Man v. Zone Coverage

[CLW]

I'm watching College Gameday and I hear Kirk Herbstreit talking about how FSU needed and in fact had switched from a primary/mostly man defense to a primary/mostly zone defense.

Obviously, I don't have the direct quote but it was something along the lines of, "With today's complex offenses and all of the drags you simply cannot play defense in only man"

I found it interesting b/c of the "issue" many are having complaining about ineffective zones and over effective man to man coverage.

IMO, this is the biggest issue with 11. I'm really enjoying the game but I've just given up on calling zone defenses as they get torched unless you are defending in your own redzone which gives you the back of the endzone as an extra defender.

[ram29jackson]

heavy zones seem to work a little more in that 2 guys will get near ball. and showing blitz with a heavy zone can give the impresion of heavy coverag for a couple seconds. But , yeah, it still sucks...

[Rudy]

It makes defensive play calling very boring since man to man is so much better. This final patch is supposed to tone down man coverage so perhaps we could adjust the pass coverage slider better to fix it now. Adembroski said the NCAA team didn't change very much with this patch since they were afraid to break things so I wouldn't expect a big difference. I really hope they split up the pass coverage slider into two sliders next year: man and zone pass coverage. It would make it much easier to fix this.

[CLW]

It makes defensive play calling very boring since man to man is so much better. This final patch is supposed to tone down man coverage so perhaps we could adjust the pass coverage slider better to fix it now. Adembroski said the NCAA team didn't change very much with this patch since they were afraid to break things so I wouldn't expect a big difference. I really hope they split up the pass coverage slider into two sliders next year: man and zone pass coverage. It would make it much easier to fix this.

That would be BEAUTIFUL. IMO, the more options EA gives us in terms of WORKING SLIDERS to adjust the game to our different strengths/weaknesses the better.

[SmoothPancakes]

That would be BEAUTIFUL. IMO, the more options EA gives us in terms of WORKING SLIDERS to adjust the game to our different strengths/weaknesses the better.

Amen. They need to take a page out of the NHL series playbook. The amount of sliders in the NHL game is a dream come true for slider junkies.

[JeffHCross]

MVP had even more than NHL. It's kinda strange ... NHL, MVP/Triple Play, and I think even NBA ... they've always had a lot of sliders. NCAA and Madden never have.

[jaymo76]

Amen. They need to take a page out of the NHL series playbook. The amount of sliders in the NHL game is a dream come true for slider junkies.

+1000!!! The nhl series sliders are awesome. More user choice is always a good thing.

[Rudy]

I really wonder why some games have a lot of sliders while others don't. I personally think it's related to the devs thoughts on sliders. If devs love them they give them love. I'd still love to know the difficulty level these guys play at (particularly Russ and Ben) and the sliders they adjust.

[CLW]

I really wonder why some games have a lot of sliders while others don't. I personally think it's related to the devs thoughts on sliders. If devs love them they give them love. I'd still love to know the difficulty level these guys play at (particularly Russ and Ben) and the sliders they adjust.

Yeah to some extent its a matter of "ego" for lack of a better term. To give each individual the potential to have the best possible experience, a developer has to swallow his pride and realize that they cannot possibly make a game that suits everyone's strengths/weaknesses and/or how they want the game to play.

I've obviously never really met any of the development team but the impression I have of them is that they mean well but take criticism (both constructive and not) poorly and they seem to think that they and they alone will make the game that you play. Don't like "Wide Open Gameplay"? Too bad you will play it and you will like it.

[Rudy]

I don't know if it's ego but I certainly get the impression the development team has a narrow view on how others play the game. When some people can beat the game on Heisman, find exploits, etc. I think the dev team gets caught with their pants down as they can't understand how people play that way. When I complained that the cpu can't run the ball worth crap on AA (after patch #2) with cpu run blocking at 100 and human run defense at 0 I think their first reaction is to think I'm lying or crazy. But at the same time I do see that they found and fixed the rush defense sliders for patch #3.

That's why these community day events can be critical for these teams. I think they need people to point stuff out to them or they miss it. It's also a reason to add a lot of sliders so we can tune the game to what we want.

[JeffHCross]

Yeah to some extent its a matter of "ego" for lack of a better term. To give each individual the potential to have the best possible experience, a developer has to swallow his pride and realize that they cannot possibly make a game that suits everyone's strengths/weaknesses and/or how they want the game to play.

They also have to program the hooks into the game to adjust things with sliders. Don't take that lightly. With a few exceptions, we essentially have (in all titles) the same sliders that we've had since they were originally made on the Playstation ... maybe earlier in some cases. I would believe that most of these teams think that they've got the right amount of sliders, because it's been essentially the same since the get go.

I've obviously never really met any of the development team

Just one thing ... don't confuse the design team and the development team. Russ, Ben, and the others that we hear from often are designers. Very rarely do the actual developers speak.

I don't know if it's ego but I certainly get the impression the development team has a narrow view on how others play the game. When some people can beat the game on Heisman, find exploits, etc. I think the dev team gets caught with their pants down as they can't understand how people play that way.

Obviously I can't say what the team's reaction was to some of the exploits ... but on other games, they've gone on record as saying this. One of the more obvious examples of recent years was City of Heroes. The Cryptic team had never developed a game before ... and they started with an MMO. They designed it for the way they played. Their lead designer has gone on record that they were completely caught off guard that other people didn't play the game the same way they did ... and were particularly caught off guard that people would actively try to gain advantages or "break" the game.

