EA nullified pattern match of quarters against 3x1 formations to the 3 receiver side. I noticed they left this out of the patch notes. This is a big deal to those of us that play as safeties and follow the reads/rules for reading concepts. This is shady and complete laziness on EAs part. Put the damn match back into the match defense. SMH
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Re: The patch broke quarters match coverage
I noticed it as well. Time to start using some Cover 6. -
Re: The patch broke quarters match coverage
Palms seems to be somewhat fixed. It converts into a cover 2 against 2x2 formations when #2 goes out and #1 goes vertical.Comment
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Re: The patch broke quarters match coverage
I play match coverage almost exclusively and I’m not seeing “Quarters is broken” literally at all?
In fact if anything I the Trips checks are working more soundly than before. In Solo (Quarters vs 3x1 with a wide-split solo receiver), the strong side quarter flat player isn’t overextending himself out of the play nearly as badly as he was prior to 1.10, and in both Solo and Special the weakside inside quarter player is a bit more active and isn’t drifting out into grass quite as much (he still does sometimes, to be fair).Comment
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Re: The patch broke quarters match coverage
Agaiant 2x2 it plays correctly. Agaiant 3x1 to the trips side they don’t match, they simply play drop zone. Probably fine for most players but isn’t even comparable to its real life counterpart.
I switched to palms for now to match. It has a few more coverage rules but operates good enough if you choose the correct user safety based on formation fit and alignment.Comment
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Re: The patch broke quarters match coverage
I poked around at this specifically in practice this morning and yeah, you're right and I was wrong, this is exactly what is happening now. I think I was just having good luck with CPU play calls making it look like things were working properly.
Really hope Tiburon fixes this with haste. Madden needs more match coverages, not less.Comment
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Re: The patch broke quarters match coverage
Pretty sure EA bastardized the coverage to handle route concepts from compressed formations. I won’t get started on how that entire interaction is broken but none the less, quarters was purposely broken to counter an exploit.Comment
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Re: The patch broke quarters match coverage
It's also possible it wasn't done on purpose. I'm more willing to believe the underlying code is janky enough to break easily from changes. I get that we want to be angry at EA, but I don't know if going straight to "they did this on purpose" is the correct initial reaction.Comment
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Re: The patch broke quarters match coverage
Unless (as is highly likely, especially given that the zone depth coaching adjustments also kill match principles) drop zones are the engine's default state, and the match coverage logic is overlayed onto it, disabling the drop zones while active.
In which case, accidentally disabling match logic would cause it to revert to the default (drop zones), and cause exactly the behavior we're seeing.
But if that were the case, we couldn't use firey words like "lazy" and "shady", and what's the fun in that?Comment
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Re: The patch broke quarters match coverage
Prior to 1.10, there was an issue with defenses responding to passing plays from Bunch formations.
The gist: if the offense motioned out wide the outer-most receiver in the bunch and snapped the ball before that receiver set, it opened up the defense to get hit with an immediate fly route for big yards. The 1.10 title update added logic to defenses to counter this exploit, according to the title update notes.
I suppose what Coach Captures is speculating is that the changes made to do this deliberately and knowingly broke the Solo check in Quarters. Which, possibly? I can see how and why EA would go this route:
- Breaking a bunch formation with the motion described above effectively makes it a trips set with a weak side split-wide receiver, which would likely make the Box check Quarters uses against Bunch change to Solo. If the issue was a problem in the Solo check itself, I could easily see an engineer at EA arguing to just disable the Solo check in-game to buy time to write a better fix.
- We're in the midst of Madden Championship Series qualifying. It's easy to imagine that EA prioritized quick and dirty fix which maintains competitive balance and presentable-for-Twitch-gameplay for MCS broadcasts over keeping a feature of Quarters coverage which is poorly documented in-game anyway.
I don't think "shady" comes into the picture, in fact from the MCS perspective I think this change is (unfortunately) easily justified.
(Side note: the match coverages and trips checks obviously should be better documented, the entire NFL runs match coverages and far more complex than Madden, but nothing currently in Madden at all will explain to you how Quarters, Palms, or their associated trips checks work).Comment
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