Thanks, Guillaume. It's nice to read that. I have to acknowledge what Todd has done with IHOF as well, showing what's possible in building a community around the game.

I wasn't able to play each version of FBPro (poor high school kid, unable to buy and upgrade my computer. :( ). I did get and play 94, 97 and 98. In 97, the graphics look sharper, but always had this feeling the players were too small for the field. But other than better graphics, I didn't notice much of a change in the game.

For 98, it had a new interface, ability to save every play and rewatch a game (great for online leagues). But didn't feel it gave all that much more than 94. The developers even admitted that 98 wasn't much of an update because they didn't have a lot of time to work on it (they were getting prepared for 99...).

Sierra found out that they could sell about 150,000 copies of the game regardless of what they did. So with 96 and 97, they sold just as many (or more) than 94 and 95 and that's the reason we got patches as new versions. It wasn't really until EA started threatening FBPro's hold on PC football that they put some muscle into the game, and then came 99 and just disaster.

I also don't find it very coincidental that the whole FBPro 99 disaster (along with many other disasters within Sierra around that time) happened shortly after Ken Williams left the company.

It even has brought sworn enemies in the POL threads together with positive results.

Maybe Congress should get some FOF MP leagues started. :)

Put one down here. I found FOF through Internet searches, the Sierra message boards and the comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.sports newsgroup. I found the original FOF, but held off on ordering the CD because I was a poor struggling graduate and the idea of ordering a game like that sight unseen made me nervous. I researched FOF exhaustively before I finally had so many promising reviews and recommendations that I was ready to purchase ... at the exact time Jim announced it was sold out. Opening day for FOF2 though, I was immediately hooked.
Another reason to hate Sierra for ruining an incredible product. I think the "holy grail" of sports sims is to combine the sophistication and addictive gameplay of FBPro with the power of FOF. Knowing how close that was on multiple occassions is just too tantalizing. I can't imagine how frustrating it was for you to be setback by the shortsightedness of others with Sierra and EA.

Just curious, Jim -- do you have any inkling about any link between EA's NFL Head Coach and the FOF 2k1 base? I've seen some things in the screenshots and read some similar language that makes me wonder if some concepts if not entire sections of the game may serve as part of the base of the game.

No doubt. Wow. Jim creating the career mode for Front Page. That truly would have been the game of all games.

It would appear that the UIC potential in their forums just went through the roof.

RE: Moderated Q&A Chat? - 3/5/2006 7:38:01 PM

mrskippy Matrix Recruit Posts: 1 Joined: 3/5/2006 Status: offline

quote: ORIGINAL: David Winter Zowee77 is correct in that I have done one of these before. But like you I think it's a good idea to have another. It would also probably be a good way to clear the air about some things. JoeL from Matrix usually sets these up and he has a system in place for hosting them. I'll contact him and see what his thoughts are. Has there been any news on this yet? I have some questions about this game that I'd really like to know before I will consider spending as much money as you expect me to give you on it. It doesn't seem that you respond a lot on this board so I would appreciate some sort of Q&A session soon, before the game is released. I have been following this game since 2002 and I certainly remember there being talk of a demo at one point, so I was very disappointed to hear that there will not be one. I rarely by games without checking out a demo because my teachers' salary doesn't give me the chance to pick up very many games each year. (in reply to David Winter)

Has anyone ever confirmed by sight that mrskippy is actually a teacher?

oh dear

I think this thread may have found new life.

I was curious about the yearly rookie drafts of 40-60 rounds that occur at the beginning of each season in Maximum Football, and was told that this doesn't significantly impact the quality of teams' rosters.

The fact that rosters didn't improve with such an influx of talent had me a bit confused, but I think I've found the answer:

It appears that when a league is created, the game generates 1280 players per position for each position for the initial draft. So in an initial league draft, each team will have over 1200 quarterbacks to choose from. The result is that each team has superstar players at every position on their roster. Subsequent yearly rookie drafts have 40-60 round, which sustains this level of talent.

I'm really not sure what to say to this, except "Why?"

