Back when the program was first written, we (the community) had a problem to solve. In real life coaches can get game film on players and determine for themselves if that 4* HB is really that good or if he possibly is overrated. Previously in the game we had to just kind of wing it and hope for the best. He might come in at 78 or 64 we just had no clue. Now with EA's addition of the scouting feature added to the game we can now make this determination in game instead of having to doing it ourselves.
The entire save file is made up of about 7 million 1's and 0's (NCAA 2012, I haven't even taken the time to look under the hood of 2013). The program would go in and find all the recruits then process out all the rating information and put it all in a easy to read spreadsheet. This made it a lot easier to find players with certain skills you were looking for. Like if you wanted great M2M coverage corners you could sort the entire class that way and find guys who fit your system of coaching a lot better.
As for going in and editing the recruits, we actually tried to do this back in NCAA 2011 because we noticed a major issue with how recruits attributes were distributed across a bell curve. In general this was a great idea, but it was done sporadically so guys attributes were off (a 94 agl guy with only 45 juke move) and the Recruits (4 or 5 years down the road) made the game play completely different than how it did with out of the box rosters. The problem we encountered was we were unable to properly hash sign the file. Basically we were trying to patch the game but could not pull it off.
Most of the above I talked about is a moot point as we can now tell gems and busts in game and no longer have to resort to digging through millions of 1's and 0's to get our answers. So if they did it to get rid of me, I'm more than happy to say I have had a little impact on the NCAA franchise in what I feel is a positive way for me and my fellow gamers.
08-03-2012, 02:13 PM
