How to get more LIFE out of all your old dynasty files.

[pujolsformvp21]

If you any of you guys are like me, you likely have multiple dynasty files saved on your game over the 3 years this game has been out. All dynasties for me get boring after 5-7+ seasons as your team is likely stacked and high rated (unless you enacted some strict and realistic recruiting house rules) but MAINLY it gets boring because you start playing teams that consist of all generated players, which sucks for a few reasons

1. Because it takes away from the realism factor of knowing most of the players names and the tendencies of the teams and what their strengths and weaknesses are. This is a huge part of the immersion of dynasty, and it gets lost 5 years in.
2. Unless you were keeping close track of the top recruits over those years you will have likely no idea who any of the 5 star recruits were or who the top players at each position were, or what team they ended up going to 2-3+ seasons down the line when they are finally starters. This will kill your immersion as you have no idea who any one is on any team. Because recruiting in real life relies so much on hype, and rating, and 5 star status comes with a certain celebrity and expectations and big name status. We as fans know all sorts of information about the 2015 season and beyond's players, coaches, and recruits (commits and targets), and that knowledge is what helps immerse us even more into the game world because we have an outside perspective and expectation of how certain teams and players will play and behave in the game based on these real world assumptions, data and knowledge.
It is highly unlikely that you will have remembered the top recruits each class and where they went, especially because most recruits come in 70-80 ovr(no super freshmen who come in 90+) and only a few OVR points separating 5 star recruits and 3 star which leads to a cluster of all similarly rated players and nobody stands out from the rest. And with the generic straightline progression almost all of the 3* and above players will increase to 90+ OVR anyway even before senior year, creating a massive glob of teams and players that are all 90+ rated and no team or player will stand out. Not to mention that because of the limited player styles with the randomly generated recruits eventually all the CPU players in the game start to blend and bleed together and everyone plays the same and teams are almost interchangeable with names of players you dont recognize or know about and therefore cant care about playing against. This is usually around the time a dynasty gets stale and I have to reboot and start with a fresh idea.

However whenever I start a new dynasty, I ALWAYS make sure i set a "theme" for that specific dynasty file. Meaning I would say pick florida and the theme would be "recruit heavily on top 100 defensive players and try to get a few solid power RBs, but barely recruit on offense and stack defense". So in this dynasty i have a beast of a defensive team that I SHUT down teams with, and would be fun to try to play against it with another of my dynasty file teams. Like in a Navy file i have I recruited the top running QB and the top Rb's trying to field an unstoppable option attack. I have atleast 5 or 6 other dynasty files just like this where the teams I tried to create were super unique and varied so that each dynasty would feel different. this was always fun for the first couple seasons as i was recruiting and fighting for the recruits i wanted but eventually I would get too many good recruits as recruiting is just too simple and once my recruited players reached sophmore/junior level they were all fairly high rated and by the team they were seniors I would be dominating the other teams and eventually stop playing because it was too easy (even with sliders) and too boring (none of the CPU players meant anything to me) although I had grown a bond with all of my team's recruited players.

SOO one day I got an idea to load up all the dynasty saves and write down all the ratings and details of all the starting players on all my different dynasty files. I then began to create a new roster using all my dynasty players from different teams onto one roster and dynasty file. This process was a lot of fun because i was going back and seeing players i remember recruiting and using a long time ago that i loved. I remember recruiting most of them and watching them grow from freshman and on, i had about 10 different dynasty files and these were all players that I cared about and knew their tendencies, ratings, etc.

This allowed me to recreate about 10 different teams filled with all my old recruits and players from past dynasties. And now rather than these teams and players being overpowered and having no competition, I was no able to stack up my best players to play against eachother and compete for wins, stats, and awards. That was always my one pet peeve with dynasty mode, that every new dynasty was like a whole new universe and unconnected from the next, so i set out to change that. Have you ever wondered how that Heisman QB from one of your dynasties would have done up against another one of your OWN recruited teams, maybe against that defensive monster of a team you put together rather than facing some generic team where you dont know/care about any of the players names. Is that power RB better than that Speed RB you had in another dynasty? These are all previously unanswered questions that you can now test out and play around with. It makes playing each and every game each week more fun and meaningful as you root for certain players and teams to do well because you remember the players on the team and more importantly you know their tendencies and ratings and its fun to see how certain players are able to perform when you arent controlling them and see how players from different files stack up to each other.

Think about how much more boring/less immersive the game would be without named players, playing out the 2015 season would be extremely boring if all the players and ratings were random and generated. It makes it less fun when you go into a game going up against "RB #7" or "Joe Smith" rather then going up against Leonard Fournette. It isn't as fun to beat a nick saban bama team in 2020 when they are running a spread option with a speed qb throwing the ball everywhere with random players, than it is to beat bama in 2015 against all those great names and players.

The same principle applies here, once you get 5+ seasons in everyone has a fake name, its hard to get psyched for a game against a certain team or player or get as immersed as you were in the "make believe dynasty world" if there isnt a living breathing world of familiar and different players. But by taking the time to edit the players in from past dynasties you are actually building a new dynasty world that can be almost more immersive than playing out the current season. Because by playing those different dynasty files over the years and fighting for those hard earned recruits you have intimate knowledge and memory of most or all of those players (depending how deep you got into dynasty or how many different files you have that you care about) and you can bring that into the "world".

I spent a good few hours editing these rosters to get about 10 full teams of old dynasty files and putting them all into one file has given me a new fresh outlook and approach to this game. As it allows me to resurrect all those old dead dynasty files i gave up on and extends the life of the game 10 fold, because once they are all in the same roster and dynasty I can get even another few seasons out of these teams playing against each other. And then I can begin to fight over the same recruits and it will matter to me more when I lose a wanted recruit to one of my "old teams" rather than losing a recruit to a team full of already computer generated generic players.

I havent played NCAA in over a year, but by starting a dynasty like this, I havent played Fallout 4 or my PS4 in a week or so because I am so immersed in this "world" that I essentially created over my 3 year career by playing so many different dynasty files over the years. If you are bored of playing regular dynasties I would suggest trying this. I will pick one team to be my main team, but it is even more fun to play the good CPU match ups each week, when one of "my" teams plays "my" teams. Dynasty mode has completely changed for me with this slight roster change, dynasty addicts with multiple files have to try this! Let me know if anyone does.