PUBLISHED SLIDERS FOR ALL MADDEN LEVEL ON XBOX 360

[JoeGibbsStudent]

Introduction

Those of you who have been following our work in the thread titled ALL MADDEN SLIDERS FOR XBOX 360 probably do not want to hear me talk anymore. Rather, you would just like to get the sliders we have formulated and get on with your game. However, I must insist that you read what follows before you use the sliders. What follows below will be important in understanding how these sliders work. I will be making four or five posts in this thread before I post the game play sliders.

While our research has revealed that sliders do affect the game, it also reveals that sliders do not affect the game as much as people think they do. Your own skill, patience, and understanding of basic football principles will have tenfold (literally) the influence on your game stats as do these or any sliders.

What we have done is create a set of sliders that seems to make the average stats of many games by many players roughly match the average stats of the teams in the NFL and in Madden. What this means is that these sliders will not guarantee realistic stats for any one of you. However, if we were to take all of your games, add them up, and average them out, those stats should line up within close range of the NFL and Madden. What that means is that some of you will find certain things about the game too difficult, while others find those same things too easy. It was never my intent to guarantee any player realistic games; that is something that I cannot do. However, I can provide information that will help you customize these to fit your particular ability.

It is my experience that, across all fan site slider forums, players tends to post comments about there “being too much of this in a game, or too little of that,” and recommend a change that would fix it. That is the wrong approach. You have to play many games with a slider set before you can evaluate it. By “many,” I mean at least four to eight games. After that, you can look at your stats and compare them to where you think your team should be. In our tests, the stats varied hugely from game to game and player to player. You have to be patient and look at the stats unfettered by your frustration at losing or boredom with winning.

Therefore, I will not consider suggestions like the above in updating the sliders. Rather, if you would like to post your game results, I will add them to my “database.” When I have enough games on which to run calculations, I will. Then, I will post a new version. I intend to get data on at least ten games before I make any calculations or changes.

I would like to suggest speaking to one of the guys that were part of our little testing team. I am sure they have learned more than they ever cared to learn about testing sliders (as have I). They are, in no particular order: RTWILLIAMS2, TREY5, TIKIBARBER2115, COWHERPOWER, and BOOKER21 (Pancake Control Officer). Trey, Tiki, and RT deserve special thanks from me for doing a lot of tedious work. Another thanks goes to the folks who encouraged us to keep up the work.

Finally, I suggest that you go to the thread, ALL MADDEN SLIDERS FOR XBOX 360 and have a look at what some of the NFL and Madden averages are. Also, the basic principles behind our sliders are listed there.

[JoeGibbsStudent]

Just to give you a simple understanding of the principles behind these sliders, I’d like to explain my general approach.

After running a lot of plays in practice, I concluded that there are certain sliders with effects that can be measured by direct observation; i.e. sliders that you can set at a certain setting, run a single play, and measure the effect. I then decided that I would set these sliders at a level that would make the players’ abilities equivalent to the players in the actual NFL. These are sliders I call “quantitative,” a title that is actually something of a misnomer. I simply call them that because I can measure their effects directly and do not have to use statistics to measure their effects indirectly. These sliders are as follows:

User and Computer (CPU) Running Back Ability (RBA) Slider at 25
For both User and CPU, setting the RBA sliders to 25 slows down the running backs by about 5% from their actual, unpadded 40 yard dash times (NFL combine times). Because, as I discovered, the speed of the defense is constant for both User and CPU (i.e. you cannot change, with sliders, how fast the defenders run) decreasing the running backs’ speed slows them down relative to the defense. I decided that a padded running back, coming out of the backfield and carrying a football should not move as fast relative to a defender without a football. The general effect of this setting is to reduce the number of plays by a running back that go for more than 20 yards. In the NFL, roughly two percent of runs go for more than 20 yards. In Madden, however, these plays are far more frequent. Therefore, slowing the running backs down decreased the frequency of these long plays to a more realistic number.

User Quarterback Accuracy (QBA) Slider at 50 and CPU QBA Slider at 35
After some research, I concluded that the most powerful NFL quarterbacks should be able, in practice and unopposed by a defense, to throw a ball up to about 70 yards with any accuracy. My testing revealed that setting the User QBA slider at 50 and the CPU QBA slider at 35 made this principle true in Madden.

User Wide Receiver Catch (WRC) Slider at 30 and CPU WRC Slider at 15
We crunched some numbers from various sources that compared the ratio of dropped passes to caught passes. Considered together, the best and worst receivers in the NFL drop roughly ten percent of the passes on which they get their hands. Our test games revealed that, for the User, setting the WRC slider to 30 makes this principle true in Madden. For the CPU, data was much less consistent. However, for reasons discussed in the above-referenced thread, I decided to set the CPU WRC slider to 15.

Special Teams Slider for both User and CPU
The special teams sliders were fairly easy to measure in practice. If you are interested in why they are set in the way they are, please go to the above-referenced forum. The basic logic is that : (a) the best kickers should be able to hit a field goal, unaided by wind, at about 55 yards with some consistency; (b) the weakest kickers should be able to hit a field goal, unaided by wind, at about 48 yards with some consistency; (c) punters should average about 38-45 yards per punt depending upon their abilities; (d) the strongest kickers should score touchbacks about 10-20% of the time on kickoffs; (e) the weakest kickers should generally be unable to score touchbacks without the aid of wind, and average about 67 yards per kick; (f) wind is a huge factor on kicks in Madden.

