Bill Walsh College Football Roster Ratings by Positions

[tommycoa]

Cool find. Check out how lowly rated the positions were.

http://www.gamefaqs.com/genesis/586062-bill-walsh-college-football/faqs/34241

83 Auburn with Bo Jackson. The Running backs as a group are rated 89.

Why and when did EA start overrating players?

[Art01]

Re: Bill Walsh College Football Roster Ratings by Positions

Tommy, this is indeed an interesting discovery. I suspect that EA chose to boost player ratings for two reasons:

(1) To create more spectacular play in the belief that spectacular play is what their target market most wanted.

(2) To create more of a challenge for arcade style play, which is the predominant play style as opposed to Coach Mode or CPU-CPU play.

It is perhaps unfortunate that EA did not also invest significant effort in developing much better AI to provide the game-play challenge. EA chose instead to rely on being able to manipulate game play difficulty by dynamically boosting and lowering ratings during game play.

When I resume working with NCAA 14, I might use the Editor to create a Roster with a much lower ratings spread and the try to find supporting settings to play interesting Coach Mode games.

[hellbent]

Re: Bill Walsh College Football Roster Ratings by Positions

Very cool - I remember using Hawaii extensively in BWCF and blistering the CPU with their mobile, strong-armed QB. The QB group is rated 83 for Hawaii on the list. I'd say the ratings showed up pretty accurately in the game.

Sad that we aren't getting a NCAA Football or Basketball game on any platform this year for the first time since 1992, I believe. That was the year before Bill Walsh College Football and the year after All American College Football on DOS. The way things are going, the NCAA might not even be regulating the major football conferences in a few years. My, how things have changed.

[tommycoa]

Re: Bill Walsh College Football Roster Ratings by Positions

Bill Walsh was my gateway drug. Then came College Football's National Championship on Sega. They had a feature on that game that I've yet to see again. You could shift formations before the snap. I really wish you could still do that. The Sega game had some of the first really good playbooks in a football game. A few years ago I found the ROM for it and played the hell out of it.

Like I told Playmakers, back then the games were what they were, No sliders. No customizable rosters. You just had to deal with it. I played a lot more games back then.

[goillini03]

Re: Bill Walsh College Football Roster Ratings by Positions

Cool find. Check out how lowly rated the positions were.

http://www.gamefaqs.com/genesis/586062-bill-walsh-college-football/faqs/34241

83 Auburn with Bo Jackson. The Running backs as a group are rated 89.

Why and when did EA start overrating players?

Great find but I think that this game out well past Bo's days at Auburn if I remember correctly.

[BROman]

Re: Bill Walsh College Football Roster Ratings by Positions

Very cool - I remember using Hawaii extensively in BWCF and blistering the CPU with their mobile, strong-armed QB. The QB group is rated 83 for Hawaii on the list. I'd say the ratings showed up pretty accurately in the game.

Michael Carter- that guy was awesome on BWCF. I liked (but didn't like it when I was playing) how he'd get tired and slowed down if you ran him, or any other mobile QB, too much. They get tired now, but it seems that fatigue has no effect on their performance.

[tommycoa]

Re: Bill Walsh College Football Roster Ratings by Positions

Great find but I think that this game out well past Bo's days at Auburn if I remember correctly.

It was 83 Auburn.

[Playmakers]

Re: Bill Walsh College Football Roster Ratings by Positions

I think the lower overall ratings is a direct result of EA just not having that many ratings in the game at that time.

In fact if you still own NCAA 07 you'll see that there were a few ratings missing from that game that we have today.

NCAA 07 also had lower overall rated players and if you gave a RB like 60 strength in that game the game would automatically calculate how high his ratings could be in Trucking and Break Tackle.

Same thing for Defenders on the DL if they didn't have great strength the game would not allow you to increase their Power Move rating too high.

But I do like how Bill Walsh College Football would assign an overall rating for each position. Plus i don't think that game incorporated ratings triggering certain animations you would see like they do in today's game.

[Pokes404]

Re: Bill Walsh College Football Roster Ratings by Positions

I never played the game, so I don't know how players performed, but it's kind of pointless to compare the number ratings. What if an 89 OVR in that game plays the same as a 97 in NCAA? What if 40s play the same as 70s? Ratings are just an arbitrary number within a category that designate a player's "skill" to the computer. There is no uniform scale across all games.

Stealing a little bit from "This is Spinal Tap," let's say you have two speakers that produce the same Decibel levels, on one speaker the dial is labeled from 0-10, on the other the dial is labeled 0-50. If you crank both of them up to the maximum, the "50" speaker isn't any louder than the "10" speaker ... they're the same speakers, it's just a different scale of expressing the same thing.

