FBCB Wish List

[Petrel]

Can I say how much I love this game? Let me count the ways. However, when you like something, you get greedy for more of the same. So I've decided to create a "wish list" of things I'd like to see in future implementations and patches.

 

More customization. The rule for this game should be, "the more customization, the better". A user should be able to supply whatever files are necessary at one end, and the results should mirror what the user has supplied at the other end.

 

The major reason I love FBCB - why I think it's one of the best text games around - is that it is extremely customizable. With some tinkering around, I turned a universe of men's basketball into a universe of women's basketball. With the only other college BB game I owned, that's impossible - the philosophy there was that they controlled the content.

 

But even so, the range of options should be expanded further than it already is. Users should be allowed to set up a universe wherever, in any kind of imaginary universe they can think of. There are some hard coded restrictions that are irksome - the game treats all of Canada as the same place, as well as allowing a certain number of fixed countries from which to recruit. So my suggestions:

 

1. Not states and countries, but *areas*. My dream would be to allow a user-defined set of "areas" from which to recruit. The game default set of areas would be around 56-58 areas - which would consist of all 50 states + x number of countries, the way it is now. But if you wanted to create an all-Canada universe, you could say create each province of Canada as a separate "area" along with each of the American states. And there would be no limit to the number of areas you could create, only the power of the computer and the space on your hard drive!

 

The only difficulty might be in the generation of player names, and the redefining of "East", "Midwest", etc...but each thing in its time.

 

2. The Harvard option: Academics don't seem to play a large part in the game, except when it comes to player eligibility. There are GPAs and SATs generated for players, but Harvard recruits are pretty much the same kind of students that East Tennessee State recruits, and that doesn't make much sense. (Furthermore, Ivy League schools don't offer scholarships at all...but that's a problem for later.) Making academics count in recruiting would add a different challenge for coaches who wanted to recruit for Stanford, or Duke, or the Army.

 

3. Deeper recruiting classes: In the FBCB Universe, coaches don't start recruiting players until they become seniors. But in the real world, they're recruiting sixth graders in men's basketball! The new recruiting classes would go down to at least the freshman level, making the present pool of recruits four or five times deeper. (There would also be a "send mail" option added to the things you could do like call players, have coaches visit, or offer campus visits.)

 

"But this would just favor the big schools with money to burn!" one might cry. Not necessarily, because when you start recruiting freshmen the game would have much more variability in the kind of players those youngsters would be by seniors. If you pin your hopes on a ninth grader, the chances are high that he won't be the same player by the time his 12-grade year comes around due to injury or a failure to develop or dropping out of school due to poor academics...or just losing interest. The "recruit freshmen" strategy would have its risks, and furthermore, recruiting high school underclassmen would come out of the normal budget.

 

4. Making connections with high schools: Why do coaches visit high schools? Maybe not to sign a player, but to establish a pipeline for the future. My dream game would allow a coach to pay a cost for a connection to a high school or foreign city. For example, paying a connection cost to Christ the King High School in New York would give you a bonus in recruiting players from that school. Of course, when there are no great players at CtK for a given recruiting year, the connection is sort of useless.

 

5. New recruiting rules: There would be other options aside from the standard "add to call list" and "evaluate player". One would be "weekly letter" - a handwritten weekly letter which indicates some interest in the player but not as much as a call might. There would be other options, like camp invites, particularly if deeper recruiting classes were added.

 

6. Slide downs for facilities: Facilities are generally relative - not every school can have a 100 level facility. My suggestion is that in each year there's a chance that a schools facilities might degrade. A level 100 facility in Year One might be a 60 level facility (or worse) by Year 20. If your school doesn't keep up its facilities then recruiting will get progressively tougher as the years go by.

 

7. Liberty, Notre Dame and the HCBUs: These schools have advantages in that they offer either a religious or cultural prospective that other schools don't have. A game universe would be allowed to define up to five cultural perspectives. (The default would be Fundamentalist, Catholic, and Black with maybe Mormon (for BYU/Utah) and one left unused.) When setting up the schools in the game universe a school could align itself with one of the perspectives, giving that school an advantage in recruiting students that also identify with that perspective. (However, not a decisive advantage - just because a student is black doesn't mean he's going to attend an HBCU - but it will be important to some students.)

 

8. Skullduggery: Oh, how we love to cheat! My dream implementation allows limited cheating in FBCB! My universe would align all players as "honest", "shady" or "crooked" at a 90/9/1 rate. (One would have the opportunity to set these values if the percentages aren't to your liking.) For an honest student the cash won't be a factor at all in signing. Cash helps you sign a shady student...but it won't be decisive. A crooked student won't sign for you at all unless you pay him. You could then play as honest or as crooked as you want to.

 

However, with each cheat there is a chance that the NCAA (or its FBCB equivalent) would catch you and strip scholarships from your school - and that institution would likely fire you as coach. Or worse, you get a reputation as a shady coach and find it harder and harder to sign honest students....

 

9. Besties: Sometimes, players come in packages - people want to go to school with their friends. Blue-chip students want to go to school with other blue-chip students the same way that LeBron wanted to create a Miami dynasty. The game would have the option to assign best pals to a player and the names of those pals could be seen on the recruiting information screen. This allows a coach an option to sign the weaker player in the hopes of influencing the strong player to attend your school.

 

10. Player pictures: There would be space on each player information screen that links to a .jpg located in an interior game folder. This would definitely liven up the universe. Fans of the game could create random "player pack" mods which would generate pictures randomly for a game file! If we can have school logos, why not player pictures, even if they might be generic pictures?

 

11. An updated manual. I suspect that the current one is out of date, now with all of the fixes that have come along.

 

Maybe an admin could sticky this? Just a thought.

[yeah826]

6. Schools on this game do suffer a downgrade after some time it just takes a decent amount of losing.

 

7. HBCU schools don't actually recruit only black players and most of the time black players don't sign with the team because of the schools black history most of the time they just get the players low ranking players who if given the oppurtunity they would probably sign with another school if given the chance, but most of the time that's why white players usually dont sign with the school because its a mostly black institution. I guess I can understand a player signing with a school because its a religeous institution because Ive seen that multiple times but I wouldn't really put that in game since it really doesn't add anything to the game.

[Petrel]

Forgive me for thread resurrection, but I'm going to add a few more to the list.

 

12. Allow the major tournament to be turned off. The user could decide to have no national post-season tournaments. This would make things so that the team winning the national title would win an imaginary title. There might be conference championships, but no March Madness. The hypothetical national champ would be the one that was #1 in the polls at the end of the year.

 

13. Allow for smaller tournament sizes. This would allow the two major tournaments to admit only 8, 16 or 24 teams to a much smaller big dance.

 

14. Allow the user to cap the number of teams per conference that can go to the most major tournament. If you want to make it simple, allow the user to cap it so that only one team per conference can go to the major tournament.

 

15. Allow user to change size of national poll. You could change the display so that only 20 teams are displayed.

 

This would allow players to create universes that exist all the way back to 1900, and mimic the setup of the NCAA/NIT in those years. Right now, I'm creating a universe that starts in 1899 and anything like 12-15 would allow a little bit more flexibility.