Tuesday, September 02, 2008

A Sports Post, Sort Of, But Mostly a Post About Thinking

This is the kind of thoughtfulness I deeply appreciate.

One of my long-running problems with the NCAA series is that teams generally pass too much. Teams wind up resembling each other to a much greater degree than they should, and it makes the in game experience less diverse than it should be. This passing tendency also is reflected in the stats for simulated games, which also tend to be pass-happy.

That's the sports part. Here's the thoughtfulness part.

Over at the NCAA Strategies forum, "HookemHorns" started a thread with this comment:
Just as in the past the computer has issues with passing the ball way to often and it skews the stats not only in game but also the season stats in a dynasty. I think I have found the answer to this problem.

For my example I will use Texas.

In Texas' playbook there are 321 total plays of which 40% are running plays which means 60% would be passing plays, obviously right.

Now when you go into Coach Strategies and set the Run/Pass slider to 50 this does not mean the CPU controlled team will run and pass the ball 50% of the time and be completely balanced. Using Texas' playbook with the run/pass slider at 50 Texas will pass the ball 60% of the time and run the ball 40% of the time.

Now in real life Texas ran the ball 55% of the time in 2007. So how do we change it so in the game Texas will run the ball 55% of the time?

I still need to do testing but with Texas' playbook anytime you move the Run/Pass slider by 1 you will increase or decrease the run/pass percentage by 1.25.

That's something that I'm not sure EA even knows about its own code.

HookemHorns took this knowledge, continued testing, and wound up with run/pass settings for every single team in the game. His results?
What I've noticed is there are a few teams that will fluctuate from simulation to simulation but all of the teams should be within +/- 5% of their real life percentages, about 90% should always be within +/- 3%.

Seriously, that is crazy good. It's so good that I might be willing to dig this game out of the turd pile, apply patch #2, and start a Dynasty.

Out of respect for the work of an end user.

If you're curious, the thread starts here, and the settings are on page 8.

This is a perfect example of the kind of excellence that exists in the user community, and it's a real shame that EA Sports never seems to reach out to people like this. That's slider's been in the game for years, but I don't think anyone at EA ever took 30 seconds to explain how it worked-- if they even knew.

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