I'd prefer a 2D top down display myself as long as it moved fluidly and showed all the action.

You guys are being way to rough on sttfrk, and confirming some of the anti-FOFC opinions being thrown this direction, which I thought, at least, were entirely untrue. sttfrk is simply offering an honest personal assessment of the game, and pointing out the glaring weaknesses of MF as well as describing why he likes the game. He's not making excuses, or trying to gloss over problematic issues like some of the other nameless posters here have been doing.

I think he's been treated quite unfairly with unnecessary vitriol.

As soon as I go look up "vitriol" I may respond to this. :)

Waaaaaaaa......too much vitriol. Waaaaaaaaaaaa.

Sounds pretty.

So, for about the 20th time, HA has declared the thread dead. Each time before, he has been proven wrong.

Graphics = what I see on the screen. What I see on the screen includes animation. The animation and camera work in this game is the worst of any 3D football game I've ever seen. Combine that with player models that match up with games 8-9 years old, and I'd say I'm being generous in saying it matches up visually with 3D football games 10 years old.

As someone that worked on football video games for 6+ years, I'm aware that opinions vary wildly on what people think is accurate in terms of player models. I would agree that Madden's player models are not ideal - I thought the player models we had in NFL Fever were superior. But I'd bet a large sum of money that the poly count and number of animated joints in the players used in MF are comparable to what Madden (and Fever and NFL2K) were using 8-9 years ago. Certainly the texture-mapping is nothing special, and I have my doubts that any sophisticated shaders are being used, nor does it appear that the lighting in the game is anything other than rudimentary.

Even without using motion-capture technology, it's possible to generate good-looking animations - you just need talented animators with a lot of time on their hands. You'd also need a programmer capable of adding blending functionality into his animation playback code.

No, there are a few different types of runs that have the RB make a feign move. A counter is just one kind (a trap is the other standard kind) While you don't HAVE to have a pulling guard or tackle on a counter play for it to be a counter, it's pretty much the standard to have some kind of deception in the OL blocking scheme.

Going back to the original screenshot, I'm wondering why or how the FB seems to have gotten into the 2nd level by the time the RB is starting the actual run. Your description is also a bit troubling. You say the LT (playside) runs off to lead block, but there is a blitzing OLB on that side. I know you said that he got caught trailing the play, but (in the real world) a blitzing OLB on the playside will blow up a counter play every single time if he is not blocked.

From the sound of it, instead of telling your linemen what you want them to do, you have to basically rig it to get the result you want. I mean, having to tell a backside tackle to pass block in order to get him to seal off the backside on a counter play...

it is dead. the same stuff/arguements are being made and all the funny classic stuff is about 70 pages ago. just cuz people are continuing to post doesn't make this "ALIVE". just like someone rendered a vegetable and is on on life support isn't ALIVE just cuz the machine is keeping their lungs breathing and heart beating. that person's best years are long behind them.

it's time to pull the plug.

Someone is selling it on Ebay for $45 plus $4.5 shipping


http://cgi.ebay.com/Maximum-Football...sid=p1638.m118

I've tried, Lord knows I've tried. But Daivd's doctors won't agree.
I think they just figure as long as the meter's running why not maximize profit.

Personally, it's seem sort of inhumane to keep something completely brain dead going just to wring a few more bucks out of it but ... welcome to Hollywood.

Actually some of the best stuff is on the matrix forums themselves. There was quite a team of trolls going to town there. It was pretty funny. I read it all the other day, quite amusing.

Spinmeister, I told you that working with an odd number of teams in the real world is a pain in the backside, and leagues will try very hard not to have to do so. The schedule tool will do it, but it requires a bye each week, which means that at least one team will not play the first week of the season.

I gave you an accurate analysis of the schedule creation tool. It is a basic round robin scheduler - nothing more and nothing less. It does do odd number team league schedules. It could be better, but that is what it is.


Am I touting the schedule creation tool? I am not. I have explained what it does in the context of your premise, which was that the schedule tool cannot do odd numbers of teams, and that premise was invalid.

I don't believe the schedule tool is a strength of the game. It is nothing special to tout, but it at least it is does the basic task of creating a round robin schedule that may be edited for more complex leagues.


Ah yes, compare the game to Madden when it comes to graphics, compare to FOF when it comes to GM features, but ignore the strengths of the game when the others are missing those features. Maximum Football has advantages and disadvantages over other games; it is not the end all game, and it was never designed to be.


There are free agents, so there is free agency.


By your definition of true free agnecy. I see.

