Starting a Franchise with Accurate Rosters

[kennypowers88]

So I tried to start a franchise last night with the updated rosters, and decided to start with the regular season since teams have already made their cuts.

What I noticed were teams that barely resembled themselves. Instead of starting you at the regular season, it starts you at the preseason, but simulates it. This leads to trades being made, and rosters being filled with over inflated free agents at the expense of young players and rookies.

Is there a way around this outside of controlling all 32 teams for the preseason? Because even if I do that and then stop once the regular season starts, it'll just happen week 1, right? How can I start a season and get respectable rosters?

[bloobloouk]

What?!? I was hoping to start my 2-man league (we're sad and don't have any friends!) at the regular season this year as a bit of an additional challenge.

Previously we've started in preseason, but found that with just a few roster moves you become OP.

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[StevenSD]

disable cpu trading, start at preseason and then you have two options: create sub accounts to make the depth charts accurate, or sim and hope the cpu gives you the best result.

[bloobloouk]

Quote: Originally Posted by StevenSD

disable cpu trading, start at preseason and then you have two options: create sub accounts to make the depth charts accurate, or sim and hope the cpu gives you the best result.

How would this handle rookies being dumped in favour of older FAs though?

[kaptainkev562]

Im having this very same problem 🤔.... Cpu is releasing players for vets in free agency.. Teams look completely different from the week on roster update .. If i knew this would happen I could've started my cfm a long time ago ...😐

[statsdon]

First you have to take control of all 32 teams. Make sure you set trades to "enable human". Start at preseason. Now comes the fun part. Simulate week by week, paying attention to the transactions. I think by week 3, cuts will need to be made. This is where you have to start filling your practice squad with the appropriate players. I went by ourlads.com website because it shows who is in the teams practice squad, injuries and suspensions. You will come across some issues (2nd and 3rd yr players on practice squad). In that case, some injured players are rookies or 1st yr which can be put in the practice squad. Of done correctly, which took me about 3-4 hours, I started my regular season with acurate rosters. I just adjusted the teams depth charts to reflect PUP and suspended players. Hope this helps.

[reverend_heat]

Quote: Originally Posted by statsdon

First you have to take control of all 32 teams. Make sure you set trades to "enable human". Start at preseason. Now comes the fun part. Simulate week by week, paying attention to the transactions. I think by week 3, cuts will need to be made. This is where you have to start filling your practice squad with the appropriate players. I went by ourlads.com website because it shows who is in the teams practice squad, injuries and suspensions. You will come across some issues (2nd and 3rd yr players on practice squad). In that case, some injured players are rookies or 1st yr which can be put in the practice squad. Of done correctly, which took me about 3-4 hours, I started my regular season with acurate rosters. I just adjusted the teams depth charts to reflect PUP and suspended players. Hope this helps.

People complain about this every year, and every year it falls on deaf ears. Why does EA insist on making it so difficult to start a franchise with accurate rosters? Can we all agree we would rather just not have the preseason included in CFM? That way after all the work that is done on their part to get rosters correct, we can actually use them as they intended. its ridiculous, and it needs to stop.

[msdm27]

Quote: Originally Posted by reverend_heat

People complain about this every year, and every year it falls on deaf ears. Why does EA insist on making it so difficult to start a franchise with accurate rosters? Can we all agree we would rather just not have the preseason included in CFM? That way after all the work that is done on their part to get rosters correct, we can actually use them as they intended. its ridiculous, and it needs to stop.

Can't EA just put some real work into CFM logic and allow for pre-season to work properly?

See, this is the biggest issue with most Madden features and the reason for all the features that get taken out.
1. EA implements a feature
2. The feature is filled with bugs
3. EA gets notified by the community through various channels
4. The keep on claiming they test thoroughly (doubtful)
5. Yet it is not fixed
6. Players get fed up, and either a) stop playing the mode or b) stop using the feature or c) ask for the feature to be removed
7. EA removes or leaves the feature untouched claiming their telemetry shows users don't use the feature
8. Repeat (endlessly)

And there you have it, the CFM feature life-cycle

Edit:
Just to finish venting, since I don't want to play CFM anymore as the CPU keeps cutting players from my team even if everything is set to manual.

The biggest philosophical problem with EA's way of doing things is they like to build houses on top of swamps.

They keep "developing" stuff for CFM even though the foundation is broken. To give you a clear example, the CPU has been doing this auto-cuts thing for 2 or 3 years now, and nothing has been done; this year they come out with a new feature "big decisions" (LOLOLOL) which to the core implies development around the process of cutting players, and yet this bug goes without a fix. How is it they test the mode? You don't need to play 30 minutes to find this bug :/

Also, it seems they come up with an idea and run with it, no more thinking involved... Big decisions, you can bring a player early from injury!!!! But... There is no decision to be made actually, unless your backup is a 50OVR player (which doesn't happen because rookie classes were also messed up to start with), there is no real reason to bring a player one week early since their attributes take such big hits. How can a player be one week away from returning from an injury if his speed is -15, and throw power is -12??? That seems like a dude 4 or 5 weeks away from returning; how about a -4 or -5 max hit to playing attributes and a -15 hit to injury? nah that would be too logical.

To conclude, I think we all can agree CFM is not where it needs to be, and at this pace it will hardly ever be. The user has to invest hours upon hours to simply prevent the CPU from ruining the mode; and that's without going into the flawed AI team management for CPU controlled teams.