I feel so disingenuous giving praise to the recruiting. Yes, on paper (still have to play it) it's a step up from what it was, but it still feels like hundreds of steps away from where I'd feel justified praising them.
It feels like a bandaid video game fix, not the total overhaul in philosophy, functionality, and strategy that this series needs. In other words, it's more of the same, even if the details are a tad bit improved, slightly better.
I honestly don't have a problem with time consuming recruiting if it's done right and isn't repetitive, unrealistic, and tedious. The ideal fix isn't simply to nuke the time spent on recruiting, but that's essentially what is being done.
I want to feel like I'm recruiting teenagers, with different personalities and different skillsets that may or may not fit my system and I want there to be a tangible difference between getting the right guy for your system and getting the wrong guy.
I follow recruiting in real life. Rivals, ESPN, 247. It's frustrating and nerve racking and fun and stupid. But it's always engaging. The new recruiting system in NCAA 14 might eliminate some of the time consuming nature of past recruiting, but it's still a mindless, soulless system of spamming points towards generic players. I understand points are supposed to represent resources, but man, after you spend five minutes figuring out how it works, it's really nothing more than a video gamey point assignment session. It doesn't feel like football, and it's a real disconnect from the sim aspect of handling a team.
Texas has 13 recruits already verbaled right now, 3 months before the season starts. It just never feels realistic having so few verbals throughout the season (because you evaluate them way later than coaches do in real life), big prospects with so few offers, and so few differentiating factors between recruiting the #1 ILB and the #7 ILB.
IMO, there needs to be
- signing day hysteria.... a show... a ceremony with hat switches, newspaper articles, emails or texts, actual dialogue you can have with recruits, something
- HS stats, personalities (i.e. easy to coach/progress vs difficult to coach...player may take longer to progress)
- ratings that can change depending on the type of system they go to (i.e a running QB being rated 74 with an option offense but a 66 in a pass heavy offense)
- playable all star games, or heck, playable high school games where you can really get a feel for the recruits
- real pipelines to powerhouse programs in the state. Maybe the top states like Florida, Cali, and Texas have 10 powerhouse programs while states like New York won't have any. These powerhouse programs will produce top talent each year but you have to spend a cetain amount of time at the program to become a pipeline...sometimes even signing 2 and 3 star guys to stay connected to the (fictional) school.
- GPAs and players that don't qualify. They head to JUCO and you can recruit them in 2 years. Borderline guys are 50/50 and you might get a steal if you continue recruiting the borderline prospect while the other teams stop recruiting him.
- recruits that are aware of who is signing to your team so you don't sign 3 five star QBs...or how about if you're recruiting two star QBs, one of them tells you that he will drop you from his list of schools if you keep recruiting the other stud QB...decisions, decisions...
- strategic visit options like assigning players on your team to host visits, or having an activity to either impress the parents or impress the kid, which could barkfire if you pick wrong
- the ability to assign position coaches to specific regions to recruit. Send your top recruiter to the pipelines or send your top recruiter to untapped territory to win over the area.
- I could go on and on. And for those that don't wanna deal with deep recruiting, allow them to assign it all to their assistant coaches.
500 points for the week. Down 325 points. Recruiting point bonuses. + 200, - 125, lol that just doesn't excite me. It's more of an "I guess I can live with this for now," but it's something I'll be bored with by next year, if not a month after getting the game. Don't they want to create a system that can be a mainstay for years to come, not something they have to redo every single year?
I want the dev team to be just as tired implementing a different but-not-all-that-different recruiting feature every single year as I feel the community is.
I also have my reserved thoughts on the coach skills. But I will say I am very skeptical about how they will work.
Guess I should also say I'm still disappointing recruiting classes aren't editable and shareable online. While the complaints I have about recruiting would remain, at least editable and shareable classes would open up the possibility of real life classes and me creating my own storylines and such with classes. It would be awesome going into the OS NCAA roster forum, finding a fictional recruiting class file, then editing it for a few hours down to my liking. I do that with NBA 2K and it keeps me playing long associations with true-to-life personality.
Rant over. Sorry so long.
05-29-2013, 12:36 AM
