I'm unsure if it's a bug or I just didn't put in the effort needed regardless of other outside factors.  I'm prepared to believe a very small percentage of players might not be able to be pulled, but very small.  I generally pull one per class, sometimes more, but I'm totally fine with the idea that one in a hundred might not work. 

I am prepared to say that effort in pulldown doesn't speed up the drop down process.  To an extent I see pulldowns as a way to get to a kid quicker, but to me the clock for him to possibly drop is independent of my actions to try to pull him down quicker.  Of course I could be flawed in that thinking, but I see them as two separate things.  When I'm trying to pull a guy down it's almost always early on to try to get a head start.

This is all D3 related, although my 2 D1 teams are, in theory, similar.  Just more money/battles/risk.  I only played D2 for one or two seasons, but I would think it behaves like a mix of D3 and D1, prestige, cash being the obvious differences.

Goliath Online!!

Posted by gillispie1 on 4/25/2014 11:05:00 AM (view original):
what about d1 pulldowns? those are very rarely talked about, because you basically have no chance of signing those guys even if you pull them down, unless they are awful, in which case, whats the point? that said, i have almost no idea how to pull someone down in d1. i had done it before years ago but in the new engine i tried twice with 50 scouting trips and got nowhere. i can't remember if i took it further, but i doubt it. any successful d1 to d1 pulldown stories to share? any illuminating failure stories?

below B+ prestige I could only talk to players around 2 or 3 stars and down (talk to means they would accept regular/non pull down effort) but could get backup messages on some of the 3 or 4 stars. I don't think I ever even bothered trying to call a 5 star, since the A+ BCS schools got them all anyway.

Once you got the backup message it is any old pulldown. They do sometimes eventually "drop" too (I'd get the not getting enough love and wants playing time type indicator messages...) I built my Marquette team in Phelan that went Sweet 16 with some of those type players...

would everyone else agree, doing effort towards a pulldown, without successful completion, has no bearing whatsoever on the drop time? as in, you can't do half the effort and get the guy to drop say 4 cycles sooner?

Yes. Players drop when they drop, irrespective of pull down attempts...pretty sure I saw someone post a ticket about this recently too, but this is my experience as well.

Posted by gillispie1 on 4/25/2014 12:15:00 PM (view original):

Posted by killbatman on 4/25/2014 11:50:00 AM (view original):
Well I can't be sure without all the details, but I can't really explain it based on what you've said.

One thought..I saw it mentioned at some point in this thread.  There was/is a bug where sometimes players showing on the D3 search (for a D3 school), who should be 'recruitable', were rejecting HVs like a D2 player would.  It's possible that bug extends up to pulldowns as well.  Maybe sometimes guys who should be 'pullable' are not responding how they should in a very small % of cases.  Just a theory that might explain it.

you know, i had typed something almost identical, about 45m ago, but stopped. the reason is, the (say for a d3 school), the d3 players who aren't recruited, supposedly, the phone call is still correct. supposedly its always correct, although i sort of feel like we had an exception here that shattered my reality of recruiting so i just blocked it from my memory... well, thats half the reason.

anyway i think the thing about the pulldowns, if they NEVER started considering you, then i would think it was a bug, but they do start considering you eventually. those d3 guys who are bugged out, they will never start to consider you. so i was thinking i was probably going nowhere with the bug theory, that the pulldown worked with enough effort, so it had to be something else. however, maybe they are not actually possible to pull down but will eventually drop to you? i never thought to check what division the guy showed up in, in my singular experience, i don't know if anyone else has done so, that is the only thing that tells you if a guy is considering you because he dropped to you, or because you pulled him down (i hope readers who are not 100% solid on that raise questions, that is a very important point about the difference in dropdowns and pulldowns that many seem to have a bit confused). in my singular experience, the guy did drop to me the same cycle i did a bunch of stuff, and i know the other school said something like, by the time he dropped, he didn't want to fight me anyway, but i have no idea what the other guys prestige was :( so that's no help. while on the topic, would everyone else agree, doing effort towards a pulldown, without successful completion, has no bearing whatsoever on the drop time? as in, you can't do half the effort and get the guy to drop say 4 cycles sooner? i am pretty confident on that but it never ceases to amaze me when seble "rewrote" the engine, how many of the hard-and-trues stopped being hard and true :( i never got over the one where if the 150sg would talk to you but not the 149sg (all 70 mile players exempted), the 148 and up would 100% never talk to you and the 151 and down would 100% always talk to you. that made it so much easier, it saved a huge amount of incessant phone calls. thats partly why i just stick to d1, but this d2/d3 stuff still really intrigues me, in theory at least :)

You make a good case for it not being that specific bug, but it could always be something similar but different.  I'm sort of coming around to the fact that something weird is happening there..just wish (well sort of, maybe not really) I could see it for myself to evaluate better.

Sidebar, you made me think of another issue I thought I'd throw out for discussion/ridicule.  I've been thinking recently that perhaps team B pulling a player down CAN (not always will, but can) impact his status for me, as a team in the same level as team B.

Real example that happened recently that reminded me of this..I've had a couple previous situations that made me think about it too. 

Team A (D3 team) sees a local player on the D2 search that they want.  A few options.  1. send a coach call 1st cycle, then pull down 2nd cycle after a backup response, 2. blind pull down 1st cycle and hope he was going to give a backup response, or 3. Send HVs right away and hope he's immediately D3/recruitable.

Assume team B, also a local D3 team, uses option #2 in the first cycle and succeeds, showing up on the list.  Team A uses option #3 first cycle.  Does anyone think team B's efforts to successfully pull down the player have an impact on team A using strategy #3?  Is there such a thing as pulling down the player for someone else?  I think most would probably say no, but wondering if anyone has seen something that made them suspect it.

