Madden 11 - Strategy Pad IS Optional - Patch around Week 1 of NFL season!

iam really struggling with it

does anyone know when it will be patched?

Megatron_81 wrote:

Limb Reaper wrote:

xhhxbronco wrote:

JayNizz wrote:

probably optional as well

I guess if enough people cry things change lol. Why cant people take what there given and adapt accordingly the strat pad just needed some getting used to, but most tgl of askmadden guys cant stand change if u ask me its down right pathetic. If your child wants a toy and u say "NO" and they cry and cry are you just going to give in? No BECAUSE YOUR THE PARENT AND THEY ARE THE KID.If you let the inmates begin to run the assilum in my opinion your just asking for trouble. Ian why did you buckle man? -HH

No offense, but that's a poor analogy IMO.

I'm not EA's child, I'm their customer. d@mn straight they better listen, especially when it comes to seemingly arbitrary control modifications that serve no purpose other than to change things for the sake of change. If your preferred auto manufacturer suddenly decided to swap the brake and gas pedals and add a big joystick in lieu of the steering wheel, you would just acept it? Sure, we might eventually get used to it, but why fix what isn't broken?

We're not inmates bro, we're the means for Ian to feed his family. The fact that he heard the complaints and acted appropriately isn't a sign of weakness.

yeap very true, caint argue with that...LOL if the car was nice enough, i could drive with a big joystick as a steering wheel along with the swapping of the gas and brake pedal...just might take some time getting use to...

Their reasoning is asinine IMO. People were accidentally triggering hot routes? So what? I've done it myself, usually because I'm attempting to get my guys to the line in a hurry by pressing 'X' when the AI is running a no huddle. What's the big deal? I just press R1 to cancel. It's still much faster than the Strat Pad. The SP requires more difficult button sequences and more total button presses. If the net result of the "better" system is a less enjoyable experience overall, then it's not an improvement.

dablitzkrieg wrote:

does anyone know when it will be patched?

First week of NFL season, aka Sept 9th-12th.

This changes are annoying and pointless, this year is all about making the game easier for beginners, and little few has been improved for the people who have been playing madden for years

Not pointless...

Quote :

We realize that the Madden veterans have been using the old pre-play system for years, to the point where it had become second nature. Any longtime Madden gamer could probably change the route of 2 receivers, pinch slide protection, and keep a back into block within a second. Despite the comfort with the way things were, it often caused major confusion for someone new to the Madden franchise or really any gamer who isn't familiar with the controls. I've heard a few comments on Twitter to the effect of "if it ain't broke, why fix it?" Well, when we started looking at data, it was in fact broke. Based on the playtests we ran and more importantly telemetry we gathered from the online connected consoles, we saw some pretty major areas that needed improvement:

1. A gamer on defense would often hit A (360) or X (PS3) to button through play call or pre-play, and in doing so, would get locked into the "hot route" state. Seeing that you are reading this blog, you probably are pretty experienced with Madden, and you're saying "well, that never happened to me". I'm with you...it didn't happen to me either. Well take this into account...did you know that over 2 BILLION defensive hot route context states were entered in Madden NFL 10? That's an average of more than 5 million per day. We discovered that of this number, more than 50% never called an actual hot route. So on more than 1 BILLION occasions, a gamer accidentally went into a pre-play contextual state that they didn't mean to. As a game designer, you just can't choose to ignore that..it's staggering. To be clear, it's not that we wanted to make pre-play controls easy enough for a caveman to use them, it's that we wanted to fix a system that punished gamers for just accidentally hitting the primary button on the controller.

2. Along with the accidental defensive hot route was getting trapped in states without a consistent way of exiting. A gamer, again presumably looking to skip through play call and preplay would hit the A button, and end up in the "defensive hot route" state. Nearly 100% of everyone's first instinct would be to hit B / Circle to exit out of this intimidating new menu. Unfortunately, in this state, the B button didn't exit, it actually picked a different receiver to assign man coverage to, which dug you deeper into this context. At this point, still the only way to cancel is RB / R1, and B / Circle doesn't do anything different. Worse yet, moving the left stick in any direction would change the assignment of your player, typically with the gamer often having no idea what was happening.

