kgreene829]

Just putting this here as a suggestion so it doesn't get lost but some kind of bonus for consecutive weeks on a croot that way people are rewarded for investing points on someone weekly and lowers the chance of a school 20 bombing and getting a commitment

[subsequent]

• Move from 50 to 100 total pts per week
  
• Cap 10 pts per week on any given player
  
• Keep commit thresholds at the same ranges
  
• Bring back point bonuses every 5 weeks of putting at least 1 pt on a player
  
• Postpone RES until year 5?
  

[Sarge]

This is really good.

[Ezaco]

Also like this. Will help with filling out recruiting classes, and prevent the 20-bombs that are (at least in perception) slightly OP right now.

 

Even if you don't undo and postpone RES.

[JW1952TX]

New here. What is RES?

[Piercewise1]

Recruiting Efficiency Score. Below is the link to the full Dev Diary, but basically the points you put on recruits get multiplied by a number determined by your team's on-field performance. It goes from 0.8 to 1.0 and gets updated each week.

 

While the impact is marginal (a high-RES team might end up with a 4-5% better chance of landing a contested recruit vs a low-RES team that spends the same amount of points), some users have asked for it to be removed until year 4 or 5. At that point generated players are all gone and only user-recruited players remain, and so teams aren't punished or rewarded based on teams they inherited.

 

https://www.simfba.com/index.php?threads/56-recruiting-efficiency-score.3262/

[JW1952TX]

Thanks - have seen that but just didnt put it together with the RES abbreviation.

[SageBow]

Increase to 100 points per week and remove decimal points?

[Sarge]

RES is basically a score influenced by last year's record of the team and this year's record of the team and modifies the points allocated to the recruits based on those records.

[smackemz]

I like most of this, but would respectfully challenge lowering the cap per week to 10.

 

This could be said to be self-serving. But as a team with a bad roster, bad RES, and no affinities my recruiting strategy basically came down to identifying the guys I wanted (obviously not 5* because I need to build my floor), going aggressive on them so they could be locked up early, and reinvesting those points into the next set of guys. The whole premise is that if I locked up guys early, I lessen the potential chance that I get stuck in battles or lose coin flips. The sacrifice is that I did not make an effort on any 5 star guys. I just don't have the roster infrastructure to waste points and lose a battle to someone like Tulane.

 

Lowering the cap would all but eliminate my strategy. It would take 6 recruiting weeks to get into the threshold and would introduce more battles and more coin flips. I haven't been in many coin flips, by strategy design, but they seem to introduce a lot of frustration into the player base. In my opinion more coin flips would lead to a reduced user experience.

 

If the goal is to try and reduce the impact of a random 20 point bomb, maybe we should look at tightening the range at which a coin flip is triggered?

Edited October 31, 2022 by smackemz

[Sarge]

There just needs to be a mechanism to recover from losing in battles. With RES and no mechanism losing battles is incredibly punishing.

[BabaYaga]

What mechanism is there IRL?

[subsequent]

Tightening the range would be another good option. This would help make battles more fun without making everything a coin flip. I think my goal in the suggestion was to actually make it so that a battle would have more than 2 teams competing. In theory, this makes it less of a coin flip and more of a dice roll. My theory was that this would be more fun and less frustrating, but I could be wrong here.

 

In terms of the 10pt vs 20pt maximums, I think no answer will really appease everybody simply because everybody has a different strategy and goals when it comes to recruiting, which honestly is a good thing because diversity makes things interesting. I tried to alleviate this by simply giving more points to everyone. Someone mentioned last night that teams in NCAA 14 get like 5000 points per week and can add up to 500 pts per player (on top of various other bonuses like scholarships and stuff). That results in a 10:1 ratio of total points to max points per player which is why I went with 100 pts and 10pts max.

[subsequent]

To be fair, we don't have to be 100% realistic because we start to lose the fun aspect of it.

 

Have to find a good balance between realism and fun, since this is a game at the end of the day.

[Minnow]

Wait you can use decimal points? Who is evil enough to do this? Edited November 1, 2022 by Minnow