Ideas to make kicking harder

[Richie71]

Honestly, In my CFM, I cheat when it comes to kickers and punters. I never re-sign vets. When I have no kicker or punter on my roster, I use my last two draft picks (trading down if I can get another pick out of it) on the K and P with the highest combine scores. Then it makes no difference to my kicking and punting success. I either get the meter right or don't, but apart from the range (kick power) the score or miss is down to me.

I thought of a couple of ways to make good kickers matter, inspired by 21 before some of the patches!


The jerking kicking meter that was fixed a few weeks ago was a nightmare. So, along with a narrower target for kickers with poor accuracy, make the meter go faster for poor accuracy, but make it change speed for kickers with really poor accuracy.

i.e. KAC >95 meter goes dead slow. Above 80 to 95 is a variety of speeds. Below 80, it changes speed as it moves.


The second change could relate to awareness. Other than the "ice the kicker" mechanic there was no pressure kicking scenario. I think there is a Superstar ability that makes icing the kicker not work. Expand on that by:
Calculate the pressure of a kick.

Superbowl end of game, match winner = lots of pressure.
Playoff game match winner, a little less pressure, and regular season, less so again. Factor in where the team is in the playoff race.
During the game, does it change who leads, ties the game etc. Preseason = much less pressure. This doesn't have to be a complex calculation. Same for punters, relating to field position and score and where you are in the schedule.

Add in a dice roll for some randomness, and.... "ice the kicker" can happen without the opposition calling a timeout.

So, your low awareness kicker might be fine in preseason, but could repeatedly choke when it comes to the big games.



Both apply to both punters and kickers, but kickers should be much more susceptible to pressure.



Just a couple of ideas to add some challenge and franchise strategy to what's become less relevant.

[tril]

Re: Ideas to make kicking harder

they could simply implement the kicking meter found in the NCAA series. and make it a one analog stick feature. you kick and aim with one stick..

Thats how I kick in the NCAA to make it more challenging anyways. I use 1 stick.

position on the field, distance, and kicker rating becomes more important. (rating of the kicker and distance does affect the speed of the meter in NCAA football)

[Blue12]

Re: Ideas to make kicking harder

I really loved the All Pro Football 2k8 kicking mechanic. It was challenging and rewarding.

[cch99]

Ideas to make kicking harder

They also need to add a real kick percentage choice like nba2k does with free throws and rate kickers in 10 yard increments. It would have to be different than whatever they use for the CPU kicking though because I’ve never seen them miss an EP or anything under 40 yards. And that’s with FG’s accuracy at 37.


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[Datninja619]

Re: Ideas to make kicking harder

they could simply implement the kicking meter found in the NCAA series. and make it a one analog stick feature. you kick and aim with one stick..

Thats how I kick in the NCAA to make it more challenging anyways. I use 1 stick.

position on the field, distance, and kicker rating becomes more important. (rating of the kicker and distance does affect the speed of the meter in NCAA football)

I seriously miss the shaking play art and difficulty making audibles from NCAA. Surely that's part of a 'Living world' and 'Next Level Atmosphere' right?

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[scitychamps87]

Re: Ideas to make kicking harder

Kicking was reasonably difficult at launch if you missed the right spot on the meter. Then casual competitive players complained and kicking became a cakewalk again. Same old story.

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[khaliib]

Re: Ideas to make kicking harder

Don’t aim the stick just try and press the button to the R/L of the accurate window, even when it’s slow it’s difficult to measure correctly for the User.

Generated kickers can/will have KAC as low as 50’s, you won’t find that in Front End EA rosters.

***As long as the Kicking Sliders are not touched, the lower generated kicking attributes will function in the game.
- touch the Slider and something is thrown off under-the-hood causing shanks, short kicks and other kicking issues in CFM.

[Americas Team]

Re: Ideas to make kicking harder

Another area of laziest, the kicking meter has been the same for ages, its such a boring part of the game. No attempt to innovate and make it refreshing, theirs several examples from other sports games they could copy. I'd be OK if they brought back how it was on PS2, the more power, the harder the accuracy.