While I would consider moving the User and CPU RBA sliders up to 30, all of the other “quantitative” sliders, discussed above, will not be changed. All other sliders, which I call “qualitative,” were tested through many trial games. These games were added up, averaged, analyzed, and the result gave us what I believe are appropriate slider settings. I will spare you that discussion here.

[JoeGibbsStudent]

There are often questions posted about what quarter length to use to simulate the 120 total plays averaged in an NFL game. Because there is no accelerated clock in Madden on XBOX 360, there is no specific time that will apply to all players. The answer is between seven-minute quarters and eleven-minute quarters.

For example, RTWilliams, a speedster in terms of playing time, can crank out roughly 120 total plays per game with seven to eight-minute quarters. I, on the other hand, usually snap the ball with about 15-20 seconds left on the play clock (and cause the CPU to do the same). I play on 10 minute quarters and average only about 110 plays per game.

It is up to you to determine what length you will set within this range. However, I offer the following words of caution…

On All-Madden difficulty, football is a thinking man’s game to be sure. Stimulus-response and pre-meditated play calling lead to whacky results. The reason for that is because the CPU is statistically analyzing your play-calling patterns. If you select from your gut, or from a small play-calling list, you are showing tendencies (without even noticing it). The reason I play so slowly is so that I keep a cool head and can minimize the chance of the CPU being able to analyze my tendencies.

So I recommend slowing it down and thinking about it. You will need longer (nine to elven-minute) quarters to do this and still get realistic stat results.

[JoeGibbsStudent]

Off Sides: 80
False Start: 75
Holding: 100
Face Mask: 100
Offensive Pass Interference: 100
Defensive Pass Interference: 85
Kick and Punt Return Interference: 100
Clipping: 55
Intentional Grounding: 100
Roughing the Passer: 100
Roughing the Kicker: 100

Important Notes about the Penalty Sliders
They favor the CPU. I commit an average of eight penalties per game with these sliders. The CPU commits an average of about five penalties. These can be extremely frustrating. However, they do seem to make the game more realistic as I rank about 18th in the NFL in penalties committed.

You have to trade type of penalty for number of penalties. Roughly 50% of the penalties committed will be false start. All I can say is “oh well.” Roughly 25% will be off sides and encroachment. Roughly 15% will be clipping. The remainder will be roughing the passer, roughing the kicker, holding, and defensive pass interference. While this is way out of whack with the real NFL, there’s not much we can do about it. So we give up realistic penalties called for realistic number of penalties called.

Finally, the User is guilty of false start far more often than the CPU and the CPU is guilty of off-sides and encroachment more often than the User.

[JoeGibbsStudent]

(Update on October 30, 2006).

Here are the sliders, published version 1.2. The number before the slash mark is for User, the number after is for the CPU.

Offensive Sliders
Quarterback Accuracy: 50 / 35
Pass Blocking: 40 / 15
Wide Receiver Catching: 25 / 10
Running Back Ability: 25 / 25
Run Blocking: 45 / 35

Defensive Sliders
Awareness: 25 / 25
Knockdown: 50 / 20
Interceptions: 0 / 0
Break Block: 25 / 25
Tackling: 35 / 0

Special Teams Sliders
Field Goal Power: 20 / 10
Field Goal Accuracy: 10 / 5
Punting Power: 15 / 45
Punting Accuracy: 25 / 45
Kick Off Power: 5 / 5

Let me reiterate…these sliders may not work for any particular one of you, only for the average of all your games (or so we hope). The CPU passing game has consistently been a problem for many of our testers, so let me offer a few words of advice.

Lay off the hit stick when making a tackle in the open field.
Lay off the X (dive tackle) button when making a tackle in the open field.
Use the strafe button to get better position to make a tackle.
Employ man and zone Cover Two and Three to protect against the big (40+ yard) passing play. You have to be willing to give up some yards underneath.
Spread your defensive line and crash out to help pressure the quarterback.

I employ these principles and am ranked 8th against the pass in my franchise right now.

While I will not ignore your comments on these sliders, I will generally only pay attention to the numbers. So post your game stats and when we have enough we can start making changes that need to be made. Finally, be patient. Play at least four games before you start deciding what’s what. Madden is a whacky game and changes from match to match.

I will post a link here (later) to the Franchise Report forum so that you can see how these are working out for me. There, I will post stats from my Redskins franchise.

Enjoy, and thanks again to the guys who helped work these out!

[Flightwhite24]

Deleted by poster

[Taliman125]

...First of all thank all of u guyz 4 the hard work you've put into that...I think I can pretty much talk 4 everyone here...this is amazing Thank You...

But just a little question...Anything about Sub IN/ Sub OUT Sliders...or should we just leave it to default...?...

[WDOgF0reL1fe]

i cant wait to try these out man

great job and thanks for your hard work