EC Hood wrote:Curious as to if anyone else has the same feelings.
Since you asked, without intending to violate PointGuard's announcement:
I think the ideas your posted fall into a few categories:
- Improving roster and recruiting AI, always a good idea. I also assume it to be incredibly difficult, since I don't know of any sports sim that it isn't a major complaint about, and that it includes the most popular ones out there. I don't think I 've ever seen a sports sim that I would describe as having good AI handling of roster decisions.
- Walkons: I would describe not allowing them to ever improve or contribute significantly as actually being highly unrealistic. There are examples of walk-ons contributing significantly even on top teams. The issue is to get them to be appropriately rare, and that's a decades-old thorn where no solution has ever been found satisfactory. It's one of those features where the problem is in the details; how to make them have the right amount of impact, the right amount of the time.
- Even moreso than that, items like the prestige and recruiting ideas really need to be drilled down a lot more to what is actually happening. I simmed a random season and 'high majors' accounted for the Top 19 recruit classes at the end of it. But with changing prestige and conference movement if it's on, what a mid-major, high major etc. even means can be a nebulous concept. Even moreso, there's a need to discover exactly what's happening in the situations where you say prestige changes are 'overpowered', because A) I've seen a number of players actually claim the opposite, and B) what specific situations have prestige changes that are 'wrong'?
In situations where too many teams are doing better than they should, we need to know why or the wrong thing can get 'fixed'. Is the mix of available recruits bad, so that not enough of the best ones value prestige highly enough? Are the top teams not emphasizing recruiting assistants enough so that lower-ranked schools are snatching them up? Academics can be a factor, discipline can be a factor, prestige certainly can be a factor ...
For a sim like the one you describe where mid-majors get too strong after several seasons, I would keep a save each year and track how their recruiting is going. Look at what their prestige changes actually are, changes in their coaching staff, and so on. Basically just drill down on what the real causes are, so that there isn't a situation where a 'fix' ends up being made to prestige gains, but that ends up not actually being the problem so the issue isn't even addressed in that case.
I also expect that this will be something that is tested anew with DDSCB23, since removing the recruiting fog-of-war will change the recruiting balance anyway.