Rebuilds too easy?

[_-King-_]

I’m in year 4 of a rebuild with Navy.

Year 1: 1-11
Year 2: 6-7
Year 3: 6-7

In year 4 my team has progressed to 83 overall, on par with low/med P5 schools. I just landed the #1 overall prospect in the recruiting class.

It seems even if you’re not having great results on the field you still have a huge advantage over the CPU in recruiting and player development even in the early years.

I wasn’t even doing a great job recruiting either. The first couple years I didn’t know what I was doing and would only get 12-15 commits and all 2 or 3 stars.

I put coaching XP on slowest and am a level 8 with all my points going to recruiting.

[DollaBillz]

Re: Rebuilds too easy?

I think this has been discussed many times.

First off, if you want a realistic re-build then you would need to play almost 10+ years to make a school like that go toe-to-toe with the Power 5.

I agree that rebuilds are too easy if you want them to be. I have seen some post about some house-rules when it comes to recruiting. Not recruiting anything more than 1 start above your school's prestige.

I took Kennesaw State from a 72 in year 1 to an 84 in year 2. To be honest, I don't even know how cause I don't have that many 80's on my team. The biggest addition was a 4-star Senior transfer from Kentucky who ended up being an 89 overall SS. I've definitely seen an on field impact.

That being said, my first two games have both gone to overtime.

[deadly_titanfart22]

Re: Rebuilds too easy?

I’m in year 4 of a rebuild with Navy.

Year 1: 1-11
Year 2: 6-7
Year 3: 6-7

In year 4 my team has progressed to 83 overall, on par with low/med P5 schools. I just landed the #1 overall prospect in the recruiting class.

It seems even if you’re not having great results on the field you still have a huge advantage over the CPU in recruiting and player development even in the early years.

I wasn’t even doing a great job recruiting either. The first couple years I didn’t know what I was doing and would only get 12-15 commits and all 2 or 3 stars.

I put coaching XP on slowest and am a level 8 with all my points going to recruiting.

Maybe don't recruit the #1 player in the country to Navy???? If you are playing unrealistic then expect unrealistic results. Of course you can cheese the CPU in recruiting, its been that case in every NCAA game ever made.

[jello1717]

Re: Rebuilds too easy?

Maybe don't recruit the #1 player in the country to Navy???? If you are playing unrealistic then expect unrealistic results. Of course you can cheese the CPU in recruiting, its been that case in every NCAA game ever made.

Was gonna say that [emoji3595]. I’m in my 4th season (OC @ ECU, HC@UAB, HC @UAB, currently HC @ Louisville) and due to my house rules, I haven’t signed a 5* recruit yet and Louisville was such a dumpster fire before I got here that it’ll be a few years before I sign a 5* there either.

[Joey323]

Re: Rebuilds too easy?

I think it is the off-season training results. Just like in 14, the user controlled team has dramatic increases to player OVR compared to the CPU

[_-King-_]

Re: Rebuilds too easy?

Maybe don't recruit the #1 player in the country to Navy???? If you are playing unrealistic then expect unrealistic results. Of course you can cheese the CPU in recruiting, its been that case in every NCAA game ever made.

He was in my pipeline so I decided to reach out. Then I invited him for a visit and jumped from 8th to 1st on his list. I didn't know it was gonna be possible. It's my first dynasty so I was testing things.

I get why people have house rules but we should also be able to voice our opinion on criticisms and maybe in the future we can get something like recruiting difficulty or sliders. I'm absolutely loving this game but it's crazy how defensive some people here get if you point out one little thing that isn't perfect.

[shanew21]

Re: Rebuilds too easy?

Maybe don't recruit the #1 player in the country to Navy???? If you are playing unrealistic then expect unrealistic results. Of course you can cheese the CPU in recruiting, its been that case in every NCAA game ever made.

I don't think this is a valid excuse. It should be nearly impossible to land the #1 player in the country to a service academy, especially given the records in the OP.

You shouldn't have to have an excessive amount of house rules for the game to function at a moderately realistic level IMO

[jello1717]

Re: Rebuilds too easy?

He was in my pipeline so I decided to reach out. Then I invited him for a visit and jumped from 8th to 1st on his list. I didn't know it was gonna be possible. It's my first dynasty so I was testing things.



I get why people have house rules but we should also be able to voice our opinion on criticisms and maybe in the future we can get something like recruiting difficulty or sliders. I'm absolutely loving this game but it's crazy how defensive some people here get if you point out one little thing that isn't perfect.

We weren’t being defensive, we were simply pointing out that if you want to be able to rebuild realistically, it’s completely in your power to not go after unrealistic recruits for your program.

I don't think this is a valid excuse. It should be nearly impossible to land the #1 player in the country to a service academy, especially given the records in the OP.



You shouldn't have to have an excessive amount of house rules for the game to function at a moderately realistic level IMO

It’s absolutely valid. It should be nearly impossible for him to land the #1 recruit, but it’s very possible, and has always been in every college football game I’ve ever played.

We shouldn’t need recruiting house rules, but we have always needed them.