If I were to answer my own question, I'd have to say that something drastic happens when teams with a more normal dispersion of talent play, and the current situation is designed to cover up issues with player ratings.

Please tell me that mrskippy is a joke account. That can't be the REAL mrskippy. Can it?

I can probably count on 1 hand the members here that have purchased the game.

And probably two hands for all the people who purchased the game.

Going to have to fire FBPro 98 back up now after hearing all the talk about it.

I remember being at Electronics Boutique (pretty sure it was still that back then) with a friend and seeing the very original Football (before the pro was added) and thinking that it looked pretty cool. I picked it up and was hooked as soon as I started playing (hell, even the incredible time it took to sim a week of games didn't phase me as I would sim when I had something else to do).

Then the Pro versions started coming out and I was hooked like a junkie.

I actually tried a demo of an early FOF and wasn't able to get into it. FB Pro had me loving watching the players as I called the plays and went thruogh a game. It seemed to really get you into the game so I couldn;t go back to text at that point. IT wasn't until I realized there would never be a game like that again when I tried FOF again and then found myself up all hours of the night simming (though it was still a lot different that FBPro as I still find it a little harder to 'get to know' the players since it's too tempting to just sim like mad through the seasons to see how the next game turns out, sim, see stats, repeat...).

I think Maximum Football made me hope that FB Pro could be revived in some way. Oh well, I usually get trapped by one of these games every now and then (the college basketball game from .400 Studios was the last one, though Maximum Football makes that one look flawless).

I was reading through the forums at matrix games and seeing some of the customization projects the folks are talking about, 20s era football in particular, and I actually found myself getting excited. A dude created a perl script to generate "old style" QBs (less passing, more blocking), and with the ability to use players on both O and D and the ability to customize playbooks to take in to account the old style of almost only the running game my mind began to run wild and imagine how awesome that would be.

Then I remembered that the engine this mod would be using was Maximum Football.

Still, it sounds like this game is pretty heavily customisable down to the core, more so than I thought, and if the many, many, many issues can be sorted out - either by Matrix or the community - maybe this game will be worth a spin... I know I'll be keeping an eye on the forums, at least.

I just really wish there was a demo so I could see the game in action myself. For the price tag it carries and the state of the release there is no way I'd consider purchasing this game until I can try it myself.

It'll be a while. With the game in it's current state; I can't see them releasing a demo.

Put my in the I-don't-buy-it camp. I think if that's mrskippy, then that hornsmaniac guy really was hornsmaniac.

I can't believe this word is even in my vocabulary on this subject anymore...but wow. That's absurd. Where'd you hear this from, GB?

Check out the Matrix forums. There is some crazy crap going on with the psudeo career sim.

There is also a lot of talk that it doesn't actual keep track of stats. The database only seems to keep track of the last game. So it writes over the data from the previous week. The database also places all of that data into one field (that's like putting the stats in one cell in Excel).

I am truly disappointed, because I truly don't think they had any good beta testers. It seems there were too many people cheering him on and overlooking the faults of the game, which is actually hurt him in the end.

A number of people didn't think it was a big deal when it was brought up by this board, but now you are slowly starting to see people complain about it.

I am one of the handful that purchased this game. Right now, the actual gameplay is pretty bad. I have seen kickoffs where every player just runs into each other. They just knock each other down until you have to shut off the game. I have seen receivers running routes on the sidelines. The second half of the game starting on the same yard line that the first half ended on. Kickers hitting 60% of PAT's so far, just to name a few.

Also, the stats are not accumulating like Antmeister mentioned. I really dont know how this got by the testers. Play by play is not logged anywhere yet. Ratings cannot be edited from the actual game, you have to go into the database, which is in Access 97 format. I accidentally hit the draft button twice for a new league and every team had over 120 players. Numerous spelling mistakes in the game. The "dense" had a penalty tonight, not the "defense".

I admire that one guy has developed this, but its nowhere near where it should be. Things like spelling mistakes and cumulative stats are easy to spot.

thanks for posting BigJimSlade.