Tell me this, does FOF run true plays? Does the game actually go through the physics of the men in space on a gamefield interacting with each other and a ball in motion? Does it really do more than take the statistics already given and redistribute them by formulas that guarantee the outcomes are similar to the original statistics? Is that true football? Are FOF, Football Mogul, and other text games really true football games at all?

It is quite simple to find that an item does not meet a definition when one creates the definition based upon what one already knows as a strict enough interpretation to exclude the item.


The CPU drafts by the team profile it is using.


And why would Maximum Football have GM and commissioner features when it was never touted as having them. That is exactly my point.


It is an intervening variable whether you chose to ignore it or not.


What? You don't even know what you are talking about.

There are two ways to play the games in Maximum Football: one is on the 3D field with full playbooks and gameplans, the other is running games through the sim game engine that uses playbooks and player skills but does not play the game out using the physics based engine.

As I stated before, there can be great variance in the outcomes of games in the 3D game by having game owners use differing playbooks, gameplans, and making changes to the constants (base run speed ...) to fit the game to how one wants it to be played. A game owner can run a 1950s ground pounding game, ane can run NFL style game, or one can run a more open Madden style game.

If one wants to set up a league, one has to make sure that the variables for the sim game match the 3D game (CPU games). At the request of beta and community members, David has allowed more of the variables to be accessed by the game owner to do this. The beta team has also tweaked the default setting to closer to the NFL as the standard, and there are further improvements being tested.


You misread my post. Matrix Games told David that they wanted a fast sim instead of the 3D based sim, and that delayed the game's release.


This isn't an FOF topic, but sure; 5 second sim the first week and post the results.


You guys? I didn't argue that. I don't work for Matrix Games.

In its original form, the game did not have specific rule sets beyond the rles that could be changed by league type. It was not designed to emulate any given league in detail. It was designed as a game that would allow one to play with differing rules that had the major rule set based on a generic set of rules. That was the design that David had in mind from the start. It was not supposed to be an NFL, NCAA, and CFL simulator.

Because of feedback from the beta team and the community, he decided it would be best to go from general to specific on as many rules he could. In my opinion, he has done a pretty good job considering that the game was not supposed to be that detailed by design, and he had to create a different layer of code to do so.

You said in another post that when Maximum Football came out, I was posting great things about it and then became the moderator of the board. That is simply a fabrication.

In fact, I was very vocal about the game not having statistics that were comparable to the NFL game. There were problems in the defensive AI, and the game had many statistics bugs. I joined the beta team to help clean up those problems, and I didn't become the board moderator until months later.

Again, I am here to answer questions and provide information and debunk myths. I am not here to tell anyone they should purchase the game or not, just as I would not tell anyone here to purchase FOF, Madden, or any other game. It is always for each individual to decide.

Some of you may not trust what I say is sincere, but one can look at my posts on the Matrix Games board to those people who may inquire about the game. I am fair and honest about what the game will do and what it will not do, and as a moderator I ask each community member to post any constructive criticisms he or she may have with the game.

I don't feel like going back and reading all 119 pages to see if this has been mentioned before, so forgive me if I'm only bringing up something that's been talked about before, but as a prospective consumer, I think my biggest criticism is that the game STILL appears to be an absolute fucking trainwreck.

I suppose that's not that constructive though.

Yeah, I guess I've got nothin'. Sorry. :(

You fucking asshole - you got some nerve calling Ant "Spinmeister" when you've been the one dodging questions, giving incomplete non-answers, and basically being a blind company shill for a product you *know* sucks.

YOU are the one making the comparisons. I don't think anyone here in their right mind claimed MF was comparable to any of those games. And if MF pales in comparison to Madden graphically, and pales in comparison to FOF statistically and managerially, *what exactly does MF do football-wise that is better than anything out there?*


This is the single biggest piece of horseshit spin, non-answer you've ever managed to spit out. You know, I know, my cat knows that *Free Agency* means a player that is available on the open market to sign a contract with any team. Without *contracts* and a way for teams to *offer contracts*, it isn't free agency. Free Agency and an economic model are synonymous. It isn't Ant's definition, it is THE definition. Just because MF calls it Free-agency doesn't make it so.

And yes, FOF, FM are *really* football games, because they are (1) games that (2) simulate football. MF also meets that criteria, albeit barely.

If you don't know the answer, or are too embarrassed to say, just say "No, I cannot elaborate". The question was *how well*, not *how.

It matters if you're related to the developer I suppose. If they used 2x as many developers on Civilization 5 or CoH as expected, would that make the game only half as good, or half as valuable? If Daivd is going to (over)charge for his game, then the "poor me I'm only one guy" shit doesn't matter when the game sucks. And oh by the way, Jim and Marcus and Shaun all got it right.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHA - uh, no. You haven't and you're not.

