Madden needs to overhaul its schedule generation system

[sadler]

Re: Madden needs to overhaul its schedule generation system

Not quite true, the inter-conference matchups rotate every 6 years. There isn’t really a clean cut solution, and, until you’ve actually made a 30+ team sports schedule, be careful labeling anyone “lazy”. Real professional leagues use a combination of super-computer generation & human oversight for a reason.

I’m aware how the schedule works, however I call them lazy because the way the schedule works each week after season 1 is clearly not given enough time. Teams can be at home for 6/7 straight games. Thursday night games appear at the bottom of weekly schedules instead of the top and prime time games are not weighted towards the more successful teams. It’s been like this for 10/15 years and needs some polish.

[Detroit Tigers]

Re: Madden needs to overhaul its schedule generation system

Is there a way to “re-roll” your schedule? Like save & reload at the right spot and get a different schedule every time? Or is it always the same schedule? I’ll re-roll 10 times if needed.

[sadler]

Re: Madden needs to overhaul its schedule generation system

Is there a way to “re-roll” your schedule? Like save & reload at the right spot and get a different schedule every time? Or is it always the same schedule? I’ll re-roll 10 times if needed.

They had that in Madden 94!!

But no, not anymore.

[CgyFlames]

Re: Madden needs to overhaul its schedule generation system

They had that in Madden 94!!

But no, not anymore.

As did EA’s final NCAA games. One tap and it generates a new schedule for everybody.

[doorknobb]

Re: Madden needs to overhaul its schedule generation system

Also, games with far more complicated scheduling demands, on much smaller budgets, can figure out a scheduling system and have had a working one for... possibly up to a decade (my old Steam library no longer runs on my new hardware so I can't go back to check). OOTP comes to mind (and by extension, FHM, but also the FM series). Your league can automatically expand and either balance and unbalance the league, interleague games are an option but not a given, you can manually set an balanced or in this year, an unbalanced schedule. I realize that 162 games gives you leeway, but as long as you don't do something truly ridiculous on your end (move half of NL to the AL, for example), it handles schedule generation, real or fake teams, with little issue, and before the 2023 licensing debacle, for the Japanese, Korean, Aussie, European, Cuban, Mexican, and Indy leagues too. The franchise started development a full decade and plus after Madden did. Before the balanced schedule came in, the interleague rotation + specific rivalries that fall outside of the formalized interleague rotation (Freeway series, Subway series, etc) throw another wrench into the mix. The primary complaint is from Seattle having to travel too much but having lived in Seattle I'd say that's just a general complaint as to how annoying it can be to get to anywhere on the east coast, even a major city like Boston. You can't schedule the country smaller, geography is what it is.

And there's of course the regenerate option if you want it. I used it maybe twice in the last 3 years, and one of it was entirely my fault (screwed up playoffs setup and accidentally added one more wildcard team than I should have). Before OOTP Studios got bought out by that Korean company in 2018-ish their dev team is, I can safely put money on this proposition, smaller than Madden's QA team. Sometimes I seriously wonder if their outsourcing of QA created a situation where those doing QA as a job (instead of paying to beta test aka early access) don't actually know how the game is played IRL.

The MLB schedule was done by hand for the longest time, and transitioned to a computerized system fairly late in the game, pun sort-of-intended. I'm not sure how many people even noticed beyond professional bettors and TV execs. I'm not saying it's a cakewalk, it's not, but they are professionals who should be able to implement a user-friendly and/or more reasonable scheduling system. Triage it, put it in the pipeline, make it an issue in their VCS setup. it can be done. They just didn't.

(Also, why would you treat a Thursday opener as a mid season Thursday game? It screws up training and the bye week surely ameliorates some of the effects that an actual short week produces? Again, this should have been triaged via QA and an orderly process. Instead, I've had 3 of these in 6 seasons in franchise and 2 of my QB1s have gotten injured. Correlation != causation, but that is... high).

[MLcardinalfan]

Re: Madden needs to overhaul its schedule generation system

Way back, when I worked on Madden 2000, I told EA of the scheduling problem after playing one season. Did they listen, of course not. Some times I had a schedule where I had all eight home games in a row. I guess the genius programmers at the time couldn't figure out an equation to limit 1 to 3 home away games in a row. Suggestions to EA fell mainly on deaf ears while they had us work an 80 plus hour week.

[oneamongthefence]

Re: Madden needs to overhaul its schedule generation system

Way back, when I worked on Madden 2000, I told EA of the scheduling problem after playing one season. Did they listen, of course not. Some times I had a schedule where I had all eight home games in a row. I guess the genius programmers at the time couldn't figure out an equation to limit 1 to 3 home away games in a row. Suggestions to EA fell mainly on deaf ears while they had us work an 80 plus hour week.

Were you a dev or QA? That was my 1st Madden game I poured hundreds of hours into so I'd love to hear stories or any behind the scenes stuff on working on it beyond the extreme hours.

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[MLcardinalfan]

Re: Madden needs to overhaul its schedule generation system

Were you a dev or QA? That was my 1st Madden game I poured hundreds of hours into so I'd love to hear stories or any behind the scenes stuff on working on it beyond the extreme hours.

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I was a QA tester. What platform did you buy Madden 2000 for? I have some behind the scene stories for EA, as well as Namco (which treated QA even worse than EA), Sony and even 3DO.

[adembroski]

Re: Madden needs to overhaul its schedule generation system

It's stuff like this that makes this game infuriating. The NFL has a fairly easy schedule model. The only thing EA needs to is spread out the games correctly. I don't know much about building a video game but I would imagine it's not that hard to program a viable schedule. Why do I play multiple Thursday games? Then the next season have no primetime. The Madden dev team has no attention to detail when it comes to things like this.

To be fair, the NFL does it by hand and it takes weeks. It's not as easy as it seems.

They get the match ups right. Personally, I'd be happy if they'd just fix with the insanely long road trips and home stands and TRY to make the closing weeks have more division games.

[oneamongthefence]

Re: Madden needs to overhaul its schedule generation system

I was a QA tester. What platform did you buy Madden 2000 for? I have some behind the scene stories for EA, as well as Namco (which treated QA even worse than EA), Sony and even 3DO.

PS1 mostly.

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