Online Communities Took Precedence Over Online Franchise in Madden NFL 12

[Still2REal]

Re: Online Communities Took Precedence Over Online Franchise in Madden NFL 12

Just being honest man, the true is what it is... It's not a conspiracy. The most played game.modes always get work, on EVERY GAME.

OK then please tell me why people on this site always say Offline Franchise is the most played part of the game, yet it took 4+ years for them to touch the mode.

They improve what they want to improve and hold off on the features that gamers demand for as long as possible so they can add it at the last moment and say "NEW" feature. There is NO DOUBT in my mind they staged a 2 part Online Franchise implementation for this very reason.

[CRMosier_LM]

Re: Online Communities Took Precedence Over Online Franchise in Madden NFL 12

OK then please tell me why people on this site always say Offline Franchise is the most played part of the game, yet it took 4+ years for them to touch the mode.

They improve what they want to improve and hold off on the features that gamers demand for as long as possible so they can add it at the last moment and say "NEW" feature. There is NO DOUBT in my mind they staged a 2 part Online Franchise implementation for this very reason.

Because what people assume and what is actually real are 2 completely different things. And I'm sorry that you feel that way but your last sentence is not correct. Online franchise will be torn down and rebuilt from scratch, you can almost bet on that

[GiantBlue76]

Re: Online Communities Took Precedence Over Online Franchise in Madden NFL 12

Because what people assume and what is actually real are 2 completely different things. And I'm sorry that you feel that way but your last sentence is not correct. Online franchise will be torn down and rebuilt from scratch, you can almost bet on that

Casey, I know that it will actually. That's probably more the reason they didn't put effort into it this year. They are thinking of it as throw away code when they could simply start the work on the re-write, which in actuality is the right thing to do. However, they should have done it right the first time. That falls on poor development, which is the frightening part. I'll be thrilled if they get it right next year. Full web integration and everything. Online franchise coupled with more gameplay improvements will bring me back to the Madden fan I once was about 10 years ago.

[kbmnm247]

Re: Online Communities Took Precedence Over Online Franchise in Madden NFL 12

Does anyone else see the same cycle of logic that I'm seeing?

EA says people aren't playing Online Franchise as their reason it wasn't updated. Upset consumers are saying they aren't playing because the mode isn't updated. Someone stated they may delay their purchase until December to get Madden for a lower price.

The problem with this logic is, not buying Madden keeps Online Franchise metric numbers low and starting to play in December to get a bargain may be well after the creative decisions get made. Meanwhile, guys like myself that get the game at midnight on release day can give meaningful feedback about what we'd like changed immediately through our feedback and gaming habits.

And you think it is right for EA to make decisions based on the first week(s) of gameplay? I understand they have a quick development cycle... so save the big changes for last. Work on getting all of your art, commentary, animation stuff together early and then refine the modes afterwords? Is that so hard? To make decisions based off of reviews a week after the game is out is something EA constantly does, and imo it is not very intelligent. Even when it comes to patches, but I digress...

I'm curious to know how many of the people who are complaining about what isn't updated in Madden 12 didn't pay $60 for new copies of Madden 10 & 11. The way I see it, EA improved the online landscape and game play enough for several things to happen:

1) Gameplay: Longtime PS2 holdouts may finally move to PS3/360 because the coverage shading they have been using since Madden '05 has finally made it to NG.

2) Gameplay: Longtime critics of suction will play Madden more now that tackles occur on contact.

3) Franchise: Although they don't make this mode for me, I remember the list of improvements being substantial. Franchise players who make up a large part of the community will be pleased for a few months.

4) Online Communities: People have been craving something like Communities for years. Slider folks will be happy. SIM folks will be happy. Cut-throat players will be happy.

Don't get me wrong, but I do not see the allure for these online communities. I don't see how it is any different than me having a friends list, except that OC will keep stats. Whoop-de-do

These are things that people who PLAY MADDEN have asked been asking for. It's reasonable that the improvements to other modes may cause the metrics for Online Franchise to dip even lower. With many of the 'fans' refusing to play based on principle and the rest of us not caring at all, the effect is the decision NOT to update the mode.

A better course of action would be to address the real issue that plagues online franchises and leagues alike - NOT ENOUGH GOOD OWNERS and COMMISSIONERS.

If you like the idea of Online Franchise and want to improve it, don't just complain, boycott, rile, and rally. Instead PLAY IT - OFTEN. Add to the fabric of the small Online Franchise community. Get Madden 12 at midnight and play Online Franchise all year long. Make some new friends and mirror the dignity you expect from others.

Obviously, fans of Online Franchise who play religiously in spite of the shortcomings need help getting the numbers up.

