Operation Sports Forums - Penalties need to be set before gameplay sliders

Hello fellow Maddenites, I just want to share a little something that will hopefully help some of you avoid some undo anger and frustration from EA’s wonderfully thought out and impeccably implemented gameplay and penalty sliders. :jpshakehe

I think we can all pretty much agree penalty sliders are unpredictable and inconsistent, that they do, in fact, affect gameplay to some degree, and that there are some penalties that will rarely, if ever, be called. Conversely I think most people will agree that gameplay sliders have no effect on penalties, and that we at least have a decent understanding of how the gameplay sliders work. The exception to this may be the Pass Defense Reaction and the Pass Defense Coverage sliders, as there still seems to be some debate about them. Actually it seems to be more about the Reaction than the Coverage, most would agree that higher coverage means better/tighter coverage, however there are differing opinions on the Reaction slider. But I digress… In light of the relationship between the different slider groups, gameplay and penalties, I think it is very important to tune the penalty sliders to your liking before messing with the gameplay sliders.

Since penalties have no effect on gameplay the only reason we should need to adjust them is to tune the frequency of a particular penalty being called. I understand many of them don’t work as we hoped they would and they affect gameplay to some degree, but we need to set them up the best we can for penalties alone, and not focus on the gameplay effect because it is too much of an unknown. From my own testing and reading just about everything on this site regarding penalty and gameplay sliders I have found, what I believe is, a pretty solid set of penalty sliders. Remember, all I want to accomplish is getting each penalty called as often as is realistic, I’m not concerned with gameplay at this point and I don’t want to see 12-15 facemask calls just to make up for the penalties that don’t get called. I’m thinking something like this for the penalty sliders.

OS – 75
FS – 75
HOLD – 80
FM – 53
DPI – 99
OPI – 99
PCI – 50
CLIP – 80
IG – 50?
RTP – 50
RTK - 50

The only one of these I am at a loss on is the IG. I have never seen it called at any setting and since that is the only reason we should be adjusting the penalty sliders (to get more or less penalties) I’m not sure we need to move it from the default. I have seen people suggest anywhere between 0-100, for a variety of reason, and I have tested with 0, 1, 10, 50, 100, and in all honesty I don’t see any distinct, consistent difference. It doesn’t seem to affect the penalty being called so it’s pretty much worthless in this context. The good thing about the penalty sliders is, if you set them up for the sole purpose of tuning the penalty frequencies, you can play on any skill level, speed, threshold, fatigue and with whatever sliders you want and your penalties should never change. None of the other settings have any affect the frequency of penalties being called, so if you set these first they should be your static settings and all your other setting can then be tuned around them

I have seen a lot of people tune their gameplay sliders first and leave the penalty sliders til last, I think this is a big mistake. Penalties are the only slider that affect 2 distinct aspects of the game and as such need to be nailed down first. Trying to tune them after you have everything else set becomes an endless tweaking of all the sliders because you cannot be certain of the affect one has on another. On the other hand, once you have the penalty sliders set you don’t have to worry about them and their affect, and what you see with the other sliders will be what you get, you eliminate the unknown of the penalty slider affect later.

Obviously this is just my take on this and I in no way claim to be a slider guru or a Madden expert, it just seems illogical to me to try to tune something when one of the components cannot be quantified. The best way to deal with that would seem to be to eliminate the unknown quantity, in this case the penalty sliders. Set them for penalties and leave them alone. For example, you want to help the CPU run game? Adjust the CPU run blocking and/or the USER PDR or TAC, don’t fool with the unpredictable and wildly inconsistent OS/FS/HOLD sliders, leave them for what they are supposed to do, determine the frequency of penalties, even if they do a poor job of it. Their influence on gameplay is far too random and volatile to be trust.

Obviously the exception to this would be if you run into a situation that you cannot correct with the gameplay sliders alone. If you reach that point “good luck”, going back and forth between the two would appear to be a maddening (no pun intended) endeavor. :brickwall