Woot!
150,000 views!

I would venture to guess that this thread alone has generated more ad revenue for GameSpy than MaxFB has generated sales-wise for Matrix.

:D

This thread had drifted far away from its true comedy roots. Thanks for bringing us back. :)

It allows people to create completely fanciful football universes with completely fanciful rulesets and completely fanciful "human" characteristics. The MF and the FOF crowd are never going to see eye-to-eye on this game because they have totally different goals. The FOF crowd wants as close to an NFL recreation as possible. FOF comes extremely close to that. Madden even comes reasonably close. MF could probably come close if you are willing to put in many, many, MANY hours tweaking everything. Our friend the Stat Freak put in over 16 hours for a 12 team league and is still nowhere close to playing a game. Recreating the NFL with MF would probably take 50-100 man hours.

The point is that MF doesn't try to recreate anything. It appears to be a basic toolset which lets people create a visual representation of what their view of football would be. It is fanciful arcade football in the vein of Blitz or Cyberball. If the game was marketed that way, there would probably be a lot less grief coming from this board. The game isn't really designed to simulate different football leagues (like it is often touted). It just gives the ability to adjust everything to let players see if they can recreate a recognizable league.

I still say that if they could fix the stats so that they all follow the rules of math, market the game by saying that you could customize the rules to to create leagues "similar to" the NFL or CFL or whatever, and dropped the price to about $20, there would be very few complaints from around here. The game looks (and as I understand plays) like the product of an individual amateur developer. If it was marketed and priced accordingly, people might support it.

Uniform design? Beer Tents? :D


I know, I am not helping.

Very well said - and not to take anything away from it, but thats pretty much spot on to what 90% of us have been saying from the outset.

However, it turned out that the developer was a pompous ass who denigrated text-sim players and developers, missed his release date by a presidential term of office, released an unplayable game, and still charges twice what Madden costs.

Plus, he couldn't even spell his own name right. :D

I've known stat freak for about 7 years, so he's definitely not Jeinfier Wninters. He's a pretty good guy.

I agree that I didn't say anything new. It is funny to me how this thread will die and people will generally come to the feeling that MF is an overpriced game which isn't ready for prime time yet and should be labeled as a version 0.7 or something like that...but still is a reasonably decent start to something that could be interesting. There is the occasional joke posted about a strange stat calculation, but that is about it.

Then at some point a MF fan will show up and try to "correct" people about all of our misconceptions. They call the game "good with flaws" and we respond that there are too many flaws to consider it good. Then they say that we are wrong and the game is really very good...to which we respond that it is really very bad. They eventually claim that for what it tries to do, the game is great and we respond that it is actually crap. Everybody keeps exaggerating their own opinions in an effort to sway the other side.

Pretty soon everyone trying to convince us will decide that we are mean and not willing to give the game a fair chance and leave. Our opinions will drift back to calling the game not read for release and not worth $50 and the cycle will begin again.

Which is why this thread is the best thing on the internets EVAR!

Let's harness the harshness and f-bombs, please. Keep it civil. It'd be a pity to lock such an epic thread.

Now if this application was nothing more than a way to visually represent data from FOF game logs or any text sim game log for that matter, I would be a buyer. That way he would only have to focus on improving the 3D models and camera views and adding utilities to take screen and video captures. In fact, if it had these features and it was a paid add-on, I would most likely jump at it.

As it stands now, we can do screen captures with Madden, but if there was an ability to to let the logs control the outcome of the play, it would be a great investment for those in online leagues and for those who want to see their games played out visually play by play.

But, of course, a few bridges have already been burned, so I don't see this happening anytime soon.

who's going to? you? i laugh in your face. i don't know if you're one of the quasi-mods here, but rest assured your thread-locking ability would be taken away much like jbmagic's edit button.

I agree on all points. To discuss these points was my stated objective for posting here.

I have been told by independent game developers that it is a losing proposition to even try to discuss the game here, which was sound advice. I just believe that there are people who are football game fans that may come to this board and see this topic that want to actually know what the game does, does not do, and what may be needed or planned for the future.


The beta team is made of of game players that have been constructively critical of the game in the past. Shaggyra, nmleague, and myself have posted to the public board many times when we have seen things we thought were not right. We do that in the beta forum as well. Counter to what some people here would have you believe, we are not just a bunch of fan boys. In fact, I have pushed to get Shaggyra, nmleague, and other game players that had been constructively critical, and active on the public board bringing up issues, into the beta program to help isolate and resolve game issues.

