Progression forza win: Or, what FIFA and Pro Evo can give to Madden - Icarus2k9's Blog

Icarus2k9's Blog

Progression forza win: Or, what FIFA and Pro Evo can give to Madden

Posted on August 22, 2010 at 07:19 PM.

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Once again, Madden NFL 11 has seen the thorny argument of nature vs nurture rear its head in the form of franchise mode progression. It wouldn't be August without the stats based progression people sounding off, and the potential based progression guys getting exasperated in trying to teach the others the error of their ways.

In truth, there probably isn't a right way of handling progression in a computer game, but there are certainly ways it could go wrong. That's why this blog will use as its foundation that stats-based progression is wrong, wrong, a thousand times wrong. I'd explain why, but too many people have done it far better than I far too many times. So let's just use that as the yardstick.

So what's wrong with the A B C D F system now?
Three things. It's visible, it's predictable, and it's inflexible (bear with me on the third one). You pretty much know from the minute you draft a person how fast they are going to grow and what their ceiling is. From a game perspective, that isn't very fun. The buzz you get from unearthing a gem (one of the best parts of franchise) is realised before you even pick up the pad to play as them for the first time. Also, the letters don't allow for the many dips, swells and career-changing moments in an average NFL life. Every player's career is essentially a drawing of Table Mountain.

Where do FIFA and Pro Evo come into proceedings then?
Both games are also well-known for their life consuming career modes, particularly Pro Evo's Master League. As a result, both games have had to put their own spin on progression.

Pro Evo uses the graph system (As seen in this thread http://forums.pesfan.com/showthread.php?t=225955). This allows a player's career to develop based along a chart, meaning every player develops uniquely, has differing ceilings, and can even have sudden peaks or troughs - very realistic.
It's problem is that a) you can see the graph, which means the players with bad potential are usually thrown back into the pond, and b) improves ALL statistics based on player position and performance. For something like a soccer game, performance-based progression has a bit more logic, simply because the amount of improvement that happens during games is more marked than in the shorter American Football seasons, and has obvious differences in the amount of "practice" a player gets per game (100+ kicks against three runs from scrimmage, for instance). Also, the stats only break someone's potential by 3 or so overall points in their entire career. However, physical attributes boost despite several increases not making sense, e.g. continual speed climbs, which brings us to...

Fifa's newest system breaks down stats into three areas: Physical, skill, mental. Physical stats improve early, peak, and fall away. Skill stats improve more slowly, until a later date, then freeze. And Mental stats improve slowest of all, but never stop (if I'm wrong on this, throw rotten tomatoes at me). It's more realistic for how progression works, but makes the mistake of progression being something you can "buy", and something you can allocate yourself. The higher your mark out of ten in each positional area (bought by cash from your budget) the quicker and further they improve. It means the big clubs stay big and the smaller clubs struggle, which works for a disparate league system such as soccer, but doesn't really benefit the NFL's parity thing.

So what should Madden take from all this to make a good progression system short term?
Before we overcomplicate it, let's think of a one-year fix: combining the two takes on getting better into a three graph system.
All EA needs to do is create a series of these progression charts, and assign one to each player - with a separate graph for each skill set (mental, technical, physical). And it's not even like Pro Evo needed thousands of different charts - they used less than a dozen, just with different starting points.

Why does this work?
Because it allows for the way a human would progress, and gives you the freedom to make progression a bit more fluid. It allows you to adjust for different positions too (so WRs would be more likely to have a boost in their third year, RBs would be more likely to drop off the ledge at 30, etc.) It could also create those 'lights on' moments, when a player suddenly gets it after a couple of years of nothing, or a sudden plateau or even drop for a one-year-wonder.

Two caveats
1) It must be hidden. To see the progression would destroy the point of making it more nuanced. In response, scouting would become a lot more vague (e.g. a lot more of the "this kid could be the next Matt Schaub") and would be an ongoing process (e.g. "Jim Bloggs has said he wants to knuckle down and really improve his route running. We should give him a shot, but I don't know if he's got it"). Make the scouts everything from bang on to well wrong on a player by player basis.
2) There must be many more points for someone to progress. The old 5,11,17,season's end was a good model, but it should resemble the real process a little more e.g. the biggest progression should come before preseason begins, with smaller jumps during the season.

Conclusion
This is only a simple model, but one I believe they could build on over iterations to make fantastic. As it stands, it would be entertaining and simulate a real career without being technical, but technical enough to last a year. I'll jump in with my more complicated one very soon, along with why solving the stats progression guys' gripes could be the key to the best franchise mode later.