Dynasty Blog 2 of 3: Prospects
by Russ 05/20/10 4:43 PM
Russ Kiniry (NCAA Football 11 Designer) back again and as promised, here is part 2 of the Dynasty Blogs for NCAA Football 11; you can check out the first one about our new
Phone Call here. But before we get into the details of the second blog, I'd like to mention one more thing about the New Phone Call that can help you in a call. We were going to reveal this later but there have been a lot of good discussions at various community sites and we want to ensure everyone has all the new information for our new Phone Calls.
During a call, when you are between topics, there is a chance you can earn what we call a Coaches Choice. This gives you the option to select the next topic and leverage your program's strengths.
The only catch is, you don't have control about when it appears. For smaller schools, this and the ability to change topics can be life savers during a call. As you really dive into the new Phone Call, you'll be able to see how all these elements tie together and make you think a little about how you'll react. Now let's get on with the rest of the blog...
For the rest of this blog we are going to go over some of the new things we've done with the Prospects in Dynasty Mode. As you all know, the further you get in future years of Dynasty Mode the more the new Prospects coming into your game matter, so we had to ensure we did a better job this year in creating and ranking these Prospects.
As you many of you have already guessed, there is a new ratings spread in NCAA Football 11. You'll no longer see dozens of players at 99 OVR in this year's game when looking at the rosters we ship with. Hence, we had to ensure the new Prospects created in Dynasty Mode matched the new philosophy. The Prospects have been re-created... every single one of them. The reason being is we wanted to ensure that all positions in the game had its share of elite players, multiple types of players, and an even spread from top to bottom.
What classifies as an elite Prospect has changed from previous years with the new ratings spread. As you can imagine, you'll no longer see true freshman come into the game rated in the 90's OVR or even high 80's OVR. Only the top Prospects at any position this year will come in over an 80 OVR and depending on your school, he may or may not be able to start instantly.
We tried to create each Prospect in a similar mold to players that play at each position each Saturday and built themes for each position. For example, you can scout defensive ends that specialize in a speed pass rush or a strength based run stopper.
New to the game this year is the ESPNU 150; which replaces the old Top 100 we had in previous versions of NCAA Football. Each of the top 150 Prospects in the nation will be tagged as one of the ESPNU 150 and you'll be able to see that next to their portrait:
After the Prospects were created and the ESPNU 150 list was filled out, we took a look at how each Prospect was ranked against each other. In years past the Prospects were always ranked by overall; meaning the "best" player was always ranked at the top of the list. Because of this, we had to have kickers, punters, and fullbacks overall ratings lowered to ensure they rarely showed up in the Top 100. To improve the fidelity of this list we've included position into the ranking formula.
This change sounds pretty simple, but it has a big impact. We can now weigh a position to be more or less valuable in the rankings formula. For example, last year's list would take an 80 OVR QB vs. an 81 OVR Kicker and rate the kicker higher. In this year's game we are able to keep the Kickers rating at an 81 overall, but his ranking will not even crack the ESPNU 150 because his position isn't as valued. Together, this change and the new ratings spread improved the Prospect rankings in the ESPNU 150; and we were still basing the list on overall within each position.
Using an arbitrary number to adjust the rankings really seemed like a poor way of going about things, so we took a rating that isn't visible to help solve the problem: potential. What we did for some of the Prospects is change both their overall rank and position rank based on the potential they have. This doesn't mean that you'll now see a 40 OVR player as a 5 star... but it does mean you might see a Prospect who is technically a few points lower in OVR rated above another Prospect. So, why did we use Potential?
This is a rating all Prospects (and players) in our game have, and it matters equally for everyone when it comes to player progression. We took another look at player progression this year and really pushed Potential to be the major force in driving how much better players on your team get. This choice came from gathering lots of feedback from you guys in the community from the forums and the Live Chat we had on the subject a while back. Basically, potential felt like the best equalizer to measure a players worth in conjunction with his overall rating. The balancing factor to keep this more realistic is not every player uses his potential rating to determine his value, so there is still some surprise when you get any Prospect on your roster.
Once we got the Prospects created and ranked, we moved onto JUCO's next. These Prospects were really easy to deal with after all the work done above. We simply raised the attributes of every JUCO a few points more than they would have been with the new ratings spread and made the value of a JUCO lower in the rankings. So here is a likely scenario for 4 different Prospects you'll see once you have the game:
Player A - True Freshman QB, 70 Overall rating, 90 Potential rating
Player B - JUCO Junior HB, 75 Overall rating, 75 Potential rating
Player C - True Freshman HB, 73 Overall rating, 50 Potential rating
Player D - True Freshman QB, 71 Overall rating, 70 Potential rating
On average with the 4 players above would end up being ranked like this in NCAA Football 11:
1. Player A
2. Player D
3. Player C
4. Player B
In previous years, only overall would have mattered.
When you add up all the changes to Prospects and the new Phone Call we've already made some significant changes to Dynasty Mode in NCAA Football 11. But honestly that wasn't enough (and well this is only Blog 2 of 3), so there is still more. What's great is Blog 3 will address some of the comments about the first blog: both about Kent State being in the Top 10 of our 5 Star Fullback (in the last blog's screen shots) and the points showing up in the Top Schools menu. We will take a look at the logic behind signing a Recruit and how the CPU will do it.
Once again thanks for reading, and keep checking back here for the next blog about Dynasty Mode.
-Russ Kiniry
Designer NCAA Football