What I find ironic is that I am likely the most critical person this game title has had on the old board, new board, and in beta, but when I come here and ask that this game be discussed, I have to run through pages of personal insults and drival. I don't respect that, I often just have to ignore those posts.

People active in the Maximum Football community, and other beta team members, know that I am not one to sugar-coat problems, and I am active in addressing game issues like no other person outside of David himself.

Shaggyra and myself have been consistent in asking for features to allow better playbooks, more realistic gameplay, and better user ability to control game constants to create a league that has statistics that more closely reflect the type of league the game player wants.

The key here is that we recognized that Maximum Football can be a very good game if David was given some support and input from the football gaming community. We saw the issues in the game, stated the issues, and have worked to help correct them as best we can.


Open up any game manual for an ongoing PC game title. There is always a list of beta testers, development team members, and QA people that continually work on it. To get from 1.0 to 2.0 to 3.0, there has to be beta members willing to test new code and new features.

Madden certainly has beta team members, FOF does as well. It would be plainly dumb not to. Please understand that this is standard practice for game developers.

Well, none of us own the game, so since we can't discuss it, all that's left is drivel.

By the way, nice bump.

Oh God he's back.

Seriously. I think people here have been pretty clear about what we would like to see improved. I guess you've told us those things are improved, in a version you can't tell us about. Great. Wake us up when you can.

Even if he did the 3 people that care probably already are aware of the Matrix board.

Maufrauders gets off on this thread. Although who doesn't.

Logging on to FOFC and seeing new posts in this thread makes me feel like a 5 year old on Christmas morning.

EF27 should recommend this thread to any patients he has with depression. There's no way you can read this thread and not feel better about yourself.

Speaking of, my cousin's wife bought MaxFB for him off of eBay for Christmas. He sent me an email asking me if I had heard of this game, and if I could help him get it working "right". I sent him the link to this thread, and he told me he got a lot more enjoyment out of reading this thread than he got out of the game, which is going back up on eBay.

That is so awesome.

If it sells for cheap, I'd be interested.

Guess who's back, back again, Marauders back, so tell a friend.

Actually, there has been discussion. There is just a lot of bloat here. It is like an NFL board where people work to get their post counts up on gameday threads.


Fair enough, but people here want NFL stats, better graphics, GM, commissioner, head to head play, uber scheduler, and other features that can not be all upgraded at one time, and they want it done without a beta team. It is pretty clear that there are people here that want the graphics of Madden, the GM features of FOF, and the gameplay of an NFL quality control simulator. I can honestly say that there is no secret build in beta that will do all of that, but isn't that a bit much to ask for?

This thread is getting to the point where it could use a table of contents.

Did you point him to the Matrix Game board?

If this is real situation, please ask him to PM me or post questions on the board over there. Any copy from ebay is likely old, and he will need the password for a registered copy in order to patch it to the latest version. That is, if the game was a legal copy.

On a side note, I guess the next time someone asks me a question about Front Office Football, it would be a good idea to send him to a Madden board to get his questions answered. We should be constistent in our logic. ;)

Sorry, that crack about none of us owning the game wasn't an attempt to be serious -- it was just more drivel. Besides, it's not true after all -- cartman's cousin owns the game.

People here want stats that are within the realm of possibility, and would *like* better graphics -- I don't remember much about the others. I don't think head to head play would be a big selling point to this community, and I don't know what you mean by "uber" scheduler -- either a scheduler works or it doesn't. As for a beta team -- the other games you mentioned had beta teams work with the game *before* its release, not after. I'm not saying Maximum Football didn't have beta testers before the game was released -- I'm saying that since the game is in beta testing -- and from all you've said, it sounds like a LOT of beta testing is being done -- it surely can't be called a completed game.

I think you're really exagerrating the expectations of this board. You've mentioned several times that people are expecting other things from MF, without mentioning what it's good at. In the 120 or so pages of this thread, I guess I've forgotten -- what does it do that's good?

Skeet skeet skeet.

1. beer tent

2. teleportation

3. facilitates use of benny hill music

There are plenty of mentions in this thread of people saying they'd be more than happy with a version of the 2-D gameplay from FM/WWSM used for a football game.

You also seem to either intentionally leave out or simply gloss over the glaring omissions of trying to have any kind of semblance of the US amature aka NCAA football played. More than a few of us here would enjoy greatly this kind of play. But without being able to replicate the field structure or use the play designer to create the style of plays used by a great number of current and classic teams (which is one of the differentiators of MaxFB), the option to create a league using Amature rules in the game is pretty much worthless.

