[Aestis]

Quote: Originally Posted by CM Hooe

The very premise of this topic is flat-out wrong. When I last spoke to Clint Oldenburg about gameplay and penalty sliders, he made it exceedingly clear to me not only that penalty sliders only affect penalty chances, but also that front-end sliders do not modify or override sliders other modes. He was well-aware when we spoke of the anecdotes to the contrary propagated by forums such as this one and he immediately and strongly dismissed as just that - stories. Given that he's the lead designer of gameplay on Madden NFL and would know how the game works better than anyone on this forum, we all should consider the observations reported in the topic post as merely placebo.

FWIW, I'm the analytics geek who tracks all kinds of raw and performance metrics for my 32-man league. Have for 2-3 years now.

I've swung multiple penalty sliders from 100 to 0 and seen absolutely zero impact on our #s (other than the penalty calls themselves). Most other gameplay sliders, sometimes even just moving them 2-3 points can result in a noticeable statistical effect.

So color me staunchly on the side of "penalty sliders = pure confirmation bias," at least until a single shred of evidence is posted otherwise. All I ever see is "trust me."