Customize OOC Schedule

[jonesguy14]

Have an option to customize the out-of-conference schedule at the start of the year, so that they can change how hard of opponents they get.

[destilla]

I'm writing down some ideas I have on implementing this and two things I came across to consider:

1) If I want to win a NCG and I can choose my schedule, I'm going to choose #60, 59, and 58, because going undefeated is so valuable that the hit to my SOS probably won't even matter (especially considering all I need to do is get to #4 after the conf champ week, and being undefeated going into the CCG is a great way to do that) -- So, some sort of check needs to be put in against this.

2) If a team is getting a home field advantage for games where they are passed as the home team, ideally the number of home games they play should be evened out (since Football Coach has no FCS and most teams (lol samoa) are considered to be good enough to win any given Saturday). If this is true, the number of home games you get from the round robin schedule should be taken into consideration with the OOC (right now it's random).

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Ideas for solutions to 1)

• Prestige loss if you're constantly playing bottom dwellers and there's never anyone worth talking about in your OOC. Ex: Everyone has cupcakes. If the whole schedule is cupcakes your ability to hang with real teams with consistency comes into question. Even Alabama, notorious cupcake scheduler, has one solid (or at least P5) team on their OOC schedule each year.
• Force the user to select from a tier for at least one game. So one game is with any team, one is any team above #40, one is any team above #30 or top 25 or something.

Idea for a solution to 1) and 2)

• Somewhat mimic real life OOC scheduling by scheduling OOC series a few years in advance, save what year the user is going to play which teams and what years they're home/away. Maybe still implement some sort of restriction on how many basement dwellers you can pick (because 99% of the team you're going to beat Samoa if you pick them, even if it's years in advance).

Alternatively -- Make your opponents a stronger consideration for Poll score OR whatever and just let people pick who they will and leave things unchanged.

[akeaswaran]

To address 1, what if you instituted the tier system and added a multiplier to the updatePollScore function depending on if the team you played was weaker (lower-tier) or stronger (higher-tier) than you?

Another idea: You could also live-calculate the strength of schedule like NCAA '14 did when the user edits their schedule and implement a hard minimum that the team's strength of schedule has to be at or above based on its prestige.

[destilla]

So I've got the start of a setup that will allow for a home and away rotation in conference, so that any teams you play at home this year, get saved and played on the road next year. ("you" being a team)

For whatever reason I can get it to work perfectly on the initial year, but I can't get the values of the teams on that list to properly get saved/read as a string. I either get an error telling me it can't append strings (wat) or each year the array of string values adds a space to each of the array's values and another set of braces around the array.

I just can't figure out what the hell I'm doing, and it's super late, but I've got progress at least. From there OOC can be setup according to which games should be at home, which shouldn't and whatever criteria is decided on.

[jonesguy14]

Been busy lately but I do like your ideas here. The main reason why I have delayed implementing this features is because I felt like the players would abuse it, but having some restrictions may prevent that.

Having a tier system where the user would have to have a minimum strength of schedule is an option but that might be too annoying to users to have to find a good enough schedule every year.

So yeah I'm not sure yet about what to do here. We'll keep throwing around ideas but this feature will probably wait until other stuff is done.

[destilla]

Sounds good, at the very least some foundational work has been done so that whatever is decided on, it's easier to move in that direction.