Let's Talk Player Confidence - Madden 16 Edition

[CM Hooe]

Quote: Originally Posted by GameBreaker35

Alright, fair enough. You seem to agree that confidence isn't particularly authentic, but you do like the idea of managing player morale as a factor in roster managment. Is that an accurate statement? Let me offer an alternative that I think satisfies both your need for dynamic user choices and my desire for simulation football. Instead of having confidence artifically increase player ratings, have it act as a consistency modifier - as it used to work with Dynamic Player Performance. A player that is more confident could perform up to their actual ratings more often than a player with less confidence. Physical ratings such as speed, acceleration, agility, jump, strength, etc. should remain constant regardless of confidence, and technical skills could fluctuate BELOW their abilty from game to game but never ABOVE their abilty. This gives you a meaningful choice as a user when attempting to make personnel moves, but it also prevents a player from performing above their physical abilty -which unrealistic. What do you think?

I think the alternative you offer can work.

I don't care as much about the effects of Confidence as long as it has some tangible effect so the choice I make in Game Prep is meaningful. Heck, one could even rename the thing "Playbook Knowledge" and have it exclusively act as an AWR modifier for all players (as opposed to affecting all technical skills); that could work too, maybe.

The big-picture element of the mechanic I like is the choice between Confidence-increasing drills and XP-rewarding drills in Game Prep. In my Cowboys CFM last year, I opened my season struggling with Tony Romo, throwing INTs all over the place as I was learning the game's redone zone coverage. I really waffled with the decision to do the "pep talk" Game Prep activity to goose his Confidence back up (to remove the low Confidence penalties to accuracy ratings), as opposed to playing through it (risking real games in my season) and instead using the Game Prep hours on XP activities for my young players who I wanted to develop (Zack Martin, Demarcus Lawrence, etc.). It's a choice between immediate short-term gains vs a long play.

Unfortunately, Dynamic Drive Goals has made Confidence really easy to come by this year, minimizing the value of ever using the Confidence drills in Game Prep and eliminating the friction presented by this choice. If I'm struggling with Romo this season, all I have to do is run for 30 yards with my starting RB a few times when prompted and Romo apparently is fine again, and I can just do XP Game Prep activities all the time. This doesn't make sense.

This is why I continue to say that Dynamic Drive Goals is a much bigger issue to me than Confidence. The existing Confidence mechanic was admittedly pretty unforgiving in Madden 15, but it was easy to understand how to work with it and overcome the challenges presented by it, and it was up to the user to either make the choice to use Game Prep or to try to play through slumps. DDG doesn't work with Confidence well at all because it eliminates the challenge presented by low Confidence, and thus makes the game less interesting.

[Robo COP]

Quote: Originally Posted by NEOPARADIGM

I knew someone would say this in one of the first few posts. Listen man, for years upon years people clamored and begged for our sports games to be fully dynamic with progressive and regressive ratings based on in-game performance. Now it's here and new-wave people want it removed. Go figure.

People want it removed because it has failed miserably.

At the very least give us an option to disable it. It has caused more issues than it has given any sort of dynamic progressive and regressive ratings system.

We all want a dynamic system. But we shouldn't pretend like it works because they gave us a broken system. In its current form its nearly impossible for the majority of teams to lose confidence. It's especially impossible for a team controlled by a user to lose confidence. In its current form confidence is only a means for the user to boost all his players by 3 overall. It's not dynamic at all. It's broken.

Give me a dynamic system that works and I'll fall in love with it. The current "dynamic" system isn't dynamic at all. We want streaks to be replicated like in the NFL (Big Ben back to back 6 TD games. Tom Brady's early season slump, etc.). This system doesn't do that. It allows a guy to go on a streak and then leaves him there permanently for the remainder of the season. There's nothing dynamic about it.

They need to completely reimagine the confidence system. In it's current form it doesn't work and only makes the game worse to the majority of players