More immersion - ideas

[frankinho]

Continuing from one of the threads in the FIrst access forum where Brooks asked for some ideas on improving immersion in the game going forward. Ive been doing some quick brain storming and have come up with some suggestions. If interested by the developers to expand on the ideas i can add mock-ups and screens. I think immersion can be improved and i think we all agree we all want this game to be as great as possible so we can enjoy playing it and WS getting more audience to it so hopefully some of these can be added this year or next year. I would be willing to help in any way with this if the devs need some help. Anyway here are the ideas i have so far:

School - there needs to be more connection build with your school and gratification of improving various aspects of your school (similar to DDS CB)
- Athletic Director category on the left menu where you can check your expectations for the season similar to DDS CB e.g. Win at least 5 games or Dont finish last in the conference, or
- Under AD you would also check your school prestige and ratings for School Prestige, Coach Reputation, Conference Prestige, Academic Prestige, Athletic Facilities, Pro Potential, Television Exposure. Also include Team info ratings here AVG OVR, Fanbase, Approval and Bandwagon.
- School Prestige, Coach Reputation and Conference Prestige i believe already exist in the game today for the rest here are my ideas similar to the EA NCAA games:

- Academic Prestige: Can be improved by recruiting players with high inteligence.
- Athletic Facilities: can be improved by requesting upgrades from the AD each offseason similar to DDS CB.
- Pro Potential: is determined by the number of players that are drafted to the pro's over the past four years. To improve recruit better players and ensure they perform on the field coupled with the team winning more games.
- Television Exposure: can be influenced by playing and winning televised regional and national TV games. Better TV exposure also positively impacts school's budget for staff salaries, Scouting, academics and can increase odds of AD accepting facilities upgrade requests.

Coaching Changes / Carousel - More immersion towards the college football world around you
- Media news about potential HC/OC/DC changes including speculation and odds of potential replacement candidates before the start of the staff signing period.
- Add media news about the most notable coaching changes after the staff signing period is over.
- Prior to season start pundit's new appointments grading including analysis on new coaches preffered system, pipelines, recruiting success in prior years.
- Coach historical tracking of their recruiting classes and pipelines.

Recruiting - some additional replications of the real world of recruiting
- Designate HS All-Americans and add it under their awards.
- Pro Potential should be added to recruit talking points or replace one of the existing ones e.g. Market size.
- Add JUCOs.
- Include signing day after the season is over perhaps in 2-3 rounds where youre able to focus on only 2-5 players depending on your prestige and available scholarships. Add additional mini game where youre able to do an additional round of recruiting and based on how succesful your season was (W/L) get extra bonus points for both recruiting and outreach to possibly entice some recruits from your rivals.

General NCAAF world - Adding more immersion towards the world around you and getting more information presented to you that are really important IRL
- Top 25 weekly show - could be an animation of presenting only the top 10 since all 25 would probably take to long to look at every week. The weekly show could also include showing top conference performers. Possibility of skiping the animations of course.
- Heisman dedicated presentation and animation. Presenting all 3 candidates and their stats and then the winner.
- In the Top Recruiting Classes news article after signing day include infor on Total no. of recruits, no. of 5stars, 4 stars and 3 stars and no. of points with additional filtering by conference (in 247 sports style recruiting ranking.
- Add academics in the same manner as DDS CB has and that players can lose/retain eligibility during the season. Some academics points system would have to be added to manage their GPA and eligibility and forcing you to make difficult decisions in some instances - prioritizing players to dedicate limited points to.

Recruit Player card - some details to add to the recruits information and recruiting classes that is a big deal IRL
- In recruit player card replace with team names of interested teams with their logos that are clickable and it takes you to their roster - so you can check if they have a big need at recruits position or not.
- Include National, position and State ranking on the player recruit card ( currently only able to see that on the recruiting Preview Magazine)
- Designate top 300 recruits with a special logo in their recruit card e.g. WS300 (instead of ESPN300)

[eel1987]

To keep the long lists of suggestions/requests in one place I'll paste my post from the First Access forum here, plus another new suggestion.

1. More in-game info to help "on-board" players new to DDSCF games or to college football in general. This is a BBCF-inspired idea, because in each phase of the off-season you get literal essays explaining the concepts involved in whatever that phase is. If it's time to decide your offensive and defensive schemes, you get a novella that explains what each scheme is in case you happen to not know the difference between Run-N-Gun and Smash Mouth. Have no idea what redshirting means or why do it? When it's time to choose redshirts, you get an essay in your email that explains redshirting, why to redshirt, who to redshirt, who not to redshirt, etc. Obviously after the first time you read them you don't need them quite so much anymore except as an occasional refresher, but it's super useful to help get accustomed to college football costumes that some people may not be familiar with and to important game mechanics.

2. On the roster screen if I use the player type drop down menu to switch to "Redshirts" I would have guessed that I would see a list of the players I have selected to redshirt for the current season. Much to my confusion, it shows a list of all players that have (RS) in their year, regardless of whether they are redshirted for the current season or they are currently redshirt seniors who were redshirted their freshman season several seasons ago. "Active Roster" filters to only players that aren't currently redshirted, so I would say "Redshirts" should be the inverse of that and it would make a lot more sense.

3. On the Depth Chart screen, if I click Quick View Roster, sometimes the window that pops up shows me the players in the position I selected, but the column headings are just text and not sortable. If I close it and open it again, now the screen that pops up only has column headings and no players. If I close it and open it again, the screen that pops up now shows the players in that position and the columns are sortable. Seems like some kind of bug. I haven't yet figured out if there are any conditions that cause it to happen or not.

