AI AI AI AI AI AI AI AI AI AI AI AI AI AI AI AI AI AI AI AI AI AI AI AI AI AI AI AI AI AI AI AI AI AI AI AI AI AI AI AI AI AI AI AI AI AI AI AI AI AI AI AI AI AI AI AI AI AI AI AI AI AI AI AI AI....
Oh yea, and AI.....
Also players ratings need to be adjusted or recalculated or something...Essentially everyone is an ALL Star because there is hardly any difference between 99 and 60....When you can place all your OL to "5" across the board and still run the ball (in the case of the ISO I-form, even better) and you get a feel of better pass rush from teh defense...
The ratings issue reminds me of "Front Page Sports: Football 98" - The default ratings were not that great because of a similar issue - there was not a difference between elite, great, good and average players...A group of people got together and created the VPNFL set of player rating guidelines with maximum and minimum player rating level by position...Freaking worked wonders....
FOLLOWING is an excerpt from the original VPNFL files from 1999 explaining some logic behind rating changes:
http://www.pnfl.biz/vpnfl/index.html
Excellent work has been done by Rolando Jimenez and others timing sprints on the practice field and translating SP-AC ratings into 40-yard dash times. (And by the way, SP is SP and AC is AC for all positions no matter what the manual says. And anyone who has watched a linebacker bounce off a high-ST QB knows that ST is ST too. It’s our opinion that there are no “relative” attributes no matter what anybody tells you.) Basically, the results are as follows:
SP-AC 95-95 Time in 40-yard dash 4.18
Every 10 points less of SP is worth about .3 seconds
Every 10 points less of AC is worth about .1 seconds
So the fastest player in the NFL would check in at about 95-95. The fastest DE around 72-75 or so and the slowest OL in the 50-point range. The relations are linear up and down the scale. A lot of “realism-oriented” remote leagues scale their positions on precisely this scale.
Our players are considerably slower. They may look ridiculously slow to experienced FBPro users at first. But they work. Here’s why:
1) Sure there are a very few players in the NFL who run the 40 in less than 4.3 seconds. But they don't do it in pads and they don’t do it on grass. When I asked experienced football players and coaches to estimate the speed penalty for playing in such game conditions, they said it averaged .3 seconds and ranged from .1 to .5 or even more depending on a number of factors. You’ve heard of players who “play faster than they’re timed.” That’s what they mean.
2) To be able to run reasonably authentic plays you need to be able to get the snap off. Everyone is familiar with the woeful caliber of OL as opposed to DL play in FBPro. To be able to operate under center the DL must be slowed way down. That means that other positions must be slowed down accordingly.
3) “Wider is better.” We’ve found that the key to an authentic-looking passing game is the ratio of receiver (and defender!) SP to QB ST. To actually hit a slant pattern or split a zone, to catch a receiver in space and in stride means overcoming FBPro defenders’ tendency to collapse on the ball the instant it’s in the air. Slower receivers mean QBs are less likely to be throwing just as receivers come to the end of their patterns and sit a minute while the defender catches up.
4) Experiment proved that the Kangs were right: unless you want to rely on gimmicky offenses, defenders have to be scaled somewhat below their offensive counterparts. It’s the only way to produce reasonably realistic stats and scores with authentic plays.
Our other guiding principle comes from Carroll, Palmer and Thorn’s Hidden Game of Football: “The difference between a great quarterback and a merely average one is three or four plays a game.” This holds for other positions too. Most elite running backs average less than a yard per carry more than a mediocre back does (5.0 to 4.0). That means the great back is worth but a long stride more than the also-ran every time he gets the ball. So for each physical attribute at each position our range from top to bottom is considerably narrower than in any of the Sierra leagues, about 15 points for SP and about 20 points for AG, ST and HA. Yes, we know about fatigue. In fact, EN is our great fudge factor. The range from top to bottom for EN, IN and DI is more like 30 points, and EN especially helps make players heroes or goats late in the game. You can count on Barry Sanders and Terrell Davis to get yards in the fourth quarter in a way lesser backs might not. Kordell Stewart does not have impressive IN or DI, but his high EN means that late in halves and games his throws still have that zip on them, so he really is a proportionately greater threat as everyone else on the field wears down.
Which is no guarantee that Sanders, Davis or Stewart win. With the narrow attribute ranges the VPNFL really does have an “on any given Sunday” effect. Over the course of an entire season though, the advantage the best players and teams possess tends to tell.
(FBPro 98 faced the same issues Madden currently does - ratings are absolute across the board and players are not rated correctly by position)
06-02-2013, 03:33 PM
