Question for "gamers"

[Txtbook]

Went 4-8 last season, UCLA.

The fun of it for me is building a consistent winning team from a lesser team.

[Bullet Sponge]

I agree with the OP. In my 5th year as Utah State I have yet to win a WAC title. I came close last year (finished 6-2 in WAC play with 2 last second losses to Boise and Nevada). I'm 24-24 overall in the previous 4 season, 2 winning seasons, 2 losing seasons, 2 bowl games (both losses). I'm slowly building something here and savor every decent recruit and every close win. That's where the fun is. I don't dream of national championships or even BCS bowls. I dream of WAC titles and maybe a top 25 ranking someday.

[BlastX21]

Despite sliders I still find it easy to win with weak teams. My sliders are good though, the cpu plays good pass coverage and all that. The problem is that every cpu team plays the exact same defense. They all pick from the exact same set of plays, meaning no defense is different from another. The CPU pool of defensive plays is also extremely limited, so once you figure out how to beat the ten plays the cpu seems to run, its hard to lose. After playing long enough I can look at one area of the field after the snap, and within 1 second I can tell you what play they called because every cpu team runs the same plays.

[Special27K]

I love losing more than winning, I despise winning NC's with Toledo or whoever I pick. I very well am capable of turning that into certainty after 2-3 seasons of building. Its just 1.) Too easy too go up a "prestige star" and get those bigger recruits, 2.) Its not a perfect game, sliders only can do so much when there are advantages given that we as human players can learn which plays don't work (Playaction, certain zones, etc) while the computer will walk right into basically wasting a down. 3.) Computer consistently "over-blitzes" on 3rd and longs and can be very exploited

My friend played as SJSU and in year 2 beat Texas in the Fiesta bowl, quite handily by like 4 touchdowns. We were furious. Our sliders we felt were damn hard, hard as we could get them while still getting realistic stats.

We now have implemented a sort of "coaching career" aspect to our dynasties. Take your Non-AQ schools up to 4*'s (2-3 years, ideally 4) then move to a bottom level BCS, nontraditional power school (Baylor/Duke/Virgina/Indiana/Washington St) or some mid-level BCS school who had dropped off the map (This past year I took over a 1* Cal) and go from there.

I won my first National Championship in a long while, took till 2016 (2 years at Toledo, 4 years at Cal)

[poopoop]

No you won't see people posting about 4-8, because it's tough to do so. The only time I've seen someone have a losing record in a dynasty was in an OD with 12 players in the same conference. The majority of their losses were vs human opponents.

I just won a game against VT @ Central Michigan in year one. They had the ball down 1 point with ~40 seconds left. On 4th down and 10 from their own 30 they ran the ball out of shotgun. How am I supposed to lose to the CPU when it does stuff like that? The reason I was beating them with CMU to begin with is because the CPU plays terribly.

Until EA gets rid of the mentality that increased difficulty means the CPU players just run faster and break more tackles than they should, the game is never going to pose much of a challenge to most people. Throw in the fact that, as previously mentioned in this thread, you can turn a program around extremely quick and it just becomes too easy to dominate.

Fact is, a lot of people like picking up the game starting a dynasty with their favorite team and crushing everyone. Even if their favorite team happens to be Duke, Washington State or Rice. They like crushing their rivals, racking up a ton of stats, and winning a bunch of championships. I think if EA made a game where you actually had to struggle with a bad team a lot of people would complain. It's combo of EA not being able to make a challenging game, and a lot of people not really wanting one either.

[cOWASs68]

Yeah I gotta agree with different strokes for different folks. I happen to be one of those people that like to play more of a sim style. My buddy runs the same defensive play every play...and uses ONE formation on offense to play-- and he never loses to the computer, beats them 52-0 with Rice-- but that just isn't a whole lot of fun for me-- I use the entire playbook (minus the broken plays like Playaction or something...), and have been working to build weak programs (Wyoming, Arkansas State, and Utah State...all in custom conferences). And I love that aspect of it-- getting sh*t for recruits early on, but building your team up.

I remember with Utah State the first 2-3 seasons I was aiming small-- just wanted a winning record in the ACC (cust conf), and once I had that, I aimed for a Bowl Game-- and now that I've done both of those...I want the ACC BADDDD...if I make it to the game and lose-- I'm okay with that because next year hopefully I'll get 'em. And my record so far this year have been straight NAIL-BITERS against the top dogs (Va Tech, Miami) and have been awesome games to be a part of. I don't think I'll ever play for NC with them as there are little teams who get LESS love than the Aggies for national recognition, all-americans etc.

But that's just me-- if all you want to do is beat the crap out of teams and win 10 back to back NC be my guest-- I'm just not sure how that's fun you know??

[poopoop]

^I agree with that. If you already know the outcome of the game before you play it, it becomes more of a chore than anything else. The uncertainty of knowing whether you'll win/lose increases the longevity of the game.

[waytofailself]

I used to be one of those gamers, but I changed over time. Maybe it comes from growing up playing Techmo Super Bowl all time to compete and see if I could beat teams by over 100 (and even shut them out in the process). I had a similar view when I started playing NCAA back on the PS2 ('04? '05? back when they had licensed soundtracks instead of just generic/school music?). If I was winning 100% of my games and piling up massive stats I wasn't doing it right.

What changed? I don't know -- I went away from sports games for awhile until NBA 2k10. I'm in a different place in my life now. Losing helps me get better, and usually when I lose it's my own fault. I used to really like recruiting little schools and simming to build them up. Now I like playing through the games in the process.

I'm no max difficulty player or anything, but bumping the difficulty to all-american has really pumped new life into NCAA 10 for me (waiting for 12). I had a VERY entertaining game where I lost to BYU as SDSU 3-10 on a last second hail mary with an amazing freak tipped ball catch by the CPU. I don't really get mad -- how could I get mad, I threw four picks in that game including 2 in the red zone and one on the 30 driving for the game winning field goal with 30 seconds left.

Different people like different things. So it goes. I've still got a lot to learn with this game.