EA please make recruiting more engaging!!! - jkra0512's Blog

jkra0512's Blog

EA please make recruiting more engaging!!!

Posted on September 15, 2011 at 11:45 PM.

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I want to take a break from railing on EA and other gaming companies, in order to offer a bit of advice for next year�s edition of NCAA Football. Over the years, EA devs have taken steps to improve the dynasty portion of the game, namely with features such as Coaching Carousel and a revamped recruiting system. Today I want to touch on the latter of the two features.

Before NCAA Football �11, users who took advantage of the recruiting part of the game were given a list of items you could talk to each individual recruit about. Each school had a letter grade that corresponded to how their school rated in a particular category. For instance, I always played as the Notre Dame Fighting Irish, as such, they always graded A+ for Television Exposure because their games are nationally televised each week.

Each recruit had different feelings about each topic (e.g. Most, Very High, High, Above Average, Average, Low, Very Low, Least). From there you could talk to recruits for a specified amount of time regarding each topic to identify what they liked most. If you were smart you would pound those topic points until they gave you a hard commitment. However, the system wore thin on many people. For instance, a little football character up in the corner would give you an indication of how the conversation was going. Needless to say, the system wasn�t very efficient.

Then came the new Russian roulette system, which has the computer �randomly� choose the topic for you. From there, can pitch your point to the recruit without knowing their prior feelings on the subject, talk to them to reveal how they feel about it, sell your program over another school�s, switch topics, promise them something, offer a scholarship and so on.

After two years of this system, it is time to go back to the drawing board. The little mini-game is neither fun or realistic. Coaches don�t talk to recruits by randomly picking topics. Instead, they have a set agenda of what they want to present to the player. It�s a sell job, and for that reason alone, coaches will only present the good parts of the school, while mitigating the not-so-good things about the program.

That is why it makes little sense for say a Buffalo Bulls head coach to have a randomly selected TV Exposure category (in which they rate low) and not have a chance to change the topic. Why would he ever try to sell a recruit on that?

The whole recruiting process is too long, arduous and dull. I absolutely used to love this mode, but there is little redeeming qualities about recruiting players yourself. The CPU recruits better than I do for my own team. I usually limit myself to targeting 20 players with 10 being on offense and 10 for the defense. However, even pumping points into players who already have me in the top 3 and come from my pipeline state (Indiana, Michigan, Cali, etc. for ND). I still come up with fewer recruits than I should. Meanwhile, if I leave recruiting alone and let the CPU do it for me, I have my recruiting class wrapped up by Week 8.

Here are some changes that I think would be very beneficial to recruiting:

1. Quit with the smug remarks from recruits. I�m sure the devs are being cute and clever, but it doesn�t work and no coach would ever take recruits who spoke to them like that.

2. Make campus visits more meaningful. Simply setting what recruits experience isn�t good enough. They should have questions they want answered or at least some feedback the next week outlining what they did and did not enjoy.

3. Options to send assistant coaches to recruit�s games and take notes, should really be looked at. I really enjoyed how 2K Sports� College Hoops series and even EA�s own college basketball franchise handled this. Coaches research the recruit before spending any face-to-face time with them, so that means requesting game film, sending an email to their coach. Sure this needs to happen quickly over a span of a few months, but that�s why you add multiple recruiting classes in the same year, so you can begin looking at high school juniors.

4. Whatever happened to giving us the recruits� weekly stat line, that was always fun to look at.

I already touched on this, but recruits should ask questions and coaches should be given multiple options on how to answer those question. So many times you hear recruits say, �X coach said Y and that�s why I wanted to come here.� There should really be a recruiting prestige for each coach, which will allow them more options for offering promises and when answering recruits� questions. These multiple-choice questions can lead to a �Choose Your Own Adventure� type outcome.

For instance, Alabama�s head coach Nick Saban is lauded for his recruiting prowess and then developing those players. Developing players should also have its own rating for coaches, because some are simply better at it than others.

The system in place is tiring and boring. I simply get little enjoyment out of earning a recruit's commitment. Right now, it feels like I�m putting money into a lottery that I have no control over which numbers I want to pick. To me, that�s not a good design decision because it leaves too much in the game�s hands and not enough in the player�s. It�s high time to take another look at the recruiting system and make some changes.