How Madden Ratings Are Made

[jfsolo]

Quote:

“Some designers and producers complain that there are too many ratings,” Moore said of his colleagues. “They ask, ‘How can we limit the number of ratings?’ But I would argue you make players more vanilla with fewer numbers.” That’s why Moore wants to continue adding categories even if it makes his job progressively more daunting. “The developers and programmers hate this,” he said, “but it would be great to do more ratings.” He then launched into an only-half-joking suggestion that the game might add a long-snapping rating someday.

It's not surprising, given that we know that there are always competing philosophical perspectives on how madden should be made, but it is interesting and sad, IMO, that some designers and producers would want a Madden game with less ratings, i.e. an even less accurate and realistic representation of NFL players. Donny Moore may make a lot of people here crazy with many of ratings decisions and seemingly capricious changes, but he seems to be one who is always advocating for increased authenticity in player evaluation. I do wish that he had more guys working with him on his team. With the dough that MUT is bringing in, they can afford to add a couple more people to the ratings team.

I think that most of us here have thought for a long time that LSing should be a rating, but it just occurred to me that maybe it should be one of the traits with three options, NO, EM(Emergency), and YES. Of course bad snaps would have to be in the game, so it's probably not going to happen.

[JaymeeAwesome]

Quote: Originally Posted by CM Hooe

A couple reactions to the OVR rating breakdown from that article - I know the Speed rating at one point in Madden's life was the be-all end-all rating, but with where the game is at today, I'm a little disappointed that the OVR rating attribute weights still value it so highly for many positions. It would strike me that ability to play fast in small areas should be more valuable; to that end, things like Acceleration, Agility, the break tackle move ratings, Pursuit, and Play Recognition should have more value. I'm also surprised that the Throw On Run attribute has very little weight for quarterbacks, with how important quarterback mobility is in the NFL these days. Speed seems entirely overvalued, while Acceleration and the ability to break tackles has no value whatsoever; this would strike me as making identifying truly good running quarterbacks just from the OVR rating very difficult. It would also strike me that Block Shedding, Power Move, and Finesse Move should have non-zero value when determining a safety's OVR rating. Right now, apparently zero. I don't pay much attention to the OVR rating anymore anyway, but perhaps Tiburon might consider revisiting it, for the sake of helping out team roster management AI pick out more useful players if nothing else.

It seems like the weighting system listed on that article is only showing the weighting OVR for offense and defense of a certain scheme. I would expect by changing the scheme of the team, the weighting would change. But as we know, OVR means nothing.

I've also come to the realization that once I control a HB to run, there are basically a few ratings that go out the window like AWR. If AWR is thrown out while being controlled by humans, shouldn't we have two different weightings. Because I may choose a different HB for my starter if knowing that my lower weighted OVR HB for CPU isn't not as good as a HB with AWR thrown out. I'm also curious what other ratings out there are canceled out when human controlled.

[Paul Heyman Guy]

Quote: Originally Posted by charter04

I love to see that formula. I wonder if the gameplay itself values those ratings the same as the overall rating does. I thought his comment about Spec Catch was interesting. He said that rating has little to no affect on gameplay. I thought it was pretty important. Also the idea that the EA guys might not even know how the ratings all work within the game. Not surprising.

So if this rating does absolutley nothing to affect gameplay, why have it all? Hell why even bother making it a big deal to move OBJ's SPEC rating to a 99? I know someone said that increasing it means triggering more catch animations because he'll dive for it opposed to someone who doesn't have a high SPEC rating. If anything that tells me they should just get rid of the SPEC catch, and the higher the jump rating or catching rating would trigger more animations(One Handed catch in the air, etc).

Didn't they get rid of some OL ratings because essentially they did nothing to affect gameplay?

Also just from a customization stand point, imagine Donny putting that table into the game and allow us to change the chart and change which ratings matter most to get a more realistic game out of it.

[Paul Heyman Guy]

Quote: Originally Posted by NDAlum

“I’ve heard it speculated that even the Madden team themselves don’t really know what’s going on,” Bailey said. “Because they’ve got years upon years of systems and code just layered on top of one another, where it’s not always entirely clear how they’re interacting. FML

No wonder this game is so buggy and messed up. They need to go in and remove old code and leave the new code in.

[CM Hooe]

Quote: Originally Posted by Paul Heyman Guy

No wonder this game is so buggy and messed up. They need to go in and remove old code and leave the new code in.

If only video game development were that simple.

[TheDominator273]

Quote: Originally Posted by Paul Heyman Guy

So if this rating does absolutley nothing to affect gameplay, why have it all? Hell why even bother making it a big deal to move OBJ's SPEC rating to a 99? I know someone said that increasing it means triggering more catch animations because he'll dive for it opposed to someone who doesn't have a high SPEC rating. If anything that tells me they should just get rid of the SPEC catch, and the higher the jump rating or catching rating would trigger more animations(One Handed catch in the air, etc). .

I wouldn't do that because they are two different things. Catch is just their ability to catch the ball in general. While the high spectacular catch rating just unlocks more animations, it doesn't guarantee they will make the catch. Thats why you have the catch and catch in traffic ratings. What they could do is make it into a trait such as the cover ball trait with different levels.

[mjavon]

Cool article. The part 2 with Walt Hickey was pretty funny too.

"On the gridiron, detailed individual statistics are kept for only a handful of positions, and those numbers frequently miss the whole story because of interactions between 11 players on each side of the ball. Game developers quickly realized that football players, in contrast with their cousins in baseball, would need to be graded on a wider variety of skills — and that ratings-makers would have to temper the science with a whole lot of art."

I think this is important to note with respect to the difficulty of this whole process. They can generate a probability distribution by simulating a large number of "dice rolls" for any given event type, but not having that information for the real life game makes it difficult to emulate.

[NoleFan]

That weighting chart should be really helpful for me moving forward as I'm not sure I've seen that before. If so, it was a while ago and I didn't recall that it existed.