This nowhere near where it should be that I bolded out in your post is what I think is the big thing right now. The it referenced there should be replaced by "a $40 game" as in "it's nowhere near where a $40 game should be". As was said numerous times before, you can't go and say "this is not my full time job" and charge "full price for it". The "where it should be" would not have been the same had it been sort of prereleased as a freeware...

FM

Let's say the price had been $10, do people think the game would have been sold more than four times as many as it has been so far? I didn't see cold hard facts on this subject, but the handful of FOFC'ers might have been two dozen if the game had been at that price rate. Or am I being too optimitic for Maximum Football there?

I'm not sure how the sales would be, but as mentioned earlier in this thread, I think that expectations would have been considerably lower at that price point.

I don't dispute the strategy of charging full price for this game right away -- if you're trying to maximize revenues, then you want to milk the "gotta have it" crowd right away, as they won't be able to help themselves form buying the game right away. As speculated earlier (here and elsewhere, I suspect) this most definitely smacks of a game that over time loses sales, and becomes a target for a lowered price to induce more buyers later.

I think the two issues are not really connected. Matrix/WV are probably wise to release it at full price (and without a free demo) right now, and to make their money while they can. And critics are absolutely right to object to any "well, we're just a one man show" defense by (or on behalf of) the outfit releasing the game at full price.

At this point the game is so bad it's no longer even fun to make jokes about it. :(

Maybe the best way to salvage this game is to make it open-source freeware and let the community take it over. The potential success, of course, depends on who the "community" is.

It may be wise as a very short term decision, but is it fair to their customers?

I kept myself informed (and entertained) about the development of the games in the last couple weeks only so I knew it would kinda suck at first. Think about the guy who doesn't know much about it and goes in head first and buys it, only to find the readme.txt file with known issues well hidden in the zip file. Sure they've since made it public but after release the first few comments were the kind of "it's in the known issues list" posts...

I know if I'd bought a game like that for full price, hoping to get a full game, and I got the game they just released, I'd be pissed at Matrix/WV for a long time... Maybe it's just me...

FM

They have taken maximum customization to a whole new level with the bi-racial players. Can't even do that in The Sims.

Bravo.

If this were just another war game, by the same internal development group as all the rest of the Matrix Games, I think they'd have a legitimate concern for smearing their good name.

Since this is clearly an independent project, where Matrix is only serving as distributor, and in a ganre totally separate from their other games -- I think the spillover effect is certainly lessened.


Fair? Fair has nothing to do with it. If you don't want to pay a nonrefundable $40 for a shaky product with no demo and mixed (at best) reviews during development, then don't buy it. That's fair enough for me.

Especially for a game like this. There is close to zero chance that anybody interested in a game in this genre would stumble upon MF and purchase it without hearing about any feedback first.

You're probably right, but from what I've seen so far, I have strong doubts that Daivd's ego would allow that.

Just not how I see it, and maybe why I'm not in business. Liability shouldn't only be on the customer to make sure is not getting screwed big time. The seller has to have some responsability for it too, at least in my eye...

FM

I can't imagine someone with the skills to fix a game that's this bad at it's core would spend the time doing that instead of spending the time to release their own game. I just don't see anything there that's worth building on. If the graphics/animations were good, maybe someone who is inexperienced in graphics would work on the game...or if the game AI were solid, someone who knows graphics would try to fix the animations...but there's nothing there to build on from what I see. The only positive the game has is it's flexible rules, but I don't think that's a base to build on...that just makes the fixes more complicated.

Except that (as I believe you recognize/acknowledge) isn't how it works.

I mean, the phrase "caveat emptor" isn't exactly something from the pop culture dictionary.

agreed, as I said, it's probably why I'm not in business, heh.

I just profoundly hate being screwed (or see people being screwed) and felt like ranting this morning :)

FM

dola, and to me, releasing the thing with that pricepoint, in hope that "suckers" will buy it in the short term, is not how I'd do business.

FM

It's pretty standard these days. They have to make what they can to pay for the development costs, and the game does start and run. And if they stick with it and improve it, they'll save face with a lot of their customers. I don't hold it against Matrix. I won't buy it, but they aren't special in this regard.

and this probably shows my lack of knowledge of the game developping industry.

