That Time of Year Again!

[steeldee7]

This is what community is all about.

[cheddabob7502]

I understand the let down with gameplay videos but getting to play with your favorite team and/or rookies that came into league is slowly getting me hyped. To each their own, its only a video game and at the end of the day just enjoy it for what it is. Getting to be a boss on the Gridiron against your friends/family/online community. My playing days are over but atleast in madden you get to work out that competitive feeling of facing opponents and beat people down with your favorite team. I can't wait to see some of you in online ranked matches. GO NINERS!!

[testorz]

Gaming is changing and unlike what I like to think of as the "golden age of gaming" which to me was before consoles went online, we are now bombarded with sub-par games intent on microtransactions being the focal point.

I miss the days when you bought a game popped it in and just played without all the constant updates and internet connectivity requirements etc.

[cheddabob7502]

Quote: Originally Posted by testorz

Gaming is changing and unlike what I like to think of as the "golden age of gaming" which to me was before consoles went online, we are now bombarded with sub-par games intent on microtransactions being the focal point. I miss the days when you bought a game popped it in and just played without all the constant updates and internet connectivity requirements etc.

Me too. I remember the days of updating all my madden rosters to make them like the NFL Each week. Then simulate season to test accuracy and records. Now everything is being released unpolished and micro transactions. I miss the old days when games released with quality and standards.

[sheredia]

Quote: Originally Posted by kehlis

We can, and should all be expected to constructively criticize what we aren't happy about with Madden or any game. What we need to embrace is the fact that not everyone is looking for the same experience. So what you are well within your right to criticize, someone else is within their right to disagree with you (and visa versa).

agreed....i'm all for positive posts. however, madden has grown stale the past few years and has had no innovation to speak of (other than longshot story mode). we do finally have roster share but nba 2k has blown madden away with classic teams, create-a-team, expansion and myleague options. there so many ways to be creative in that game and madden has nothing. frustrating to say the least. seems like the focus is on MUT and nothing else.

[JayhawkerStL]

Quote: Originally Posted by Toupal

The only way we can influence Madden/ EA is if we can unanimously agree on a change. I think everyone is in agreement that Madden is in need of some work, but if we as a community can't agree on what the problems even are, how can we expect EA figure out what we want or what the problem is?

The answer is that your expectations are way off. OS does not need to be one universal philosophy on how to play and enjoy video games. EA and devs can read and take notes from a variety of gamers and decide the best way forward.

The assumption that OS is, or even should be, one voice is a path to forum tension.

[m1ke_nyc]

Quote: Originally Posted by cheddabob7502

I understand the let down with gameplay videos but getting to play with your favorite team and/or rookies that came into league is slowly getting me hyped. To each their own, its only a video game and at the end of the day just enjoy it for what it is. Getting to be a boss on the Gridiron against your friends/family/online community. My playing days are over but atleast in madden you get to work out that competitive feeling of facing opponents and beat people down with your favorite team. I can't wait to see some of you in online ranked matches. GO NINERS!!

This is the exact approach I'm taking this year and going forward with not only this game but all sports games. Just gonna start enjoying them for what they are. I've spent years campaigning to make sports titles as close to the real thing as possible. I've reached a point where I just wanna have fun and enjoy it for what it offers. I still prefer simulation gameplay, but I haven't been able to enjoy Madden for years because that's simply all I cared about. Hopefully this new approach allows me to like the game again. Honestly I don't feel Madden will ever be that true Sim we desire.

[Rebel10]

I've made this appeal before, but it was probably 5 years ago in 'Steve's forum' or one of those community suggestion forums. I credit the team in that everybody seemed open to the feedback and we seemed to move in a different direction for a few months or a year, but it seems to have shifted back, so I'm making the appeal again.

Could we begin to consider moving away from the "Omnibus Thread" format, especially as they're stickied at the top of the forum and some of them are ... really stale or unimportant.