There is no way you got that out of this thread. It is a total straw man. What would go a long way toward impressing people is if "new features" were kept on hold until obvious bugs are cleared up. Nobody is impressed by smarter AI being developed who can handle a hand-off to a tight end when the stats still show more fumbles lost than actually occurred and other obvious bugs.

David seems to have a grand plan which he keeps working toward (benefit of the doubt) while trying to squash bugs (again, benefit of the doubt). Stat calculation bugs generally are due to some bad math somewhere and should be easy to fix. Not fixing those immediately in a tiny patch seems lazy. If he got rid of all of the obvious bugs, people wouldn't have as much to pick on. And really, anyone that has done development knows that tracking down the source of bugs while adding new features is very difficult. You need to concentrate on one or the other.

And..he's gone. What a fun hour that was.

If there is a thread on a Madden board that has inspired over 1,000 posts in a single thread about FOF, please point me in that direction as I think it would be a very fun read.

WHAZ THIS THERE NO GRAPHIC THIS GAME SUCKS

I think it's clear that he did concentrate on one, the wrong one. This "game" had a ton of bugs and features that were completely broken, and instead of fixing them, he redid the graphics engine so he could play around with shaders and add inflatable helmets to the field among doing a bunch of other things that in no way fixed any of the problems it had on release. That's all I really need to know.

I think that is a major reason people around here enjoy jumping on the game so much. I can understand not fixing all of the bugs before the next major release - most games do this. I can't understand including bug fixes into major releases, or ignoring visible (and probably easy to fix) bugs in favor of new feature addition. This tells me the guy is either lazy (big problem), an amateur (not a problem if output is appropriately priced), or a big-picture guy with little attention to detail. I could even see a big-picture guy finding a pretty decent market for his product, but not on this board. The fact that we don't complain too loudly about no graphics in FOF but do complain about 440 rushes per season shows that we care more about the details.

And it isn't just simple bug fixes. Even with Marauders and others putting their best spin on it, it sounds like there are fundamental things in MaxFB that are broken and it sounds like Marauders, from his own account, has to try and twist Daivd's are just to get him to think about fixing them.


But we also put up with this, and other statiscial and game play absurdities, for many years because FOF has always been an otherwise solid game. If MaxFB mostly worked, and only had a few quirks, some bugs and even a few absurdities (like other popular games on this board, Football Pro and NFL2k5 being two), it would have a decent following on this board. But since it's been an ongoing train wreck since long before it was even released, it's open season.

The comparison to discussing FOF on the madden boards is way off base. FOF does a very good job of doing what it sets out to do and doesn't stray too far away from its strengths. It certainly has its weaknesses, but they don't detract much from what it sets out to accomplish.

No one has any idea exactly what Maximum Football is trying to do at this point. The things it was originally supposed to do, it doesn't do well and features continue to get crammed into the game as if it were a developer's sandbox to toy around with ideas and a way for Matrix to milk money out of people with blind faith.

This is David's first attempt at making a football game as far as I know. He would have been smart to stick to something simple and straightfoward to focus on and build from there either though major updates or an entirely new version of the game, especially when you take into consideration the limited staff he's working with.

You can't just keep throwing features at people and hope that one day a game forms out of it. But then again, we have to actually play the game or our opinion doesn't mean much. Could someone please direct me to where I can download the demo for Maximum Football?

That is really a separate problem. If David has to be pushed that hard to get real bugs fixed, customers should have major trust issues. My point was that eliminating the obvious and quick bugs would tone down the hostility around here a bunch. It might at least get people to look deeper and then talk about the deeper issues (which might require playing to discover). When the game doesn't perform math properly (and inflatable helmets take precedence over fixing the math) people have plenty of easy targets for ridicule.


It has been an ongoing train wreck, and problems that are visible from screen shots will continue the train wreck. My point about FOF was to show how important details are around here. If you can't fix the obvious bugs, you will never get any time around here.

There is much more that needs to be done to get people to say good things about the game, but eliminating the easy targets would at least get people to stop saying bad things.

I've met Passacaglia in person, Marauders.

He will eat your children.

Alive.

Word.

And if you've seen the group picture, I'm *not* the one with the big smiling face.

HOLY SHIT this deserves a song parody.

C'mon Ant, I'm dyin' over here.....;)

In complete honesty and with no joking intent, I think that the game should have a demo.

We'll see what happens this weekend sir. :p

The graphics are fine for what they do. Even David admits they need to be updated, but other areas have priority. The graphics will never be on par with Madden, but they are on the update list.


