A friendly Raider fan (http://twitter.com/eastbayraidr/status/2061051209) had his watchful eyes on the E3 footage and noticed a few plays where Asamougha (94 press rating) was getting burned by Ted Ginn (72 release rating). I sent this on to our gameplay guys and they found a pretty decent bug with the tuning of the press/release decision (which has now been fixed). Thought you guys would like to see the detail on what was actually going wrong - so here's the email he just sent me:
I looked at this in the debugger and saw what is causing this.
The defender first decides what direction he wants to push the receiver. In the case of a streak he wants to push the receiver inside since that's where his help is. The calculation of who wins looks like this:
Random Range = Defender Press rating (0 to 1) + Neutral buffer (1.0) + Receiver Release Rating (0 to 1)
The problem arises from the fact that if the receiver is on the opposite side of where the defender wants to push him, he gets a bonus that multiplies his release rating by up to 2 times. In the case of Ginn vs. Asamougha the final chances were a 1.0 for Asamougha and a 1.16 for Ginn because of the positional bonus.
Asamougha 1.0/3.16 ( 31% chance of win )
Neutral 1.0/3.16 chance of win (31% chance of neutral)
Ginn 1.16/3.16 chance of win (Ginn 36% chance of win)
I made the following changes:
1. Remove the positional bonus, users aren’t going to understand why a crappy guy consistently beats a good guy over a 1 and a half foot difference in x-position.
2. Increase the size of the neutral buffer to 2.0, since our wins and losses are super dramatic. A "neutral" in essence can count as a win for a defender since he stays right with him.
The end result is this:
Asamougha 1.0/3.67 ( 27% chance of win )
Neutral 2.0/3.67 chance of win (.54 chance of neutral)
Ginn .67/3.67 chance of win (Ginn 18% chance of win)
This now means that in the case of Asamougha vs. Ginn, Asamougha will stay right with Ginn step for step 82% of the time, with 1/4 of those times having him stopping Ginn right in his tracks with a good press. This felt like a really good balance but sliders will also effect this if the folks on the forums wanted to see them even more dominant. Pressing a guy is obviously a risky proposition in the NFL so you don't want someone to be able to hold a guy at the line every single time.
06-08-2009, 02:49 PM