[NYJin2011tm]

Re: Ideas to make kicking harder

^^^^ that... higher power harder accuracy. Plus I remember PS2 days that if you missed slightly on accuracy if your kicker had low accuracy rating the kick would hook or slice. The lower the rating the more the hook or slice was if you missed accuracy.

[kennylc321]

Re: Ideas to make kicking harder

Cut them a break!

They alternate every five years between the current kick meter and the NCAA style kick meter. When they do the Madden hype train, they even tell you "new and improved."

Another area of laziest, the kicking meter has been the same for ages, its such a boring part of the game. No attempt to innovate and make it refreshing, theirs several examples from other sports games they could copy. I'd be OK if they brought back how it was on PS2, the more power, the harder the accuracy.

[cch99]

Re: Ideas to make kicking harder

Isn't the comp players complaining based on lag online ? So they miss because if it lags at all it throws off the kick ? If not I am always hearing about stick skills. Well kicking is one part of the game where it could be all about that. Just make it hit or miss. If your in the blue it goes absolutely straight based on the direction meter. This is a no brainer visual where you can actually see why you missed and they constantly make it way too easy.

If your left of the blue it goes farther and farther left based on how much you missed by. If you click early it goes farther and farther right based on how much you missed by but they need to make the effect much stronger than it is now if it really is even a thing. Have the devs ever said missing right or left of the meter actually affects direction of miss ?. I know people talk about doing that now but I've missed by a ton one direction and it doesn't always go that far and I've still made my FG.

In any case at this point kicker ratings don't even matter. And as I mentioned earlier, the CPU kickers never miss XP or FG's under 40. I've played about 40 games in my 32 team league that I play all games every other week and the CPU this year has missed 1 kick in the 40-49 range and a few over 50. NO XP. It doesn't need to be a constant thing but at least once a week you think you'd see a missed XP or short field goal.

They actually try way less 50 yard kicks this year it seems which is good. They were always screwing themselves on Field position last year.

In any case whatever they do it has to be better and actually matter.

[scitychamps87]

Re: Ideas to make kicking harder

I'd love to know what the league wide NFL stats are on kicks from inside 40, 40-49, and 50+. Then compare against Madden.

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[cch99]

Re: Ideas to make kicking harder

Here's an article from 2019 in the Toronto Sun

https://torontosun.com/sports/footba...20of%2069.5%25.

For the most part I know that kickers are pretty accurate. In fact this article says a kick from 10-19 yards hasn't been missed since 2002. This was through 2018.

The bigger issue is even with 30-39 being 95% realistically the CPU should miss at least one every other week even from that distance. Same with Extra Points. You should see a couple missed a season. 40-49 is about 76.2 in 2018. So you should see some missed from there. Realistically they need to up it just a bit from the CPU.


The other issue is that the sliders don't seem to have any effect other than under 32 you shank everything unless it's a perfect kick.

[cch99]

Re: Ideas to make kicking harder

So Boswell from the Steelers is 7-7 this year. I looked him up because he was the worst percentage wise kicker of 2018.

In 2018 he was
0-19/0-0 20-29/3-3 30-39/4-6 40-49/5-10 50+/1-1 13 20 65

Another guy who is known to miss kicks and here are his career stats.

https://www.nfl.com/players/cody-parkey/stats/career

Realistically they are actually pretty close. Just need the rare 30-39 yard miss, and definitely more 40-49 misses for bad kickers.

For the Human kickers I think they need to adjust the kicking for bad kickers to have the misses outside the blue be a bit more punishing but it's not neccesarily that bad when you look at the real numbers.

I've not taken enough notice of bad kickers or tested to see if bad kickers are actually that much or worse at all so maybe if anyone has labbed it they know that bad kickers are definitely punished more.

For me it's more how it seems not an actual tested thing so maybe I am more off than I realize.

[Jagsfan24]

Re: Ideas to make kicking harder

I have my kick accuracy slider at 40, using Matt’s sliders, and I can tell you if you’re like a tad off of the box you will miss that kick lol. I missed quite a bit