3. Another common experience was getting stuck in a state on offense that didn't allow you to snap the ball. This could be any state from hot routes to slide protection. We tracked well over 2 million instances of delay of game penalties being called while a pre-play menu was up. Assuming that even half of these were because the gamer was "lost" and couldn't snap (and not actually trying to rush out an extra adjustment), we've still got a major problem there.

4. Lastly, there was no way to easily communicate that A/X would bring up your hot routes, Y/Triangle would bring up coverage audibles, etc without a big piece of intrusive UI that had to always be displayed. Furthermore, there was no structure to the button commands in the pre-play controls, which made it harder for a newcomer to memorize which hot route, shift or audible uses a face button, versus a trigger, bumper, or directional pad command.

So the decision was made to relocate our controls to the directional pad in order to unify the commands. We moved them to this one consistent location where the B button was (nearly always) a consistent way to exit, and to a location that couldn't accidentally be pressed by an inexperienced gamer. This change was not made to alienate you, the hardcore fan. As you can see above, the data was staggering and forced us to consider major changes, and we knew all year that getting fans to re-train their brain would definitely take some time. With all that being said though, we gave our hardcore fans the benefit of the doubt thinking that it would be easy for them to learn this new system with a little practice.

1. I can admit that this HAS happened to me. Not a lot, but it does happen. I'm an impatient player. So I habitually tap X in an effort to speed things up by skipping replays, Backtrack etc. I'm not even sure if pressing X will make your team move faster anymore, though I know it used to.

He says they used telemetry data to determine this, but neglected to mention whether anyone was actually complaining about it. People WERE complaining - in droves - about the Strategy Pad.

"To be clear, it's not that we wanted to make pre-play controls easy enough for a caveman to use them, it's that we wanted to fix a system that punished gamers for just accidentally hitting the primary button on the controller."

So now instead, you have a system that punishes gamers for intentionally invoking the pre-play menu? Because that's what they're doing, especially on defense. What's the difference between being accidentally stuck in a menu state and being caught with your pants down because everything takes too long to modify?

2. "Nearly 100% of everyone's first instinct would be to hit B / Circle to exit out of this intimidating new menu."

Really?

If he had more actual telemetry data to back this up, I might be tempted to back down. But he says that their first instinct "would be" to hit B/O, which means it's an assumption on his part. Why would it be? Because we use those buttons to back out of the menus in the console OS and many other games as well.

If that's the case, shouldn't it have been this way since the inception of Playmaker? And you're just now getting around to changing it?

3. "Assuming that even half of these were because the gamer was "lost" and couldn't snap (and not actually trying to rush out an extra adjustment), we've still got a major problem there."

There's that "assume" word again. I mean it couldn't be due to any other reason, such as a wireless controller battery dying or the player just simply failing to realize how little time was left on the play clock because the post-possesion change/post penalty call play clock is set to 25 seconds. (Don't get me started on that one.) Even if he's correct, the "2 million" number means very little without other contextual data to bring it into focus. How many total delay of game calls were there in online games? If it was 3 million, he's got a point. If there were 20 million, not so much.

4. They say it wasn't easy, but I found it way more intuitive than the Strategy Pad. I had no problem learning it, but the SP will always seem like a pain in comparison. I'll admit that I've had people tell me that they don't bother with pre-snap because it's too tough. But they're also casual players. IMO those players aren't going to find the Strategy Pad any less daunting than the current system, so this effort to change will largely have been for nothing.

I really don't complain about much but the thing that really pissed me off was the fact that EA left NCAA 11 the same and all of a sudden decided to change madden. now, knowing that most people play both how would they could they even begin to think it would be an easy adjustment for prople

and yes i kno i spelled people wrong the second time

cant wait for the patch, strat pad sucks