So unless you know the exact scale of the numbers involved, how those relate to the gameplay, and how the scales in the two games compare to one another, you can't really say one game overrates/underrates players anymore than the other.

EA could change their scale to make fewer players in the 90s and more players in the 50-60s, but they'd play exactly the same. It's just an arbitrary number. My assumption is that they have it scaled the way it is to not have large gaps between similar players. Let's say you stretch the scale, you might have two guys who are very similar players in the real life (and would have only been 1 or 2 OVR points different with the old scale) who now may have 5, 6, 7 OVR points difference between them. People are going to freak at how one guy could be so much lower rated than another player of similar skill level. I think it has more to do with EA expressing the fact that there isn't a huge difference between most players than them just wanting to enforce "arcade" gameplay.

Now, all of this isn't to say that EA isn't overrating players, they absolutely could be. I'm just saying that you can't determine this by strictly looking at the numerical values of ratings between two different games. It's more important to understand what those values really express.

[charter04]

Re: Bill Walsh College Football Roster Ratings by Positions

I never played the game, so I don't know how players performed, but it's kind of pointless to compare the number ratings. What if an 89 OVR in that game plays the same as a 97 in NCAA? What if 40s play the same as 70s? Ratings are just an arbitrary number within a category that designate a player's "skill" to the computer. There is no uniform scale across all games.

Stealing a little bit from "This is Spinal Tap," let's say you have two speakers that produce the same Decibel levels, on one speaker the dial is labeled from 0-10, on the other the dial is labeled 0-50. If you crank both of them up to the maximum, the "50" speaker isn't any louder than the "10" speaker ... they're the same speakers, it's just a different scale of expressing the same thing.

So unless you know the exact scale of the numbers involved, how those relate to the gameplay, and how the scales in the two games compare to one another, you can't really say one game overrates/underrates players anymore than the other.

EA could change their scale to make fewer players in the 90s and more players in the 50-60s, but they'd play exactly the same. It's just an arbitrary number. My assumption is that they have it scaled the way it is to not have large gaps between similar players. Let's say you stretch the scale, you might have two guys who are very similar players in the real life (and would have only been 1 or 2 OVR points different with the old scale) who now may have 5, 6, 7 OVR points difference between them. People are going to freak at how one guy could be so much lower rated than another player of similar skill level. I think it has more to do with EA expressing the fact that there isn't a huge difference between most players than them just wanting to enforce "arcade" gameplay.

Now, all of this isn't to say that EA isn't overrating players, they absolutely could be. I'm just saying that you can't determine this by strictly looking at the numerical values of ratings between two different games. It's more important to understand what those values really express.

The scale was still 0-100. They just had much fewer players rated too high. This gave a better separation of skills and players. The same thing is done with the FBGratings rosters. You can tell the difference when playing the game.

[Pokes404]

Re: Bill Walsh College Football Roster Ratings by Positions

The scale was still 0-100. They just had much fewer players rated too high. This gave a better separation of skills and players. The same thing is done with the FBGratings rosters. You can tell the difference when playing the game.

Once again, you're taking 0-100 in both games to mean the same thing. We don't know what the scales in the ratings are. How much difference is there between a guy with 70 strength and 90 strength? In one game that could be a very minimal difference, in another it could be a huge difference. Maybe 0 strength in one game equates to a bench press of 150 lbs, in another game it may literally mean he can't even lift 2 ounces. Maybe a rating of 40 is the lowest rating you can have in a certain attribute instead of 0, like in EA games, but they both express the same thing ... the lowest possible value that can be assigned in a category. Again, it isn't about the numerical value, it's about what that value represents.

The reason lowering the ratings in NCAA works is because you're stretching out the ratings of players that are all using the same ratings scale. That's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about comparing the OVR ratings between two different games. This can't be done strictly looking at the numerical values because the ratings scales can be completely different. There's nothing to say that a 74 OVR in one game doesn't have the same effectiveness as an 88 OVR in another. It's all relative to the game.

[ACardAttack]

Re: Bill Walsh College Football Roster Ratings by Positions

Cool find. Check out how lowly rated the positions were.

http://www.gamefaqs.com/genesis/586062-bill-walsh-college-football/faqs/34241

83 Auburn with Bo Jackson. The Running backs as a group are rated 89.

Why and when did EA start overrating players?

They why is to make as many fans happy as possible...just look at the team ratings, Look at say Kentucky, ratings in the low 80's and then look at any good team other than Bama, say Florida State, low 90's ratings. Who would ever in their right mind pick Kentucky when their buddy picked FSU in a quick play game if ratings were spread out? A good player can take a low 80's team and compete and beat a team with ratings in the 90s

It also makes fans of teams happy to see their team has a solid rating (even if it is an inflation of what the team's ability)