It's quite frustrating, isn't it?

[NoLittleBabies]

Many teams rosters are messed up this year, with some teams missing entire freshman classes, transferred players still on teams, very little attention given to detail. And the worst part, absolutely no way to get roster updates. This is devastating for those of us that play primarily (or exclusively) online. BCS schools still have uniform issues (including obvious mishaps like white facemasks for Iowa).

This is all quite hard to imagine considering the fact EA has thousands of fans in major forums like this one basically willing to do their work (or at least quality control) for them, for free.

On top of that, all early impressions seem to suggest NCAA 10 gameplay is merely NCAA 09.5. And considering NCAA 09 had some very major flaws, that's a pretty depressing fact. Even something as easy to edit as playbooks appears to have received very little attention.

Sure, TeamBuilder is an excellent feature, but any feature can only be as good as the core gameplay it helps support. Without great gameplay, the pleasure of any feature will fizzle out pretty quickly.

So another year's worth of effort for the folks at EA, and we have a subpar game patched up a bit, with two new features added on: the legitimate TeamBuilder, which probably should have been added years ago, and the bizzarely uninteresting Season Showdown.

The saddest part about the whole thing is that significant change is nowhere in sight. From a business perspective, EA is playing it smart. But we would hope profit isn't the only motivation for the development team. I won't make any major assumptions, as I know there are people at EA who legitimately care about making a great football game. Either those people are few, not in positions of power, or else the NCAA team as a whole is just understaffed, underfinanced and/or under resourced. Either way, things aren't being fixed, and subsequently EA continues to make NCAA games that are unexciting and underwhelming at best, and severely flawed at worst. There is no reason for optimism regarding the near future, and yet most of us need our college football gaming fix each and every year, and have nowhere else to turn for it.

[DaTwolves21]

You need to be honest with yourself. We the people that care about games in more closer way are out numbered and I wouldn't expect a change until sales dip. I like your point but there's not enough of us to get there attention.

[NoLittleBabies]

Nothing I said contradicts that. EA's business model is sound, and there's little hope for reform in the near future.

[WisconsinSports414]

Yeah, it's gotta be tough for a lot of guys on these forums. I mean, the only realistic choices for them are either don't buy the game and not get that CFB fix, or buy it when they feel it is not of an acceptable quality and end up disappointed that way instead. Folks are just gonna have to be patient...and hope that things change soon.

[lint]

I am going to give NCAA one more try before going to same route I did with Madden, where I would not buy based on xyz. For me NCAA11 must have xyz or I will not play it. This year though they made the game more playable (according to pastapadre) so I will be satisfied with the improvements...

I do not harp on uniforms because as long as I can 80% of the way recognize the team then I am cool with that.

To the guys who are upset about freshman, I am curious, when do the school release their freshmen lineups of who made the team?
How would they know if they had that information who to redshirt, who to not redshirt or who to delete from the team because they were not good enough? What about that walkon gem that no one would really talk about?

Not really trying to defend, but trying to be realistic.

Only thing that really makes me happy is watching the Offensive and Defensive line play, if you get that right the rest of the game will fall into place.