I know if we'd put out an option on one of our models of coach (read bus, not head coach ;)) that made it break down after 10k miles, we'd be paying through the nose for that mistake for years to come, but there are only a handful of coach manufacturers in North America so the game is not the same. That is my background, probably a much slower moving background than the game developping one...

FM

Has anyone found any more pirated logos in the game?

I took a gander over at the M-F Support Forum, and I thought my headwas going to explode. Oh, the humanity! To the credit of the fanboys, they are really trying to stay positive, "This game has so much potential!" is their mantra, but I just can't see how anyone is getting a positive football experience from this game.

Random UIC: Customer complains that there are only 3 playbooks in the entire game, so all of his games are very repetitive. Another customer replies that more playbooks, and therefore more plays, would be counter-productive to the "maximum customization" of the game. Sigh.

i agree. yes, yes, "caveat emptor" and all that, but the seller should also be given a black eye for gross negligence. even though it's up to the buyer to practice due diligence and research products before they purchase, we have such things as "lemon laws" that prevents bad practices on the part of the seller. so the law does acknowledge that while it does begin with the purchaser - the seller still has a responsibility to deliver.

"caveat emptor" is not a get out of jail free card for the seller. seller just can't say "nyah, nyah, you didn't do your research on my product so you have no one to blame that it doesn't work in the manner i advertised it would."

I think there's a fundamental difference between a product that actually lacks things that it claims to have (e.g. if there were meaningful elements from the game's published feature list that were not at all included in the game) and a product that has glitches, errors, unrealistic outcomes, a poor simulation engine, and the like.

As far as I can tell, this game falls into the latter category. If I'm wrong, and customers are being promised specific things that the game does not deliver -- then I'd certainly side with the righteously indignant.

here's the features list from the MatrixGames site:


http://www.matrixgames.com/news.asp?nid=299

and damnit, you are right, they don't list tracking of statistics as a feature, so they have a right to sell it that way since they have delivered everything else they had advertized. That was sarcasm btw, I understand your point. I'm just seeing it on a broader view.

We're getting into semantics here but what you see as "glitches, errors, unrealistic outcomes, a poor simulation engine", I see as too much wrong stuff to call this a working game. Again, that may be just me. Is it a working piece of software? Maybe. Is it a working football game with what we'd assume should be some realistic playing? I think not.

FM

exactly what it the issue with the game, come to mention it. is it a question that the game doesn't work well, like FP '99 (which didn't work at all), or is it a question of weak AI? not *enough* customizabilitation? perhaps its the graphics that aren't up to (even mid-1990's) standards?

this goes back to my rant about expectation on the part of the public. knowing one guy was working on this in his spare time, how could anyone expect Madden-esque graphics/animation? i don't think this was ever billing itself as Madden Coach-mode+. again, i bring up FM. if you don't have a problem with 2D dots moving on the field why all of a sudden is there a problem with simple (and outdated) player models?

if the game works, but just not up to your standards or expectations - perhaps the bar was set too high. unfortunately for the programmer he decided to sell it for $40. just wish he'd have sold it for even half that amount and curbed people's expectations. you expect less from a $20 game than from a $40 one. his downfall was he was not a good business man, among other things.

I feel like this thread needs some spectacular finale or something. We are right about at the who cares anymore stage.

A futile and stupid gesture needs to be done on somebody's part.

The world needs more futile and stupid gestures.

That said, I think that we can just let the thread die. It had a great run. It founded the 2,500-60,000 club. It has the most replies of any thread ever. It has the second most views, behind only the reference thread. And it racked up all those numbers with style.

Sure, when this board double in size, I imagine that the numbers that this thread put up will be surpassed. But, for its time, it was a spectacular thread. We may look back on it as the beginning of the modern era of super threads. Certainly a Hall of Famer in my book.