If the options are to (1) expect that we don’t need house rules, not use any and bring in the #1 recruiting class every year at just about any school you choose, or (2) use basic house rules and bring in a realistic recruiting class (and again, in every game I’ve ever played those were always our 2 options) then #2 seems like the obvious choice to me.

[bears5122]

Re: Rebuilds too easy?

They're always going to be a little too easy in any game like this. Most people picking up the game don't want to spend a decade building a program just so they can sneak into some bowl games. They want to rebuild a school in a few years. A realistic game would have 95% of your rebuilds fail and you're fired in 5 years. That's just not fun for most people.

So yes, it's unrealistic. But I understand why they designed it that way. I'd love to see sliders added for recruiting difficulty and other settings in the future.

[canes21]

Re: Rebuilds too easy?

It is definitely too easy. We need a recruiting difficulty setting at the very least to help with this issue. Finer control over how recruiting works with a plethora of sliders would be even better.

Assuming much of the recruit generation is all controlled via tables and some simple weightings, it would be nice if we could simply change those around within a recruiting settings menu.

Things we should be able to have control over include:

- Overall class quality on a macro, positional, and archetype level
- Class quality randomness on a year to year basis on the macro, positional, and archetype level
- Talent disparity to increase or decrease the difference in average talent for each star rating
- The distribution of archetypes per position
- The percentage change of each recruiting pitch being a motivation for each star rating
- Dev trait distribution on at least a macro level but also potentially positional level
- Deal breaker type distribution control on a macro and positional level

Those are realistic items that are likely driven by just a few values that EA can quickly tweak and would only need a UI to be built for them before they were ready to be changed by the user. Having control over all of the above would go extremely far towards allowing us to better control the recruiting class generation to even better reflect reality, to get dynasty rosters in future years closer in line to what the base rosters look like, etc.

It would allow for those of us wanting recruiting to be harder for a small school to change the weightings around certain areas of the game so that it was basically impossible for a 2 star UMass to land a 4* WR because we could make it so those blue chip players really only ever cared about championship potential, pro potential, brand exposure, and a few other items. We could make it so being close to home could still matter for those recruits, but also keep it from being a deal breaker so that would fix the issue of UMass being able to hold off USC for a 4* QB simply because he wants to be closer to home.

While in theory that QB wanting to stay close to home is fine, in game we've seen that does create too many issues of higher rated players being under recruited and too easy to scoop up for lower level programs. We would have the power to fix things like that with finer control over the distribution values for things like motivations, deal breakers, and so on.

[RogueHominid]

Re: Rebuilds too easy?

If we were to start from the assumption that some house rules could help keep recruiting challenging and add challenge to the rebuilding process, what house rules do folks like best in the recruiting space, and why?

[canes21]

Re: Rebuilds too easy?

If we were to start from the assumption that some house rules could help keep recruiting challenging and add challenge to the rebuilding process, what house rules do folks like best in the recruiting space, and why?

The two I like to use now and back in NCAA 14 were limiting my recruiting to players up to 1 star above my school's prestige. If I am a 2-star school, no 4 or 5 star recruits. This is to keep it grounded and more realistic in my eyes as you wouldn't expect someone like UConn to start getting random 4-star commits until they've at least shown to be a good program for a few seasons at minimum.

I also don't like to go after players that the CPU is not recruiting at all, at least blue chip players. Just feels wrong to me to get what is essentially a free 4 or 5 star player because the recruiting logic is doing something screwy for the CPU teams.

A random 3-star that's the 1,400th best player in the country? Makes enough sense to me to be okay recruiting him in week 8 after he's been ignored. The #4 tackle in the entire recruiting class has no offers near bowl week? Yea, just chalking that up to something screwy with the CPU logic and acting like he isn't there.

[dirk1970]

Re: Rebuilds too easy?

If you don't want your players to develop better than cpu players, play shorter quarters.
I play 8 min/20 seconds and I haven't seen anything too crazy yet.


Recruiting rules are a must, though.

[Rocket32]

Re: Rebuilds too easy?

They're always going to be a little too easy in any game like this. Most people picking up the game don't want to spend a decade building a program just so they can sneak into some bowl games. They want to rebuild a school in a few years. A realistic game would have 95% of your rebuilds fail and you're fired in 5 years. That's just not fun for most people.

So yes, it's unrealistic. But I understand why they designed it that way. I'd love to see sliders added for recruiting difficulty and other settings in the future.

100%. It can be easy to forget if you’re only in spaces like OS where the vast majority of us are all about realism and sim style play, but in reality we aren’t the majority of any sports game’s player base. I’ll definitely be expecting a recruiting difficulty setting/sliders in the next release, but if they couldn’t fit it in this time, the default had to lean towards being too easy, to please the most possible players.

It can be annoying, but we can still get the experience we want through house rules and self restraint, while the average player who wants to take a small school and build them into a powerhouse playing 4-5 seasons, can have theirs. It doesn’t work the other way around.

[GarKeith]

Re: Rebuilds too easy?

I mean if you want it to be "realistic" then it should be completely impossible for a small school to ever compete with the top schools.