Now I have a better understanding, only slightly though I would be more careful with my bids, especially at the start. Be selective with my first pick up and go for a five star player. 
 

After that hope for the best.

Me? I'm just grabbing what I can get. Sometimes I get a 5, sometimes a 3 star...it feels a little bit like the giant claw game at the pizza parlor trying to pull out a stuffed animal. Sometimes it claw comes back empty...other times...paydirt!

I need at least one more player (could've done with 2 really) but I don't have anywhere near enough RP

GIVE ME MORE RP

:)

No doubt my entire next season is already ruined as I will have to draft in a player with about as much volleyball ability as a tomato (a crazy tomato?)

I'm having to rely on my free 3* OH for a few seasons.

Trying to triangulate a player's value at Step 3 is a bear. Coming up with an estimate based on prior bids for similar players is easy enough, but factoring in some expectation of what other coaches' intentions are (i.e., how desperate are they for that four-star MB?) is the real challenge. Not really much that can be done about that. There is plenty of information available on the site, but unfortunately (fortunately?) no way to get inside another coach's head.

Nice concept and layout. 

The best players may go to the best teams, so maybe a few lower star players could be included for teams short on money so they can still feel involved in the recruitment process. 

 I ended up scattering my bids 2nd half of season just to get any player at all, but that is likely my own fault rather than anything wrong with process :-)

What are your impressions of season 5 recruiting?

 - I didn't have enough RP to get more than 3 players. Clearly this not my fault :)

Is it strategy?  Is it luck?  Is it a combination?

 - It's insufficient RP's for the newbies....the existing crop had a HUGE advantage. Yes, I am sulking.

What would you have done differently knowing what you do now?

 - Probably tried to get 2 from every recruitment phase.....if I had enough RP to do it!!! ;)

Do we need to tweak anything in our setup?

 - I need not answer this, you know already :)

Do you know that if you are on the recruiting page and click the Dashboard tab it will tell you exactly what your roster requirements are for next season?

 - Yeah, I think so....

I enjoyed it. I got lucky in the final session when some big RP teams didn't bid, which moved the Pandas up to #2 on the recruitment rankings.

But I was the only newbie in the top ten showing perhaps the bigger RP accounts were more likely to pick up players.

The dashboard is a great help, getting the extra RP through media helps. Next season I'll try and target more 5* players. Luck pays a big part though.

There's always going to be a luck component, but I think you can minimise it pretty well after five seasons of this.

I'm not sure it's working, though. A lot of the strategy is like being in a poker game by looking at what the other bidders might do. You gain a lot of benefit from waiting until Saturday to place the second round bid, by seeing if you have more RP than the other bidders, or even mis-directing by placing bids in early so it looks like someone'll be visiting your campus and then un-doing that at the last moment.

It's wonderful that there's so much transparency, but the way it currently works doesn't entirely work - I can easily calculate whether I'll get a player if I place a bid for them based on the other teams bidding.

The way you'd change this is to remove some of the transparency from the process. There's a few options, some of which I like better than others, but I'll try not to be transparent about which ones I prefer and rank them in the order of the transparency that's being removed.

1. Remove all transparency from the auction process. You just bid on players but you don't get any information about who's bidding. This may allow for better price discovery but the best players would probably still suffer from one-under syndrome where the player's price is equal to the max RPs for the team bidding in second place. Could also cause more players to slip thru the cracks.

2. Remove some transparency from the process by showing the amount of interest in the player after the first round instead of the teams bidding on the player, possibly through an interest: none, low, medium, high, very high indicator next to the player's name. Probably solves the slip thru the cracks problem.

3. Remove some transparency from the process by only showing the number of teams bidding on a player instead of the actual teams.

4. Allow teams to place blind bids for a premium price. Instead of having their logo show up as a bidding team, OLMEC would display a ? logo. This would allow for better price discovery as you might not be able to one-under a specific team, though again it wouldn't completely solve the problem.

5. Mask the exact amount of RPs other teams have and make the publicly visible RP metric a ranking. For instance, Sheboygan currently is 31st of 32 teams in RP. Publicly, Sheboygan would show as RP: 31st of 32. When I'm logged in, Sheboygan would show as RP: 241 (31st of 32). Would still let you know you would be able to win the player if you put all your RP on the line but again wouldn't solve the one-under problem for the five-stars.

Fine, I'll be transparent - I'm not sure I like any of them, though I think some are indeed interesting, especially for reducing the late mover problem.

Or just understand that for the five-stars, the team with the most RPs will frequently get the player for the price of the team with the second most RPs, plus one. There will always be an incentive to max out your RP spend for the best players!

It took a few weeks for me to realize that recruiting is all about spending money. Spend money, don't save up, go after the kid you want. Some managers are willing to over-pay, but surprisingly many good players can bought inexpensively.

I'm guessing that in real life it is known which teams are interested in a player and which teams he has visited but not necessarily which teams have offered incentives to join them. So I like option 1.

Also if Columbia have shown interest and/or had a visit they can't unshow interest. So maybe lock these bids once saved to stop certain managers playing mind games.

In real life it is almost always known which teams are interested, at least for the bigger sports. I think the biggest problem at the moment in terms of this league is late movers have an advantage by withholding the information that they're interested until the end.

I also don't like the idea of "locking in" recruiting - it should be like orders.

On the other hand if you bid early and have even a decent amount of RP you can potentially put off other bidders

This is only a test.  For science.....

One aspect I definitely appreciate is that you can't just run up the price of a top recruit at no cost to your team.  You have to put in the bids in the first two rounds and pay a price.  Once there, you can absolutely run up the price on a player that you might no longer want to make sure a competitor pays more than he or should would prefer, and keep them from being able to get a 3rd or 4th top recruit this season.  While it's always a gamble (as they might not want that player any more either and you end up holding the bag), there is a strategic value to not letting your main competitors get away with steals once you've already got some skin in the game.