The game was designed to be customized. It was not originally designed to have 95% of the NFL, NCAA, CFL, and arena rulesets set up for each play type. Each play style handles some stats, penalties, and other rules differently, and Maximum Football was not originally planned to handle more than the differences that could be changes by the selection menus.

I must be clear here that Maximum Football was not originally planned as an NFL or CFL simulator. Most of the rules in football are the same across the board. Other aspects could be selected via the menus, so this wasn't a problem, but input from both the beta team members and the community indicated that game owners wanted more detail in the rulesets to follow the various types of play. This has added a lot of work for David and the beta team, as these type of changes often can add follow on bugs that have to be hunted and squashed.

As I have stated before, many bugs one sees on the board are not bugs that have always been around. They are often follow on bugs that are created when code is changed for one rule or one statistic. The code isn't as tight as it was before David made these changes that the game players have asked for, so these things happen. That is one of the reasons David wants to get any changes to 2.x completed and tested, so he may better clean up the code for Maximum Football 3.x (or whatever it will be called).


I agree.

Limits on the ability to edit rules and league is a huge advantage. Having the engine use the target statistics as a base for the sim is also a huge advantage. With FOF, it is sort of like making a puzzle to form a picture. The picture was already there, so it should end up looking like it when completed, but getting there isn't always the same. Maximum Football has a greater ability to change the picture.


I agree.

That is why I sometimes wonder what the hosility is on this thread. There is little time or money invested in Maximum Football by many of the posters here who would mock the game, trash the developer, and insult the people who have invested time and money on the game.

The reason that there have been so many changes to Maximum Football over the last year is because that is what the community wanted and asked for. When reading the last two pages of this thread, I have noted that there is a misperception that David just keeps adding items for his personal enjoyment, while that is not the case; he adds items to the game because game owners asked him to.

There is always a conflict between tweaking features and locking down. There will always be people who say "keep it as is," and those who say "I would like more stats," or "I want to have this rule defined into the game types," or whatever. In my opinion, the way the game was originally released could have done fine enough if cleaned up for bugs at that time, but it would not be anywhere as good as the game is now in terms of having the power to edit gameplans, plays, and rulesets that better reflect the differences in the real world.

Of course, by moving to make those updates and changes, it allowed the naysayers to state that the game is in constant development, or beta, or has a million bugs. The game has developed, that is certain, but is by the will of the community rather than by the inability of the developer. The advantage of doing this is that it pushed the game forward relatively quickly when compared to taking more incremental steps.

As is stands now, all changes to Version 2.x are complete with the version I have on my computer at this time. A few small changes that were considered critical by league players were added and a few more statistics were added by request. These are being tested for issues. This is the end of the line for changes to 2.x, as David wanted months ago.


There are some players that state that, but a majority of game owners ask for more features to be added. Even in this thead, there are people asking for more GM and commissioner features. David would like to add those features, but it will not be until the 3.x series that he could even consider them while considering the changes in the base code that will need to be made as well.

One must keep in mind how Front Page Sports Football progressed over the years to FBPro. If there had not been support for the early titles, the game would have gone away, as it did when it lacked support later on. In my opinion, and in the opinions of many other community members, Maximum Football needs support at this stage to viable at a later stage.

We want the game to play a solid game of football, track stats accurately, and be user friendly, just like what the people here are asking for, but we understand that to get there takes a little time and effort by both David and the community. There are people for whom this is unacceptable, and that opinion is fair enough, but one must respect that others are willing to risk a little time and money to see this project through.

this is like deja suck

Speaking of ad campaigns...."Maximum Football! It doesn't play a solid game of football, doesn't track stats accurately and isn't user friendly...but for only $39.95, it might someday."

Comparing Maximum Football to the first version of FPSF is absolutely ridiculous and disingenuous. God almighty, give MF another 6-7 years and *maybe* it will approach FPS Football v1.0, but I doubt it.

As I stated above, no one else has been more critical of inflated statistics than I have. When the original game vid came out prior to release, I was adamant about making sure that the statistics could resemble NFL, CFL, or NCAA statistics. I have also been one of the advocates of this on the beta team. It is an important issue.


It is to some members of the FBPro community who play out their leagues head to head. I suspect this could be a feature that brings in some madden league players as well. It isn't a big deal to me personally.


That is a little simplistic. The scheduler works for what it does - round robin schedules that can be hand edited, but it doesn't do dynamic shedules with division matchups and strength of schedule like a more advance editor would. It works, but it is limited.


The beta teams work on the project before, during, and after the release. I have been on several beta teams, and that has always been the case with the regular beta and QA crew.