Later

TNT, no offense, but you obviously have never played Online Franchise. It ISNT an online franchise. You say to play it, often. The reason people don't play it is because would you rather play a buddy with a random team immediately, or would you rather go through all of the scheduling to play a buddy with the same exact teams. There is nothing franchise about Online Franchise in Madden. It would be like me telling you to play Online Ranked games OFTEN even though they didn't keep score in the games, you'd be telling me I was crazy for suggesting that could get it improved.

EA is lazy, pure and simple. It can not possibly be that hard to add a salary cap to OF over a 2 year period especially when you claim you can control/update/add to it at any time because it's all online.

[kbmnm247]

Re: Online Communities Took Precedence Over Online Franchise in Madden NFL 12

BLAME THYSELF.

Later

Your business analogies do not hold water. There are glaring holes all over the place.

This is not 4 separate stores, yet it is one big store. They sell 4 products at the said store. They are also basically "forced" to keep the 4 products in stock, no matter how many sales they make of each, because it keeps the consumers happy and returning. Now, if you had a product that was 3% of your sales, but 25% of your prior resources/development/research, wouldn't you at least look into why it wasn't being purchased? Is it because all of your inventory is expired? Is it because all of that current inventory is miles behind competitors with the same inventory? Is it because your product really is just a cheap China knockoff? Because THAT is why it is 3%, the OF mode is stale, behind the times, and the only place that mode is an Online Franchise is on the in-game menus that EA displays. It is FAR from an actual FRANCHISE mode. FAR from it.

You are saying that they should just pour more money into the 97% sales because the 3% sales don't matter. So they are just going to have "rotting inventory" on the shelves while the 97% # can pretty much only go down over time? Why wouldn't they pour more R&D into why the 3% isn't selling since you already obviously have a huge market share with the other 97%?

[kbmnm247]

Re: Online Communities Took Precedence Over Online Franchise in Madden NFL 12

Good point, but mine seems to be escaping everyone...

I am not at all concerned with why people don't play Online Franchise. What matters is that almost no-one does. The lowest THREE game modes account for a COMBINED 3% of the first 40 million games played. That's LOWER than the sales tax in most states. Furthermore, by many admissions, a lot of guys haven't purchased Madden in years. I don't see much logic in EA bending over backward for the consumer that isn't buying or playing the product.

That said... I believe online Communities will revolutionize the way the millions of people who actually buy and play Madden will enjoy the game. If it is done well, it will remove all of the major issues most people have with online play. I'm not sure what effect it's going to have on people that don't buy or play the game.

Til then, where are the guys playing the 3% who buy Madden and play Online Franchise.

How do they feel?

Later

As I've stated in another thread that for some reason the majority just fail to realize...

As you said, EA looked at the first 40 million games played as their barometer to who plays what modes. Just THINK about how flawed that is.

Let's go over a quick scenario, and you can see if I'm wrong with my assumptions.
There were almost 1 million copies sold in week one of Madden 11 release.
When you get home after purchasing madden, what do you play? Most likely it's either a quick match against the computer, a franchise game, or an online game against a random or a friend. Why would you come home and the first thing you play would be online franchise?
You would obviously want to practice, get used to the game, make sure all of your friends who would be in the OF have the game and are also used to the game, etc.

Also don't forget the hundreds of thousands of pirate gamers who still played online and counted in that original 40 million game sample and to me, it seems like if 3% are playing Online Franchise that is a BIG number, not a negligible one.

I'm not sure why this is glossed over? Honestly, do you expect the first 40 million games played (thats not that big of a # in all honesty) to be 50/50 split between OF/Online Ranked? 25/75? Even 10/90?

The fact remains that 3% # to me, means nothing to prove that OF isn't played. Did they ever release final #s after the year was over? Did they ever even investigate what that # would be after say 200 million games played online?

That would be like me releasing a car and saying that for the first 50 miles only 3% of users used their navigation system that in the end gave them wrong directions, but 97% of them used their headlights so we are going to pour all of our R&D on headlight improvements.

[MMurda]

Re: Online Communities Took Precedence Over Online Franchise in Madden NFL 12

what ill say on this matter is if they need us to play an obvious half arse attempt at a online franch to tell them they should fix it, its no wonder they have so many unhappy present customers, past customers, possible future customers and is showing that they are indeed 100% responsible and def deserving of all the bad press and feelings that they get across the internet and media. this "logic" or "thought process" that EA uses to determine what they should work on is already flawed out the gate and anyone with half a brain knows this. i literally cant believe that there would be any argument on this at all from any of the great minds here at OS.

the 3% or whatever the true # is of those who played it CAN NOT and SHOULD NOT be used a sole indicator of anything. why? because the mode is not equal to any of the other full fledged finished and "working" modes. it was born to fail as it is unfinished out the gate.

