How Madden Ratings Are Made

[Hooe]

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/madden/

An interesting article from FiveThirtyEight about how EA Sports translates real-world players into their digital representations in Madden NFL.

[Gotmadskillzson]

90% of this article was already known for years by previous articles over the past 6 years. The new stuff not known begins in the second half of the article towards the end. Good read and good find Hooe.

[charter04]

I love to see that formula. I wonder if the gameplay itself values those ratings the same as the overall rating does.

I thought his comment about Spec Catch was interesting. He said that rating has little to no affect on gameplay. I thought it was pretty important. Also the idea that the EA guys might not even know how the ratings all work within the game. Not surprising.

[Senator Palmer]

Quote: Originally Posted by charter04

I thought his comment about Spec Catch was interesting. He said that rating has little to no affect on gameplay. I thought it was pretty important. Also the idea that the EA guys might not even know how the ratings all work within the game. Not surprising.

I'm sorry, I haven't read the article yet, but this made me

Spoiler

...probably because it's true

[Hooe]

A couple reactions to the OVR rating breakdown from that article -

I know the Speed rating at one point in Madden's life was the be-all end-all rating, but with where the game is at today, I'm a little disappointed that the OVR rating attribute weights still value it so highly for many positions. It would strike me that ability to play fast in small areas should be more valuable; to that end, things like Acceleration, Agility, the break tackle move ratings, Pursuit, and Play Recognition should have more value.

I'm also surprised that the Throw On Run attribute has very little weight for quarterbacks, with how important quarterback mobility is in the NFL these days. Speed seems entirely overvalued, while Acceleration and the ability to break tackles has no value whatsoever; this would strike me as making identifying truly good running quarterbacks just from the OVR rating very difficult.

It would also strike me that Block Shedding, Power Move, and Finesse Move should have non-zero value when determining a safety's OVR rating. Right now, apparently zero.

I don't pay much attention to the OVR rating anymore anyway, but perhaps Tiburon might consider revisiting it, for the sake of helping out team roster management AI pick out more useful players if nothing else.

[WingedLion14]

From my personal experience, I've found SPEC Catch just opens up catch animations available to the receiver. So I don't think it affects the game in terms of from a pure numbers standpoint, but it does affect the game from a point of view of whether receivers can catch bad throws.

Example: if I have OBJ and Cruz both on the outside running comeback routes, OBJ will dive and make the catch, whereas Cruz won't leave his feet to make the catch. OBJ has a 99 SPC catch rating, Cruz has something in the 80s I believe.

[NDAlum]

“I’ve heard it speculated that even the Madden team themselves don’t really know what’s going on,” Bailey said. “Because they’ve got years upon years of systems and code just layered on top of one another, where it’s not always entirely clear how they’re interacting.

FML

[SECElit3]

Quote: Originally Posted by NDAlum

“I’ve heard it speculated that even the Madden team themselves don’t really know what’s going on,” Bailey said. “Because they’ve got years upon years of systems and code just layered on top of one another, where it’s not always entirely clear how they’re interacting. FML

Hehehe... Hahaha... Just saying!


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