Jon, Antmeister et al. Thanks for the welcome, though I'm more a reader than a poster, two posts is usually a monthly output for me :)

I truly disagree. Obviously I can see how his text sim comments could inflame others more than me, just not how they could be so enraging as they appear. As for the craziness exposed in the not-quite-gold master and subsequent bug hunt, it sounds almost identical to a beta experience I had a while ago. During that, the "gold" version was just another build, the real "gold" was a patch to be released on store-shelf day, and even that was changed multiple times in the preceding days. Matrix appear to have exposed their underwear a little in their fairly candid reveals of the process since gold, but it's unremarkable, and one of the reasons why so many seemingly obvious bugs are found within minutes of games being released.

But those sins put this game into context. Aside from the laugable penalty bug, there doesn't seem to be an avalanche of bug postings on the site which would dwarf other games. Gven the scarcity of people reporting constant crashes, or not being able to get the game to run, I'd say it's fairly good compared with the current competition, if we limit the slop rating to just include bugs.

Check out some of the other Matrix game support fora for similar release day issues. IMHO, where MF seperates itself from the pack is in it's design, and those issues are absolutely mind-boggling (more later on that.)

Disagree, I'd just prefer the period when a game is new, to be more enjoyable. You can only get that new feeling once, and I'd rather it not be plagued with work-arounds, crashes and unfinished features.


Often, that includes a legion of passionate defenders of the game, see MOO3 for example :)


True, but it's often related to the ratio of so called trolls/fanboys which fora are split into in the immediate aftermath of a release. Someone on the Matrix boards made an excellent point last week, that those accused of trolling had actually discovered a number of bugs just from looking at screenshots, while those who labelled themselves fans were performing backflips in logic to explain an obvious problem with the yardage calculation after the developer had posted it to be a bug.

Although there is a lot of venom in this thread, some of the posts contain more thought and more insight than I'd imagine Winter has received the last 5 years from his acolytes. It's a shame that a resource such as those in this forum, would have made the game better.

I know it's a fairly subjective measurement, but the gist of all this is that I can't see how MF is atypical these days, and that Winter's dickometer score isn't significantly high enough to provoke some of the posts here.


I'm probably repeating myself here, but the game is just bad, not necessarily buggy, and it's the design flaws which will kill it, even if they release a patch every two days. There are just mind-boggling posts over there at the moment: the frigging frame-rate affects the engine and the engine couldn't handle being sped up to sim games, so he added another one......which is completely different and creates vastly different results. That alone is enough to flag this as a disaster, yet there's so much other material: perhaps the only game shipping with an Access 97 database outside of North Korea, with a schema which competes with the engine in futility: if overwrites stats and stores a strings of data in one field. One of the selling points of this game was that the data could be easily gotten to. What they didn't mention was that it could only be gotten to easily if you didn't upgrade Access this last decade.

In the end, it all comes down to two things: 1) trying to make a CFL game and adding in other forms of football to subsidize it, and 2) trying to make a physics based game which drives stats, rather than a stat game driving the display. There's a good reason why FM and EHM do it the right way, and they didn't need Nobel prize winners to work it out.

--

I disagree. Ignoring the significant minority, and either not being aware of the problems, or deliberately ignoring them, is a far worse release "crime" IMHO. MF is a terrible game with a few bugs, CIV IV was a great game which didn't even work for people.

I don't disagree with any of this, in fact, everything you say is true, and why the game looks as bad as it is. But...that's a little different from some of the examination of posts over there which have been used to demonstrate Winter's ineptitude. For example, the yardage issue which someone parsed as Winter blaming Rutins for not finding.

I think we both agree about this game, and mostly for the same reasons, but my initial post was commenting on those who were going overboard, or hammering Matrix for what is normal behaviour.

I suppose it comes down to this: with so much real material, nobody needs to find pseudo-reasoning to bash the mess.

Again, thanks for the welcome :)

Please post here more often spcd. Intelligent debate is very fun to read.

Methinks I'm gonna like this guy.

This is 'advertised' as a football game. I think it is reasonable to expect a football game to have the basic elements of football right. A lot of the complaints are defendable issues, 600 yards passing and 60% accurate kickers are not as much as a problem as the line of scrimmage being set up in the end zone is. The first two are wacky, but not wacky enough to demand a fix right away. The end zone line of scrimmage stuff is.