Difficulty, Sliders, and Their Effects on Ratings

[WilesThing]

I have always wondered just how much switching between different difficulty and slider settings affected the ratings of players. Fortunately for NBA 2k fans, they were able to crack that code last year: Understanding slider coefficients. But the football guys haven't been so lucky.

There is, however, a way to see how different difficulty and slider settings affect some player ratings in NCAA. During a Play Now game (or Dynasty game if your coach has the unlocked matchup view ability), holding the right trigger during presnap and selecting the icon of a WR will show how the WR matches up to his defender. The player matchup view shows the numerical difference between the WR's Speed, Height, Release, and Route Running from that of his defender.

To test how changing difficulties and sliders affected the ratings compared in the matchup view, I chose WR Mike Davis from Texas and DB Aaron Colvin from OU. Here are their relevant ratings:

1. WR Davis: 86 SPD, 90 AGI, 92 ACC, 82 RLS, 95 RTE
2. DB Colvin: 93 SPD, 90 AGI, 96 ACC, 91 PRS, 89 MCV, 95 ZCV

With the User on offense, Normal game speed, 50 speed threshold, 50 User WR Catching slider, and 50 CPU Pass Coverage, here are the matchup view numbers for WR Davis against DB Colvin across different difficulties (I will ignore Height since this attribute is unaffected by settings):

1. (Heisman) Speed: -6, Release: -12, Route Running: -1
2. (AA) Speed: -5, Release: -9, Route Running: 3
3. (Varsity) Speed: -5, Release: -9, Route Running: 3
4. (Freshman) Speed: 8, Release: 4, Route Running: 15

It's interesting to note that the Speed difference shown in the matchup view never corresponds with the difference of the two players' speed ratings (86 - 93 = -7), the Release difference on AA and Varsity does match the difference in Release and Press Coverage ratings, and the Route Running difference on AA and Varsity matches the difference in the Route Running rating of Davis (95) and the average of Colvin's Man and Zone Coverage ratings (92).

So it's clear to see that ratings do get affected by different difficulty settings. But what happens when sliders are adjusted?

With Heisman Offensive difficulty and all prior mentioned settings the same, here are the different matchup numbers when the CPU Pass Coverage slider is adjusted (the only matchup affected was Route Running):

1. (PCV at 0) Route Running: 45
2. (PCV at 50) Route Running: -1
3. (PCV at 100) Route Running: -4

And now with AA Offensive difficulty:

1. (PCV at 0) Route Running: 47
2. (PCV at 50) Route Running: 3
3. (PCV at 100) Route Running: -3

Obviously, there's a pretty wild swing on the lower half of the Pass Coverage slider at either difficulty. But something strange is going on at the upper half of the slider where nearly no difference is shown on Heisman or AA. Perhaps this is contributing to the poor coverage we are seeing in the game, and at the very least provides evidence that the Pass Coverage slider is having no effect at improving the pass coverage past the default setting. This further backs up the findings of ZaPPPa in his excellent thread that shows this slider, at least at the higher settings, just affects whether a DB will react to the ball in the air if his head is turned.

I'm assuming these differences in ratings across different difficulty and slider setting will also carry over to a reversed situation, where the User is on defense and the CPU is on offense, but if someone would like to check for sure, be my guest. It's a shame we can't see how other positions' ratings are affected by changing settings. The only thing we can see of other positions on the matchup view is the green or red arrows for linemen indicating a favorable or unfavorable matchup with their defender; no numerical values.

I suppose it would have been nice of EA to allow us to see the changes in ratings that are taking place when adjusting these various settings, but that probably would have confused a lot of people. Imagine seeing Mike Davis or Aaron Colvin rated as 92 in the roster view, going into the depth chart during a game on Heisman difficulty, and seeing his rating now being an 88. That probably would have led to mass confusion on why players were rated differently or why ratings were dropping or rising for seemingly no reason.

But now that we can actually see that ratings are affected by settings, hopefully we can use this information to help our approaches to fine tuning sliders and balancing the game as we prefer.

[Rezzo503]

Easily the best slider thread.

Finally people may actually talk about "Facts" instead of "Theory"

I tried to do something like this on Madden 13, I rated a couple players at 50 For every attribute, and tried to notice the difference in difficulties and see if I could get a better understanding.

But this matchup stick gave us some of the answers. But not all.

Great thread man.