Having 10+ stickied threads throughout "The Madden Season," makes you naturally ignore the point of "stickies." A stickied thread should be something that you want people to pay attention to. When threads haven't had a relevant post in 6 months, or 3 months, or have had one or two replies over 6 months, they become irrelevant and then that is the opposite of what a 'Stickied' thread should be. When you end up having a dozen stickied threads, most of them old and out of date or just not relevant, instead of people paying attention to stickied threads, they develop a natural blindness to them. In the web user experience world this is often nicknamed "banner blindness," and while these stickies aren't exactly "banners," they serve the same purpose. Through years of having unimportant, irrelevant stickies, posters develop a blindness to them and naturally scroll past them to find relevant content.

I don't think we'll ever move away from "The Little things" or "The Bug/Glitches thread," but I really think it would help if we started to have a conversation around the value of them.

I think the same conversation can be had around the "Impression Thread," especially with aggressive forum moderation it becomes really difficult to have a conversation about the game... which I think the point of a sports gaming community is. "The Impression Thread," is usually tightly moderated so that you're not supposed to have a conversation in it (e.g., if someone posts an impression and I reply "Oh, interesting you see it that way, I'd really like it if they considered changing that feature to be this..."), but then if you start a new thread to discuss a new feature or impression you have, that gets locked with an instruction to move it to the Impression thread. The result is that you can't discuss your impressions of Madden, at least for three or four months when the moderation softens up, which is pretty late in the cycle of a yearly released game.

For the Bugs & Glitches threads, I've always thought that they end up obscuring the number of bugs and glitches in the game, to the point that we're going on 5, 6, 7 years that some of the same bugs have been appearing in Madden. I'd be shocked if they fixed the Franchise wind bug this year, it's been in the game, and reported by me and others in that thread every year going back to ~2012, but if you created a separate thread for it when the game launches, that thread would probably get locked with an instruction to "post this in the Bugs & Glitches thread," which is going on 450+ posts. And, given that many bugs and glitches get fixed, that thread generally becomes less and less relevant as the game lifecycle extends, so I think it makes it harder to find bugs that have already been reported (as we know, vBulletin search software is universally pretty terrible).

Now, I'm from the olden days of sports gaming forums. The wild west pendulum of insane trolling and crap posts, followed up with a swing of insane power drunk moderation, and that killed off dozens of Madden/Sports-gaming communities, though Operation Sports has, generally, persisted. There can be a tendancy to think, "MaddenPlanet, MaddenMania, MaddeNation, and every other Madden-focused community is gone while OS still exists, so that validates our approach," but I think this might be the wrong approach to take.

It's probably too late in the cycle to shake things up, and so many of us are used to the way things have always been... But, here we are going on a new iteration of Madden, for me, it's my ... 17 or 18th iteration of Madden as an active member of this community, and I'm more or less of the opinion that Madden has gotten worse over those 16 years. So, while the community still exists (and most of the growth in communities has shifted elsewhere, Reddit, YouTube, Twitch, Discord, and so on), I don't think we've been making the best contribution to the product that we could have based on how we've been giving feedback to EA.

Otherwise, looking forward to discussing Madden again this year


*edit*

Also, this screenshot is definitely more relevant for a Steve's Forum / site overhaul suggestions... I know we're going on, like 10+ years of the same site design and it's a lot to reconsider a site design for such an old community, but there's about... ~1700px of not very relevant content before you get to the relevant content of a typical forum like the Madden forum.

Here's a screenshot: https://i.imgur.com/1YRyDEv.png

Now, admittedly, a decent ~300px of that is an ad for some beautiful Ethan Allen summer sales (wow! that bureau is both classic AND chic!) and that's out of the forums control, but... the majority of that 1700px, at least 1400px of it, is a lot of filler, a barrage of links, and some half-explored ideas from ~2004, 2005 that might have been pretty fresh back then, but are pretty stale today. Again, I know that this is way out of the scope of my original post, but, while I was taking screenshots, I thought I'd capture one of the average user experience.