how would u take any data from this, except to look at and say why is this # so low compared to the others? once u do that, the immediate response to that is to look at its possible flaws for reason...the biggest most obvious one is its incomplete and not a franchise as its listed as being. the next step should be EA saying "ok fellas, lets get it where it needs to be and complete it, then do further analysis to get real #'s that mean something". did they do that? NOPE...they proceeded to infuriate their customers by using that flawed 3% as a real reason, thus playing us (well educated customers) as fools, and further alienating its customer base with a shallow excuse that anyone could see thru in one sec.

until online franch equals the offline franch or is at least offering 80% of the offline franch offerings thus giving it a right to even be called online franch, can any data be used as a barometer to guage or come to any "real" conclusions...point blank period!! THEN AND ONLY THEN, can they truly say nobodys playing it, so lets not waste any more time and R&D on it.

[TWOSILK]

Re: Online Communities Took Precedence Over Online Franchise in Madden NFL 12

the question is this who builds something and only does it barebones, imagine getting a car with a emergency brake that didnt work because the car manufacturer said only 8% of car owners use this feature?? and when you wanted to use it, it didnt work properly, you would be outraged correct? the point is if you have the feature make it work or dont include it, how about madden take a number of games still playing online franchise, curious to what those numbers would be. and the reason online franchise got no play in the beginning of the cycle?? needed roster updates, and had to wait for the first patch, i can stand a game or two against randoms but when this game came out it had wayyyyyyyyyy too many issues to start a chise with. so of course no one played in the beginning. This is simple EA build it correctly or remove it, but dont put it in barebones and leave it the same.

[TNT713]

Re: Online Communities Took Precedence Over Online Franchise in Madden NFL 12

TNT, no offense, but you obviously have never played Online Franchise. It ISNT an online franchise.

You're right. I've never played it and dare I say, I'm never gonna play it. EA could literally leave all the Franchise modes off of my Madden disc and I'd never notice.

I play 1v1 and 3v3 online and it wouldn't matter if there are changes from one year to the next or not.

Later

[jerryrice4949]

Re: Online Communities Took Precedence Over Online Franchise in Madden NFL 12

Good point. I think that's where the bulk of my frustration is. Two things that year were platformed that I considered a green light to buy the game (Online franchise and Pro-Tak). Both of them haven't been touched. Now you can argue that the new tackling system is another step but Pro-Tak isn't spoken of anymore.

Good point. What happened to pro-tak?

As for TNT I don't know if you are clueless or just being ridiculous. Either way you idea about playing a broken mode to slowly change EA is sad.

It is about money from what I hear. The communities thing is super cheap to implement.

Online Franchise for Madden would be EXTREMELY expensive. The amount of serve space and power that would be required for trades, salary cap, rookies and other franchise elements would be huge. NCAA had like 50,000 online dynasties started in the first couple weeks. Madden would have maybe 5 times that. Server space would cost a lot. I am sure EA decided to see if communities would placate people before having to invest millions more into serves and the equipment to go with.

[TNT713]

Re: Online Communities Took Precedence Over Online Franchise in Madden NFL 12

Good point. What happened to pro-tak?

As for TNT I don't know if you are clueless or just being ridiculous. Either way you idea about playing a broken mode to slowly change EA is sad.

It is about money from what I hear. The communities thing is super cheap to implement.

Online Franchise for Madden would be EXTREMELY expensive. The amount of serve space and power that would be required for trades, salary cap, rookies and other franchise elements would be huge. NCAA had like 50,000 online dynasties started in the first couple weeks. Madden would have maybe 5 times that. Server space would cost a lot. I am sure EA decided to see if communities would placate people before having to invest millions more into serves and the equipment to go with.

JerryRice4949,

Once again, my point is missed... All throughout this post I've mentioned two things:

1) Numbers are incredibly low for usage of Online Franchise
2) EA uses those numbers to determine where to allot their resources

If communities is indeed less expensive, it requires less resources. Time, money, equipment, and developers are all resources that are used in accordance with the decisions EA makes early in the development cycle - all based on how we play the game.

What we tell EA and have told EA since Online Franchise was added is that collectively, WE DON'T PLAY IT.

For those fans that still want to point to NCAA as proof that the mode would get used seem to overlook that fact that Madden and NCAA have different target markets and VERY LITTLE OVERLAP of 10%.

I also find that much of this argument for more people playing Madden's Online Franchise depends on what we imagine to be gamer habits while numbers - which are concrete - tell us otherwise.

Given our actual gaming habits (not the "what if" numbers) it makes perfectly logical business sense to add communities to improve the mode millions of gamers play while tabling the other modes until later.

Besides... According to your post, Communities seems to require less resources to improve the mode and it's usage exponentially by eliminating the most common objections to online play and offline franchise. Any theoretical increase in Online Franchise participation would be just that - THEORY.