Most of the testing is done on new features. The beta team gives development feedback and tests new features when added. The team also tries to check for follow on bugs and similar issues. The whole game isn't in beta, just any new features.


I disagree.

When people talk about graphics, they say it looks ten year old Madden, but they don't mention that Madden plays a pretty lousy game of football stats wise. When they talk about stats, they compare it to a stat simulator like FOF, but they fail to mention that the FOF graphics consist of a little ball moving on a numbered field. They want the best of all worlds, and that isn't a fair comparison.

Toddzilla, I am sorry. Wasn't able to do it this weekend. Would have been appropriate now.

I didn't say anything about "inflated" statistics. I'm not talking about stats that are very unlikely to happen. I'm talking about stats that are impossible. These are the result of bugs, not just some slider tweaks.

Then why were you whining about how that's what "we" want?

Personally, I'm fine with setting up schedules manually. But I can understand why others would want a scheduler that lets you play teams in your division or conference more often. Is the CFL round-robin or something?

Obviously.

For the life of me, I can't figure why Mauruders doesn't start a new thread.

It's like he's asking for it.

You're right on this one -- I meant to say "exaggerating" not "exagerrating" -- my bad.

Anyway, this was the basis of my question earlier. I agree that the game lacks the graphics of Madden, and lacks the stats of FOF, so -- what DOES it have? I mean, if you're Moses, and Pharoah holds Maximum Football in one hand and Madden in the other, what is it about Maximum Football that makes you choose that over the shiny glitz of Madden?

I think most of the scheduling complaints came from the build (not sure if it got fixed or not) when the scheduler would occasionally schedule an 8-team league with team A playing team C 5 times (quite possibly all at team C's stadium) but never play team B. Some people may want special scheduling, but at a minimum it needs to provide a balanced split of opponents and home/away games.

The play and uniform design capabilities?

Seriously though, people say the game doesn't have the graphics of Madden, or the stats of FOF...does it have the stats of Madden either? Madden's stats don't compare to FOF, but they are still at least reasonable.

Just when you think this thread could not get more surreal...

That was my thinking as well, but I haven't played Madden since 2001 or so.

That is correct. The complaints came from an item that has been changed long ago.

Other areas having greater priority than updating the graphics is surreal (unbelievable or irrational)?

How so?

You padded your post count, so please explain your premise logically.

Are you seriously going to start giving posters here shit like this?

Give me a break you fool.

Does MF provide more accurate stats than Madden? If not, what is the selling point?

And stop with all the "needs support" stuff. This isn't church. I don't have any desire to give Matrix 40$ so that Daivd might one day make a good game.

I've never said MF should match the graphics of Madden and the stats of FOF - I want something that comes a little closer to both worlds than MF does. Graphically, it's miles behind Madden. Stats/sim wise, it's miles behind FOF (and from what I've seen, it doesn't even match Madden). It's not even close to either end of the spectrum.

The only thing I can see going for MF is the customizing aspects. Which is great, but unless the engine can produce plausible results, I don't think the game is going to find much of an audience here - consider that this is a forum originally based off of FOF, so this is an audience that trends towards demanding realistic results from their football games.

So he could update to directX 9.

You expect us to believe that Daivd has done a complete about face and stopped development on his beloved graphics engine to actually fix bugs?


BTW
Serious, Marauders my hat goes off to you.
Normally a troll(yes you are) will get bored and go away.
But you come back time and time again to stir up the muck.

I think calling Maruaders a troll is unfair when it's clear he's simply a true believer.

2nd attempt as far as i recall. he made a cfl game a while back

Every time this thread dies out, he shows up and revives it for a day or two.
Adds nothing new, just his same old arguments and claiming a NDA, then after a day disappears again.
I can not see any reason to it other then to be a troll.

This is the kind of myth I am talking about. You make this statement as if you know what you are talking about, and you really don't. You understand part of it, but the rest you make up.

The graphics engine for Maximum Football is not David's; it is a commercial graphics engine. David has always stated, in both the public and private forum, that he would work to upgrade the graphics only after any gameplay issues or upgrades were complete. This has always had priority over an on-field graphics overhaul.

The move to the version 2.x nomenclature was done for three reasons: the game has had many added features since 1.x, it moved to Direct X 9, and it moved to support Vista in place of Windows 98se (it supports XP as well). It was a logical step to differentiate the 1.x series with the 2.x series, as all patches moving forward must be patched to the 2.x base build. David explained to the community why the change was made and that it was not the major overhaul that he has drawn up for future versions of the game. He did this prior to making the change, so it was in no way an act to be deceitful or dishonest.


