Signing final commits

[flounder]

I'm not sure how much Arlie hangs out on this forum anymore, but I just wanted to talk about one of my pet peeves with BBCF. Recruiting at a small school (prestige around 35) is sort of pointless.

 

When I first started playing with a low prestige school, I had a really hard time. I always seemed to be severely lacking in talent compared to other schools in my prestige range. When I looked at those other teams' rosters, they had out-recruited me by a substantial margin. My highest recruit would be the one who sends you an email and would be ranked around #1000. Other than that, I would be lucky to get a few ranked from #1500-1700 and the rest of my class would be #1800-2200.

 

Meanwhile, other teams were routinely pulling in multiple recruits ranging from #600-800. I decided to run a test by saving each week and changing teams to see their recruiting strategy. I was pretty astounded by what I found. Their strategy for weeks 8-16 was pretty much identical to mine. The difference was that in the final week, they would sign five or six 3 star recruits. They didn't offer these recruits until that final week and spent no money recruiting them beforehand. They were just decent recruits that hadn't yet received a scholarship offer. They would have only a 2-3 interest in that school; not enough for them to even make his top ten.

 

Aha! I said. That's the secret. I started looking around in the final week offering recruits without any offers. It didn't work for me. The players I offered just wouldn't sign with any team. The only way I could get it to work for me was to turn over control of recruiting to the computer for that final week. It would somehow know which of the players with no offers would actually sign. Then I found another problem. Apparently, in that final week, the computer is not bound by the number of available scholarships. I would only have 1 scholarship left, but the computer would still sign 6-7 people.

 

So to keep pace with the talent level at the schools I'm competing against, I'm forced to turn over recruiting to the AI. The players it signs seem to be sort of random, so I don't really have any control over which positions it looks for. If I have a real need for a particular position, I have to make do with a 1 or 2 star recruit ranked around #1800. Otherwise I have to hope that I hit the final week lottery.

 

This has been a really negative post, but I just want to make clear that I really love this game. I've been playing it for almost 6 years now. I'm still having a blast with a small school playing the other parts of the game besides recruiting. And recruiting seems to work fine for higher prestige schools. I doubt Arlie is willing to sink much effort into the game at this point, but fixing this sort of issue would really improve the experience of playing with a smaller school.