Dynasty Blog 1 of 3: Phone Call
by Russ 05/18/10 10:48 AM
Hey NCAA Fans!  Russ here and I'm back to discuss a  crowd favorite.  We  are now less than two months away from the July 13th  release of NCAA  Football 11. Personally, I'm very excited about all the  details we  already talked about with game play and presentation.  The  game is  looking really good right now and the team is working hard to  finish in  these last couple months.
One of the most asked  questions at every event, forum, and live chat  we've done so far this  year is "What is new with Dynasty?" Well I'm  happy to finally be able to  answer that question and provide you with a  lot of the details in  Dynasty Mode. But with all the enhancements this  year, Dynasty will be  broken down into 3 different blogs; this is the  first about the new  Phone Call in NCAA Football 11. 
One of the areas we felt would  add the most to the Dynasty experience  was a new Phone Call with  recruits.  The goal was to make each call  more fun, a lot faster, and  just a better experience all around. Much  of the same concepts are still  around when calling prospects. For  example, your school will have the  same 14 pitch types and the prospect  has his rating of each, as well.  The major difference is now you'll  need to find a way to maneuver  through each call so you can maximize  the amount of points you earn. 
At  the start of each call you'll be presented with an option to select  how  many Topics you wish to have. You can pick from 1 to 6 topics that  cost  10 minutes for each prospect every week. Every week you'll still  have  10 hours for Recruiting like in previous years of NCAA Football;  so you  choose how much and which prospects to spend your time on.
Once  you select how many topics you would like to discuss with the  prospect,  the phone call will begin and your first topic will be  presented to you:
  
 
There are a lot of ways to go about dealing with each  Topic you are  presented with. If it's something your school is good at,  making that  pitch is often a good move; or you can try to compare  yourself up  against another school that the Prospect is interested in to  earn your  school some points and take some away from your rivals. 
Make  Pitch will always earn you points, but it is very dependent  on  your program's grade and how important the topic is to the  Prospect.  The only way to know the importance of a pitch is to find it.
Find  Pitch will always tell you how important a pitch is to that   Prospect; unlock the score range and it will earn you some points.  Here  you can see an example of one of the score ranges for a topic that  has  been found:
  
 
You'll never need to find a pitch.  However, knowing  what the Prospect  thinks can help you maximize your score.  This also  opens the ability  to sway the pitch.
Sway Pitch  becomes available after you know how important a  topic is to the  Prospect. This option gives you a chance to convince  the Prospect that  this pitch should be more important to him. You'll  want to focus on  trying to sway pitches that are best for you school.  The reason for this  is it gives you a much better chance of scoring  points because the more  a Prospect cares about something, the more  points you can earn.
 
Compare Pitch replaces Downplay from last year's  game, and can  be one of the most powerful options available. Compare  Pitch puts your  grade vs. another school's grade and how much the  Prospect cares about  the pitch all together to give you points as well  as remove points from  the school you selected. Because of that we show  you the grades of  each school so it's easy to see:
 
 The further you out-class your opponent the more points you will take   from them.  Your score will not be affected, however. So you'll have to   decide if it's more important for you to target a rival and bring them   down, or keep gaining as many points as you can and hope you catch up   (or stay ahead!).
Change Topic is the first  example of one of the outs you have in  dealing with a topic your school  might not be good at. Each call will  give you 3 times you can change the  topic (there is one exception to  this I'll explain later); so you can  feel free to use it every call  because they come back. Change Topic will  give you another roll at a  topic; but, there is a chance you could get a  topic you've already  passed on. Based on the length of the call and how  good your school's  Pitches are will dictate how often you use Change  Topic.  Smaller  schools with lower scores may find themselves out of  Change Topics  often.
Make Promise is finally not  just an off-season recruiting tool.  If  you don't like the topic you're  given, another way to get around  talking about it is to offer a  promise; this will consume the topic and  give you points. You can only  offer 3 Promises to any single Prospect  and if you do not keep your  promises you'll start to lose what you can  promise. Promises work off  their own score range based on what you are  promising.For example,  saying you'll win a National Title is a lot more  impressive then telling  a prospect he won't red shirt his first year.
Schedule  Visit is similar to previous years of NCAA Football.   You pick a  home game (or bye week) for the Prospect to come to your  campus and you  earn points based on how well you match up his  Activities and how well  you play that week. The big difference is this  is now considered an out,  which means once you Schedule a Visit that  topic has been used. Also,  you can no longer reschedule visits.  Your'e  now held accountable for  what you tell a Prospect on the phone.
Offer Scholarship  is the last option in a Phone Call.  Like the  previous two options, it  uses the Topic, so you can Offer a Scholarship  on a bad Topic for your  school to get around talking about it.  But  you can only offer it once  to a Prospect.
Once you figure out what you are going to do on a  topic, you instantly  get to know how much you scored on the Topic  Results screen:
  
 
Two things to notice on the above screen shot is the  Call Tracker at  the top of the screen and the Pipeline Bonus under the  points gained.  The Call Tracker will show you how many topics you have  left (6 in the  example), the current pitch, and what you have scored on  your previous  topics. Based on your Pipeline States in Dynasty you can  earn extra  bonus points if the Prospect you are calling is from one of  those  states. This is now shown to you on the Topic Results screen so  you can  see how many extra points you are scoring for Making, Finding,   Swaying, or Comparing a pitch.
 When you are done with a Call you are given a Call Recap screen (this   is the same screen you'll see if you quick call as well):
 
 This is an example of a call with 5 of the options you can perform.
Now  that you can really see how many points you are scoring in each  call we  made a change to the Prospects Top Schools screen to help you:
 
You can now see how many points you are behind (or  ahead) of every  school in the Top 10 for every Prospect.  Also you can  access this  screen during a call to help you decide on your course of  action during  a call.
Well that's it for Dynasty Blog 1 of 3:  Phone Call.  Thanks for taking  the time to read it. I hope you'll enjoy  the new Phone Calls as much as  we do. Keep checking back here for the  next two parts.
-Russ Kiniry
Designer NCAA Football 11