No one really knows how many Madden players will flock to Online Franchise once it gets the dev time it needs. But even if there are 5x as many games played as now, it's still probably going to be less than 10% of the total games played because the 3% we were quoted combines the three least used modes usage together...

Too many resources + too few playing the mode = Update other things.

Simple... But only when there's no emotional connection. I can't be the only one that sees the correlation... So dare I say again - If you like the idea of online franchise PLAY IT. Otherwise, it's painfully low usage numbers might be seen as a reason to pull the plug entirely...

Personally, I'd rather have online PRACTICE mode 10x more than Online Franchise. Dare I say, it might get more play in it's 1st year than the past 3 years of online franchise combine (since we're throwing out baseless numbers and ignoring the real ones).

Later

[CRMosier_LM]

Re: Online Communities Took Precedence Over Online Franchise in Madden NFL 12

Good point. What happened to pro-tak?

As for TNT I don't know if you are clueless or just being ridiculous. Either way you idea about playing a broken mode to slowly change EA is sad.

It is about money from what I hear. The communities thing is super cheap to implement.

Online Franchise for Madden would be EXTREMELY expensive. The amount of serve space and power that would be required for trades, salary cap, rookies and other franchise elements would be huge. NCAA had like 50,000 online dynasties started in the first couple weeks. Madden would have maybe 5 times that. Server space would cost a lot. I am sure EA decided to see if communities would placate people before having to invest millions more into serves and the equipment to go with.

online franchise is NOT broken. It works just fine with what is there, it is not unplayable or bug filled. It may not be up to your standards but the game mode itself works just fine.

[GiantBlue76]

Re: Online Communities Took Precedence Over Online Franchise in Madden NFL 12

Good point. What happened to pro-tak?

As for TNT I don't know if you are clueless or just being ridiculous. Either way you idea about playing a broken mode to slowly change EA is sad.

It is about money from what I hear. The communities thing is super cheap to implement.

Online Franchise for Madden would be EXTREMELY expensive. The amount of serve space and power that would be required for trades, salary cap, rookies and other franchise elements would be huge. NCAA had like 50,000 online dynasties started in the first couple weeks. Madden would have maybe 5 times that. Server space would cost a lot. I am sure EA decided to see if communities would placate people before having to invest millions more into serves and the equipment to go with.

Sorry, but this is just incorrect on pretty much all counts. The server code is built to scale lots and lots of users. There is software all over the world that is designed to do this. I've worked on some of it, it's not any more or less expensive, it's all about how well you build it.

[CRMosier_LM]

Re: Online Communities Took Precedence Over Online Franchise in Madden NFL 12

Casey, I know that it will actually. That's probably more the reason they didn't put effort into it this year. They are thinking of it as throw away code when they could simply start the work on the re-write, which in actuality is the right thing to do. However, they should have done it right the first time. That falls on poor development, which is the frightening part. I'll be thrilled if they get it right next year. Full web integration and everything. Online franchise coupled with more gameplay improvements will bring me back to the Madden fan I once was about 10 years ago.

I understand your point completely but my counter argument to that is it isn't poor development but different views on what is important. I guarantee Cam Weber sees the importance of online franchise where as the previous team may or may not have.

[Icarus2k9]

Re: Online Communities Took Precedence Over Online Franchise in Madden NFL 12

Some interviews are by text, but this one was my phone. So basically some allow follow-up questions and others do not -- yes, just depends on the medium.

Seems like a fair enough question. I know that generally speaking they don't want to or will give specifics on that type of stuff, but it wouldn't hurt to ask.

But just to be clear, the interview was about Online Communities, so I just didn't want to use that as a platform to "jump" a developer about online franchise stuff. So I more tacked on a question at the end to at least get a word about it.

Thanks for getting back to me on this. I can see why you don't want to derail the questioning, but if you know for a fact that this is the last question of an interview then there's no problem in taking it off the beaten track a little. I'm not asking you to trick someone, or ignore all the other stuff you ask to sensationalise one response at the end.

I'm a UK news journalist (may not be in two weeks thanks to job cuts, joy joy) and whenever someone mentions numbers we instantly ask for the details on those numbers. They refuse to give them? Just write they refused to give them, ask why and then write that too. Do you have an American version of a Freedom of Information request you can log with the EA press office to get these numbers? If your good relationship with EA is threatened by something as slight as pressing them over a few matters, you never had a good relationship to begin with.

I'm going to back up respectfully now and not tell you guys how to do your job, because you're already making sure the OS community is well informed and actually has a good glimpse behind the curtain (which is better than the rest of the gaming press combined). Take me asking you to press them on certain things as a compliment on how much good stuff you get already