Personally, I can't imagine that anyone at EA would be surprised that someone would try to find an exploit -- there's too much experience there for something that naive. However, they probably had the same reaction I did when the pump fake exploit hit -- "who the hell would try that?" I can imagine that someone found it accidentally, but I can't wrap my head around the idea that someone decided "Hey, what happens if I try to pump fake backwards?"

[morsdraconis]

I don't know if it's ego but I certainly get the impression the development team has a narrow view on how others play the game. When some people can beat the game on Heisman, find exploits, etc. I think the dev team gets caught with their pants down as they can't understand how people play that way. When I complained that the cpu can't run the ball worth crap on AA (after patch #2) with cpu run blocking at 100 and human run defense at 0 I think their first reaction is to think I'm lying or crazy. But at the same time I do see that they found and fixed the rush defense sliders for patch #3.

That's why these community day events can be critical for these teams. I think they need people to point stuff out to them or they miss it. It's also a reason to add a lot of sliders so we can tune the game to what we want.

I definitely think you're correct in that they don't seem to be able to play the game as well as most people.

That's understandable though cause these guys spend so much time working on the game, they probably don't have a whole lot of time to play it or don't want to play it because they spend so much time looking at it at work. Like even now, they're probably splitting their time between fixing shit with the game and working on '12 already.

Reminds me of the joke in the South Park episode "Make Love Not Warcraft" where the people from Blizzard are looking for Stan to give him the Sword of A Thousand Truths and he's over at Cartman's house instead of his own. When talking about how to get it to him, they say that they could just log onto one of their accounts and give it to him but then say that they have a life and don't have an account.

[JeffHCross]

I can't speak for EA, but I know devs and employees at other studios play their own games too ...

[Rudy]

I don't think it's a problem when the NCAA team doesn't find the glitch for the backwards pump fake. It's just retarded to even try that and you are a tool if you use it as an exploit.

But them not seeing the horrible cpu running game on AA is an example of a team that maybe isn't that good in a certain area and not understanding how flawed the 2nd patch made that area for some of us.

[JeffHCross]

Rudy, I'd love to agree with you, but considering the fact that we couldn't even come to a consensus on this forum about the running game, I'm not surprised that it wasn't seen before the patch was released.

Though it's obvious they agreed with you considering the upcoming patch to the sliders. Better late than never.

[Oneback]

In some respect I give EA a little bit of a pass when it comes to zone coverages. Man coverage is easy to program...follow this guy around the field and make a play on the ball if thrown near you. Zone coverage is a little more difficult as it involves a lot more: reading the quarterback, reacting to offensive threats, reading routes by offensive players and playing the ball. Not to mention if they were ever to get zone defense's to act as they should there would be a lot of casual gamers that would complain about the game being hard.

I really hope they are able to fix some of the issues with man coverage and make zone defenses react/pattern read.

[baseballplyrmvp]

MVP had even more than NHL. It's kinda strange ... NHL, MVP/Triple Play, and I think even NBA ... they've always had a lot of sliders. NCAA and Madden never have.

does anyone think it'd be a good idea to submit a community generated list of new sliders?

[JeffHCross]

It's never a bad idea to get community wishlists going. However, I wouldn't expect that it would get very far. (In other words, I encourage the idea, but don't set your expectations high). Since every slider has to have a hook into the actual gameplay, that's potentially a lot of programming that needs to be done.

On the flipside, with the tuner sets being released this year, it's possible that those hooks are already in the game, just accessible to tuners and not sliders. Petitioning to open those up to slider fanatics would be a decent idea.

[Rudy]

Anybody know why they keep releasing tuning files with patches? I thought the entire point was to release tuner sets apart from patches.

[rhombic21]

The issues with zone, for the most part, go beyond tuning or sliders. As Oneback mentioned, they need a complete AI overhaul to include things like pattern reading and adjustments based on the formation. As it is they basically hardwire in places on the field that players go and stand, and then give them a slight degree of freedom to adjust their position relative to receivers. In real life, zones don't work this way at all. Zone coverage, particularly at the college level, is going to involve reading the offensive formation before the snap to identify certain keys and then adjusting coverage on the fly based on what those keys do post-snap and what the offensive tendencies are.

I don't buy that they're going to turn off casual gamers by fixing zone coverage. For one, zone would be fixed for their defense as well, so they'd probably eliminate a lot of the frustration in defending the computer passing game. Secondly, the offense already has an inherent advantage on the videogame because of the vantage point that the user has in looking at coverage and finding a receiver, which essentially ensures that passing will always be easier to do on the game than in real life. Thirdly, the kinds of people who would get upset with this kind of thing probably don't even play on higher difficulty levels, and so chances are pretty good that they'd still have decent success moving the ball even if the zone coverage issues were addressed.

They need 3 things, none of which I expect to see this year via patches/tuners.

1) They need to fundamentally re-work zone coverage so that defenders behave more like you see in real life. Pattern reading, making adjustments based on keys, and understanding what the other 6 or 7 guys in coverage are going to do and how they fit into an overall play.

2) Fix defensive pre-snap alignment. Right now it's just bad. All around bad. Particularly with regards to man coverage against spread formations, but also in other areas too. At least 25% of the time the defense flat out doesn't line up correctly without manual adjustments.

3) Implement some kind of basic play creator for defense. Doesn't have to be too elaborate, but it essentially needs to give you all the options that you have with the pre-snap hot routes and allow you to save those to new plays. There are just a ton of situations where you can't really access the coverages or pressure packages that you want because there's no fast way to hot route to them and there's no adequate substitute in the default playbooks. Ideally they would also expand the defensive playbooks, but realistically they need to have this feature as well. With offensive hot routes you can more or less create entirely new plays from scratch, and there will always therefore be a need to do the same on defense.