[WilesThing]

Quote: Originally Posted by Rezzo503

Easily the best slider thread. Finally people may actually talk about "Facts" instead of "Theory" I tried to do something like this on Madden 13, I rated a couple players at 50 For every attribute, and tried to notice the difference in difficulties and see if I could get a better understanding. But this matchup stick gave us some of the answers. But not all. Great thread man.

Ha, I've actually thought of doing something like that myself before. It's ridiculous the lengths we have to go to to figure out what the tools EA gives us to customize things actually customize.

It's good that we can at least see how coverage ratings are affected by different settings, but I would also be really interested in how blocking ratings are affected. That always seems to be one of the biggest changes when switching between difficulties.

Some other things to note from this experiment:

1. There seems to be no difference in pass coverage between Varisty and AA difficulties. While there is clearly a difference in gameplay between the two, whatever changes are made are not happening with WR/DB interactions.
2. Slider adjustments, at least for Pass Coverage, don't seem to go on an even sliding scale. One tick of the slider up or down does not produce an equivalent change in ratings. Going from 50 on the Pass Coverage slider to 0 yields an almost 50 point swing in matchup difference between Davis and Colvin, but going from 50 to 100 on the slider only yields a 3-6 point matchup difference, depending on the difficulty setting. I wonder if other sliders have a similar, uneven effect on ratings.
3. The change in ratings between difficulties seems to be added on top of whatever changes in ratings result from slider tweaks. Notice how the Route Running matchup between Davis and Colvin on default 50 sliders changes from -1 to 3 when switching from Heisman to AA, a difference of 4 points. Then when you adjust the sliders from 0 to 100 on Heisman difficulty and compare those values with the values from the sliders at 0 to 100 on AA difficulty, you see a comparable spread in values (45 to 47, -4 to -3). This seems to indicate that slider adjustments don't operate differently under different difficulty settings. In other words, if increasing a slider 10 points on AA difficulty resulted in a 5 point rating change, increasing that same slider 10 points on Heisman should result in a comparable rating change on that difficulty as well. You just have to account for the base ratings changes that each difficulty already brings with it.

[Matt10]

You can test all this, fine - but you need to bring in different situations with Aggressive Zone Coverage. That is the issue that gets all theory and facts thrown out the window. It's the catalyst to the DB glitch.

[fugene]

I'd be interested in seeing the results of a different test with players that have a gap in ratings, or perhaps even with players with lower ratings to begin with. As you point out, there was a drastic drop off in coverage with the slider at 0, but it was hardly changed at 100. Could this be because the players are rated so close to 100 that even when you up the pass coverage, the players ratings are so close to 100 that there is nowhere for them to adjust to?

[WilesThing]

Quote: Originally Posted by Matt10

You can test all this, fine - but you need to bring in different situations with Aggressive Zone Coverage. That is the issue that gets all theory and facts thrown out the window. It's the catalyst to the DB glitch.

I tried to isolate the conditions to exclude other factors like the gameplan adjustments, hot/cold streaks, fatigue, and weather. The way I did this was to start up a Play Now game with clear weather and receive the ball on the opening kickoff. On the very first play of the game, I would check the results of the matchup view, pause the game, change the settings to whatever I wanted to see next, then let play clock run down to 0 and get a delay of game. Then I would rinse and repeat. This way, none of those other factors I listed would influence the results (hopefully) since no play was ever run.

I would be interested in seeing how these other factors affect ratings as the game goes on. I've suspected that hot/cold streaks actually result in a pretty big swing in ratings. Maybe I'll look into that next.

[WilesThing]

Quote: Originally Posted by fugene

I'd be interested in seeing the results of a different test with players that have a gap in ratings, or perhaps even with players with lower ratings to begin with. As you point out, there was a drastic drop off in coverage with the slider at 0, but it was hardly changed at 100. Could this be because the players are rated so close to 100 that even when you up the pass coverage, the players ratings are so close to 100 that there is nowhere for them to adjust to?

I thought about that too. I suppose the Pass Coverage slider only increases or decreases the DB's coverage abilities and doesn't affect the WR's route running, which would explain why there's not much room for boosting that rating but plenty of room for drop off. If the slider affected both the coverage and route running ratings, then we could see a bigger difference in the matchup since the slider could reduce the User WR's route running. But that doesn't seem to be the case.

[bcruise]

Interesting find. I'm kind of surprised I didn't stumble onto this when I was testing out what I did in this thread from way back on release night (I had Season Ticket):

http://www.operationsports.com/forum...-formulas.html

Never thought to check the difficulties to see if the bars were different for each. Kind of wish I did now.