4. Also regarding the depth chart screen, I notice on the offensive part there is a big empty space at the bottom. The defense screen could also be re-arranged pretty easily to have the same space at the bottom. I propose moving the Quick View Roster screen to that empty space instead of making it a pop-up screen. Put a drop-down menu to pick the position, and maybe another drop down to select whether we want to see the players' attributes or their current season stats. That would make setting depth charts easier, since there's no more need to jump back and forth between different screens.

5. On the Stats screen, add a question mark tooltip that explains what the different stats mean.

6. Also on the Stats screen, add game-by-game stats as an option along with Season/Postseason/Career.

7. The Positions screen is already on the Recruiting screen so I'm not sure why it needs to have its own screen. Seems like a waste of space.

8. I like the post-game email message that breaks down stand-out player performances. It helps make the game feel more "real" and assists in figuring out which players I can rely on. But I wish it had more detail. Telling me a player played X snaps, had Y key plays, a number that I think is supposed to represent their "value" to the game but I really have no idea what it is, and some letter grades is kind of a vague report of a player's performance. Maybe two more immersive messages, one from each coordinator, giving a brief stat breakdown of each player in the previous game with just stats that are relevant to their position. So for a QB, maybe attempts, completions, TDs, great passes, bad passes (however the game might define those). For an offensive lineman, pancakes, missed blocks, sacks allowed, key run blocks, false starts, holding penalties. And so on.

9. This one was answered in Slack, but I'd like a bit more control over setting playing time for players. If I want to play my QB1 100% of the game and I don't care how tired he gets, let me do that. If my QB1 is hurt and I want to split snaps 50/50 with QB2, let me do that. The different packages sort of get at that a little bit, but I would like more control over it.

10. Maybe add recruits' high school or junior college stats somewhere on a recruiting screen to help with scouting and finding players to pursue, and add a bit more immersion.

11. An email letting us know when an injured player recovers.

[Colly]

A lot of my thoughts are captured in the above posts, I'll add more thoughts here as they come up in gameplay.

[sin44]

I'm so sad. I just wrote a ton of recruiting ideas and it asked me to log in again and I lost it all. Going to try to type it up again. hashtag that sucks.

[Colly]

I think there's a huge opportunity to improve game clock management for those of us who play the game by playing each and every down on both sides of the ball. Some seriously weird things happen currently that do not make much sense, to be honest, and I swear have cost me games. Less AI and more control in clock management please for those who play in this style.

Pro Strategy Football does a really good job of letting the player define clock strategies on each down.

[WranglerBrute]

I'm new to the series, loving it so far, but I'd like to see where the draft class ends up and when in the order they were drafted. Perhaps they could use the team names from DDSPF just for draft purposes (though I guess the draft order would just have to randomized)? When you develop a player for 4 years and they get good, it's a shame they then just disappear. It would add an extra angle of satisfaction if you develop players into first-rounders, and especially if they're the #1 pick.

I'd also like a screen to manage jersey numbers. It's a fairly unimportant thing I guess as they don't seem to be in any part of the game except on the roster screen, but I noticed after signing day I had 6 players all playing 87, and no simple way of changing them without editing each player.

[stiets1118]

Small Ask....under coach profile, can we add a bowl record W/L for coaches?

[eel1987]

I'm new to the series, loving it so far, but I'd like to see where the draft class ends up and when in the order they were drafted. Perhaps they could use the team names from DDSPF just for draft purposes (though I guess the draft order would just have to randomized)? When you develop a player for 4 years and they get good, it's a shame they then just disappear. It would add an extra angle of satisfaction if you develop players into first-rounders, and especially if they're the #1 pick.

Draft classes can be imported to DDSPF, which is probably a feature built-in to encourage us to buy both games if we want to continue a player's journey. So I doubt we'll see DDSCF tell us anything about draft results.

[Colly]

I'm new to the series, loving it so far, but I'd like to see where the draft class ends up and when in the order they were drafted. Perhaps they could use the team names from DDSPF just for draft purposes (though I guess the draft order would just have to randomized)? When you develop a player for 4 years and they get good, it's a shame they then just disappear. It would add an extra angle of satisfaction if you develop players into first-rounders, and especially if they're the #1 pick.

Draft classes can be imported to DDSPF, which is probably a feature built-in to encourage us to buy both games if we want to continue a player's journey. So I doubt we'll see DDSCF tell us anything about draft results.

Okay, but what if it was one game?

Imagine, rather than just exporting draft classes, the game universe was both the college and pro combined. now that would be a really cool coaching career to build. Start of at College as a HC, OC or DC build a career and become a top NFL coach. Every player could have a college and pro history too.

[slybelle1]

I'm new to the series, loving it so far, but I'd like to see where the draft class ends up and when in the order they were drafted. Perhaps they could use the team names from DDSPF just for draft purposes (though I guess the draft order would just have to randomized)? When you develop a player for 4 years and they get good, it's a shame they then just disappear. It would add an extra angle of satisfaction if you develop players into first-rounders, and especially if they're the #1 pick.

Draft classes can be imported to DDSPF, which is probably a feature built-in to encourage us to buy both games if we want to continue a player's journey. So I doubt we'll see DDSCF tell us anything about draft results.

It may or may not ever be introduced into football, but I don't think it will be because they also have a Pro game. With the College Basketball game, it also has the ability to import into the Pro Basketball game, but it has some of this. You get an email that shows the results of the draft with the players selected and in which order but does not show which pro team drafts them. The coach record also has a stat that shows how many of their players were drafted.