Posted by ettaexpress on 4/25/2014 2:33:00 PM (view original):
If so that would be horrible game design. Players don't commit to divisions, players commit to schools, and often times, coaches.

Please explain without using real life basketball why that would be horrible game design.  Seems like an interesting strategic element to me.

I'd say no, otherwise if two coaches combined to make it easier to pull to one or the other the issue of not getting a pulldown to ... well, pull down wouldn't be there.

Or are you asking if that's two separate things?

Yeah I'm suggesting it might be 2 separate things.  I'm probably way off on that one, but hey, if you suggest enough crazy ideas, one of them is bound to be right..right?

Posted by ettaexpress on 4/25/2014 2:43:00 PM (view original):

Posted by killbatman on 4/25/2014 2:33:00 PM (view original):

Posted by ettaexpress on 4/25/2014 2:33:00 PM (view original):
If so that would be horrible game design. Players don't commit to divisions, players commit to schools, and often times, coaches.

Please explain without using real life basketball why that would be horrible game design.  Seems like an interesting strategic element to me.

Your premise is invalid.

Why the hell would you want something incorporated into the game that can't be explained or related to real life basketball? I mean that's just stupid.

See this is part of why people are 'mean' to you.  People ask you over and over and over again to stop comparing it to real life basketball.  We get it.  We even agree with you, HD <> real life basketball.  Please stop making those comparisons and using words like "broken" and "dumb" when you point out for the 8000th time that HD <> real life basketball.  All it does is irritate people and I think you know this.

Posted by ettaexpress on 4/25/2014 2:03:00 PM (view original):

Posted by asher413 on 4/25/2014 11:11:00 AM (view original):
A few notes that I'm sure will be picked apart:

#1: If you have more than six scholarships, you only get money for six, so it's mathematically difficult to fill 10 slots with quality players, unless you find cheap options.  Pull downs is not one of those.

#2: In general, unless you're getting one of the elite DI players, freshmen will not be able to compete their first year on the court.  Therefore, you won't be able to find recruits good enough to compete with 9 freshman in a season.

#3: HD is a game, it's not really college basketball.  If it was, we'd have to wait until the fall to do anything with our players, we'd be making sure their tutors were 'helping' them on their finals right now, and getting ready to stay in hotels to watch players for the next 3 months.  Many of the mechanics in HD (recruiting included) are designed for fun, not to match the real world.  But, the HD recruiting system is pretty fair- the rules apply to each coach equally, and the recruit generation is random.

#4: I'll repeat what I said earlier- Pull downs are difficult.  They cost a lot of money, and as others have pointed out, if you're pulling a guy down, that means every school with a higher prestige than you can pull them down for less money, and some don't even need to pull him down.

#5: You can get knocked off a recruit (and I consider it a valid strategy), by someone placing significnatly more effort than you.  This means you have to spend more money just to get the "considering bonus" (99% sure that's in a Dev Chat if you want to look up details)

#6: Please don't compare Seble and Tarek.  Two different beasts, one was working more freely, the other under the Fox umbrella.

Asher,

#1. Well that would have been good information to have had. I thought you got money for however many spots you had, but you just couldn't have more than 6 players in a class. 

So you get money for spots up to 6, but not after, as if those spots just don't exist? That's really colossally dumb.

#2. Then the designers should watch a damn basketball game. But I wasn't planning on recruiting 9 freshmen, for that very reason.

#3. You said it, not me! Then you went a little crazy trying to act like you couldn't accelerate the timeline for those things. You could do a much more realistic model with a sped-up timeline.

#4. Everyone talks about them here like they do them every year. No one ever talked like they were hard and people shouldn't do them, quite the contrary, I've read here that you more or less have to do it in order to get the best players. 

#5. That is absolutely horsecrap. For one thing, putting in a huge amount of effort in one cycle shouldn't even be allowed. If you have to go away and can't recruit for a day or so then you should have the option to time lapse your orders, but it's ridiculous that you would not be involved wiht a player and then all of a sudden be able to schedule a ton of time when your program is no better than the team recruiting the player. 

On #1- The why: Because for a long time the 'valid' strategy was simply to have all 12 scholarships open so you could A. recruit with money like no tomorrow and B. Be unstoppable for two years.  The community and designers at the time decided this wasn't fun for the majority, so they stopped it.
Also- I'm worried that you didn't know that.  It's here in the FAQ for HD (http://www.whatifsports.com/hd/help/faq.aspx) specifically, the first and last points in the recruiting section.
All this information is here to help you, and some of us are working our rear ends off to keep answering your questions and actually trying to help. But this is one more that has given up.  If/when you get sitemail back, I'm willing to answer specific questions, but if all you're going to do with every one of my responses is complain about how poor the designers are, or this game is, why should I keep trying to help you enjoy it?

If you don't like the game, that's fine.  There's hundreds of games on the internet, and maybe one fits your desires and you enjoy it.  If this one isn't it, stop poking at it's 'holes' and go find that game for you. From your repeated comments about the design (even up here where you call it "horsecrap" and "the designers should watch a .... basketball game") you feel that HD is a terrible simulation and game, and clearly you should stop wasting your time with it.

Civil tone over: Read that FAQs.  Search the forum on this stuff.  Read the developer chats when these changes occured.  Try to understand all the limitations in the basic rules of the system, and maybe even why they are in play.  I hope you make a basketball sim someday, I'd love to see it in action since clearly this design is below your standards.  There are loads of information and resources here if you actually want to understand the game.  Your comabtive attitude has chased me away from trying to help, and many others that have helped hundreds...