Since I am on topic, and I am not just posting to rock the boat, give personal insults, or bait a negative response, I am not a troll by definition. One may want to look through this thread and see who fits the definition.


I am under an NDA. That is a legal and binding contract. Like it or not, there it is.

I also am not going to spend each day posting here. If I have something to say, I say it. If I don't, I am not going to. It is the same for everyone.

Yes, I am going to ask people to explain their posts rationally and logically from time to time. I generally don't have to do that with most people I converse with, but most of the people I converse with aren't trying to take cheap shots either.

Do you have a rational reason for having problem with that?

You say a lot for someone under an NDA.

Point of contention....

There have been many shots taken at Marauders in the last 20 or so pages and none of them have been cheap. He's worked hard and earned every single one of them.

Don't sell yourself short, Marauders, you're a terrific troll...

Mystery Solved!

Marauders = Bubba!

QFT

The difference is that people are not asking for it to do more than it was designed to do. How many posts in this thread degrade Maximum Football for things it can't do even though those things were not part of what Maximum Football was designed to do.

Maximum Football wasn't designed with GM features, so why do the posts have complaints about it? It wasn't designed to be an NFL simulator, so why are there complainst about that? FOF was designed to use the statistics of NFL games in the past to create similar statistics in the future, and it does a good enough job at that, but I could go into many things that the game does not have as well, and I still have not received a reply to my request for a post that shows just how well FOF does with statistics in one week of using the five second sim feature.


It was designed to allow football to be played under different rules or even hybrid rules. It was designed to allow play with user created leagues, user created plays and playbooks, and user created uniforms. It was designed to allow third parties easy access to the files and databases for add ons. It was designed to allow multi season team and league play with CPU or human controlled teams.

The game does those things.


This is his second football game. The first was a CFL game.


It would have been best to do incremental updates with specific lockdown points and parallel development. Although that is what I would have recommended, the problem was that there was a large part of the community that wanted the game to be much closer to an NFL and CFL simulator, and the quickest way to do that was to make the upgrades without specific lockdown points. Considering the time needed for each improvement, it is likely that it ended up better that way for long run results, but it made for a product that was not as clean as it could have been over the last year.

As it is, there are areas that I would have liked to be completed for 2.x that likely will not be. Again, there is always a struggle between adding features and making sure that the product has a clean build.


I agree.

Wow

You've got some nerve coming here and complain about a delay in posting game stats.

Go here and browse away. This is a FOF league that uses the sim feature you wanted to see.

The link below shows a year's worth of games. Click on any score to go the box score for the game.

http://www.fof-ihof.com/season/sched...r=2015&stage=B


Then feel free to browse the rest of the site:

http://www.fof-ihof.com/index.php

So you are saying the graphics do have priority.


From Wikipedia
You com here claiming MF is a good game (posts controversial messages)
knowing no one here agrees with you. (baiting other users into an emotional response)

After this may pages, why are you still posting in this thread?
Do you think you are going to convince anyone anything about MF?


That means you should not be posting about it.
It is not something to hide behind.

why hasn't Marauders been banned yet. this is clear trolling.

marauders - you've made your point, several times over.


stop.

Ant - clock is tickin' man.... ;)

Of course I am not saying that.

You do understand that Vista is an OS that was released by Microsoft and is on almost all new machines sold to the public. Support for Vista was the major change. Since very little of the graphics was changed (a few bump maps and shaders in Direct X 9), your logic is invalid.


Nice try, but your examples don't even fit the definition. By your premise, a person that posts, "So how will the Giants offense do this year," in a Giants forum is a troll. The topic of this thread is Maximum Football???. Note the question marks. It is a thread for questions, answers, and discussion, and that's what I am doing.


I take the NDA seriously, and if you don't like my interpretation of it, then there isn't much I can do about that. The NDA allows me to post about some things and not about others. It isn't a gag order.

I could downgrade my version of the game and post some stats, but why should I? Most of the people here asking me to post stats have been rude, crude, or have violatated just about every rule on this board. Yeah, PM's count too (for those who say they have been relatively nice).


Answering questions and posting on-topic is trolling? That is invalid logic.

Ad hominem posts are against the posted rules though.

What the fuck has this thread become?

Maximum Maraudyrdom but, instead of dynamite, he has strapped copies of MF to himself.

What the hell are you talking about? What "five second sim feature"?

Daivd should stop posting here in disguise

Or is it jnnefier?

6000 posts in this thread now, what a momentus occasion for a pile of shit useless ass CFL game.

875-6039....