[canes21]

Quote: Originally Posted by CM Hooe

I seem to recall during the promotional cycle of one of the older NCAA Football games that Ben Haumiller talked about how Tiburon had brought in someone with a mathematics doctorate to work out all the combinatorics involved with season schedule generation for custom conference. I would hope that either that person is still around, or at least that their work is stored on a Perforce repo somewhere to reference. Even without the ability to bring that over, given that the new ACC scheduling format is going to start next season in time for the game, I think implementing schedule generation for a single division conference with three locked rivals per team is now promoted to a critical dev task for release, IMO. You can’t run Dynasty mode without the ability to generate a schedule. If a component of that gets cut, I might reasonably expect the biannual rotation of not-locked opponents to get pushed off for EA CFB 2024. As for other scheduling types, such as the hypothetical four pods of four for in a future SEC, I don’t think we will see that in the first release at all.

I know it is a tall task, but I hope that they not only are able to figure out how to incorporate a pods system into the game since that is what the ACC is scheduled to use next year when the game comes out, but I hope EA is able to build off the custom conferences feature from NCAA 14 and allows users in EA CFB 24 to completely add or remove conferences and do traditional scheduling or different pod systems.

I know it is a lot of complicated math to get schedules to work with custom conferences, but with the current state of college football, custom conferences with different scheduling structures is something that feels necessary.

I wouldn't even be opposed to the game allowing the user to go all out with custom conferences with some real craziness, e.g. allowing the user to straight up delete the ACC and PAC, allow them to set up some weird pod system, but then warn the user that if they go too wild the game may not be able to generate a schedule and the user may be forced to create a schedule themselves to get it to work. Obviously the game would check and validate the schedule, but I'm sure some of the more hardcore players would gladly take the time to setup schedules around the nation if it meant they could truly go wild with the conferences. The only question is, do the conferences that are signing their likenesses over to EA give EA the permission to allow users to straight up delete whole conferences from the game.

It would be pure fun, though, to have the ability to add brand new conferences with custom names and logos, to be able to delete conferences altogether, to be able to go with traditional 2 division setups, pod systems, 3 division setups with a conference playoff structure for the championship, etc. I think that is asking for too much at this point, but you never know, EA may surprise us with how robust they can make some things.