dev diary #41 - Recruiting!

[alexfall862]

Hello Coaches!

 

A Dev Diary I'm sure you're all interested in! It's time to talk 'croots! General overview of recruiting can be found here: https://www.simfba.com/index.php?threads/recruiting-tutorial.2353/

 

Nuts and Bolts

Recruiting will be a weekly activity, with actions taking place whenever you'd like during the week, but progressions occurring Tuesday nights for a Wednesday to Wednesday recruiting week.

 

The recruiting season will last 20 weeks. The first week of recruiting will take place from the Wednesday prior to Week 1 to the Wednesday just prior to Week 2. This means that the recruiting season should wrap up Wednesday following the last bowl games.

 

Recruiting is done by assigning recruiting 'points' out of your weekly recruiting budget to a player. When a player has collected enough points, they will pass a threshold and make a 'commitment decision' to eligible schools.

 

In order to be an 'eligible school' when the commitment is assessed, you must have a standing scholarship offer to the player and be in their leading schools list.

 

The purpose of this dev diary is to dive into the commitment decision and how the leading schools list in generated. Tutorial about the user-side of recruiting is here:

 

Leading Schools

The leading schools function lists the recruiting points leader and schools within striking distance of the leading school. This math is set at 50% of the leader's amount of points. Towards the time players will start making recruiting decisions, being listed here means that you are (roughly) within a week's point of becoming the points leader.

 

 

When a commitment decision is calculated, the initial list of schools eligible to land the recruit are generated from the leading school, then any schools without a scholarship offer are removed. This means that you can be listed in leading schools and have 0% chance to land a player if you didn't offer them, but also means that you can offer a player and spend points on them and also have 0% chance to land them because you're not in their leading schools list. This is meant to be analogous to real-life recruits' Top X lists.

 

Commitment Decision

A player will make a decision to commit to a school when they have passed a certain threshold of total points. That threshold is not static throughout the year, it is changed by two inputs: the recruiting week and the total number of teams recruiting the player.

 

The longer the year goes on, the lower the threshold required becomes, with Week 20 culminating in the every player left making a decision to essentially anyone who recruited them at all.

 

The number of teams raises the amount of points needed proportionally - meaning that the amount of teams pursuing a player don't impact their 'rush' to commit, but in a lot of cases cause a lengthening of their recruiting process. What decides how quickly a player commits is the average point total per team.

 

If a recruit has an average of 20 points per team per week recruiting them, they'll make a decision when we advance into Week 4.

 

If a recruit has an average of 10 points per team per week recruiting them, they'll make a decision when we advance into Week 6.

 

If a recruit has an average of 1 point per team per week recruiting them, they'll likely wait until advance into Week 19.

 

Once the player passes the recruiting threshold, the teams that are eligible (on leading schools list + scholarship offer from school) have their point added up. The points become their odds of landing a player.

 

For example, if School A has 40 points invested into a player, and School B has 60 points, then School A will have a 40% chance of landing the player, and School B will have a 60% chance of landing the player.

 

If School A has 30 points invested into a player, School B has 35, and School C has 40 but didn't offer a scholarship, then School A has 30/65 odds, and School B will have 35/65 odds of landing that player. School C's points might have triggered the recruit's commitment decision, but since they didn't offer a scholarship, their odds of landing that player are 0%.

 

The goal here is to allow for a more realistic experience when recruiting players, where min/maxing to edge out other schools by 1 point doesn't make a large difference in outcomes, but managing your targets and point spending still rewards coaches.

 

Affinity Bonuses

Aside from players directing points from their budget into recruits, the other way to gain points is to capture what are called 'affinity bonuses'. Some recruits have 'affinities' assigned to them. All but one affinity is static, meaning any school with that affinity is eligible to get the bonus for any recruiting with that affinity. The affinities that fall into that category are:

- Academics

- Climate

- Service

- Religion

- Large Crowds

- Small School

- Frontrunner

 

Right now, one of them is recruit/school context dependent, meaning that the school needs to match certain criteria instead of also holding that affinity. In the future,the list of context dependent affinities will likely grow, but for now that one affinity is 'close to home'. If the school is in a location in the specific recruit's home zone, AND they have the 'close to home' affinity, they will be eligible for the bonus.

 

The bonus itself is an additional 25 points for the 5th, 10th, 15th, and 20th consecutive weeks you invest at least 1 point in a player. These affinity bonuses are only given to schools that are 'actively recruiting' that player. What that means is that to get the 5th week affinity bonus, you need to invest a minimum of 1 point in (for example) weeks 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5. You could also get the 5th week bonus using weeks 6-10 or 12-16. The 10th week 25 point bonus requires at least 1 point in (for example) weeks 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, and 15. Weeks 15 and 20 bonuses follow the same pattern.

 

I hope this gives an in-depth review of the recruiting system's machinery. As we go from one test-run to a full sim, I'm sure there will be edits to processes, and we'll keep folks in the loop as changes are made.

 

- alexfall862

Edited July 28, 2021 by alexfall862