DeuceDouglas MVP



OVR: 22

Join Date: Apr 2010 Location: Seattle, WA

Connected Franchise Mode: A Rebuild Quote: CFM is already good!



The main goal with this post is to illustrate just how much further CFM could be taken and how much more of a deep, engaging, challenging, and authentic experience that could be provided while also maintaining a good amount of the ease and accessibility that is required for new and casual users. If you saw the original post, this will be in the same format except instead of starting from the preseason, this time I will be starting from the point of starting up your CFM all the way through to what would be the next league year.



All pictures are clickable for full-size and if you're not one for the words and just enjoy the mockups, then you can go to



CFM Start-Up



Character Selection



Commissioner>Owner>GM>Head Coach>Coordinator>Player











Commissioner



A start-up option that would allow multiple or 32-team control through the use of only one profile. No more slogging through profiles and horrid UI to monitor team's rosters. Easier said than done but a godsend for any multiple or 32-team franchise player.



GM



Think Xbox/PS2 era control. Basically owner mode without all the (pretty much pointless) financial stuff. Hire/fire coaches and have complete control over all roster management aspects. I think this should actually straight up replace owner mode but that would kind of leave relocation out to dry and I don't want that to be the case.



Coordinator



Play franchise as a coordinator in the NFL and try to work your way to a head coaching job. Playing as a coordinator would focus your gameplay on one side of the ball but would also allow you to play entire games if you so chose. You'd also be in charge of preparing your given unit each week.



Starting Point



Currently the only options are to start at the beginning of the preseason or regular season and I'd like to see this taken a step further. Offer the ability to start in the off-season prior to the current season and allow the user to "alter the NFL's reality" to start your CFM. You could make this as deep or as simple as the user wanted. I'd probably keep it at just the draft but if you were to introduce the free agency mechanic I mention later on then this would be a good opportunity for the user to go through a dry run to learn it as well as immediately improve their roster. And then you could do the whole draft or just the first round as that'd be much quicker and more simple rather than a 'process' or hinderance to starting a new season. Maybe you're a Bears fan who hated the move to go up and take Trubisky. Maybe you're a team in the teens or twenties and wanted Mahomes or Watson to be your QBOTF, this would give you the opportunity to go back and make the move your favorite team wouldn't.



Arcade vs. Simulation & Season Mode/Live CFM



Same idea applies here for CFM as it does for gameplay. When you started your franchise you'd be presented with multiple options of playing using an Arcade, Simulation or Season Mode settings. Each of these settings would default aspects of CFM to a certain setting and give the user the ability to tailor franchise aspects to their liking or, in certain cases, give the user the capability to turn certain parts of CFM off.



Arcade



This setting would default to having things like the salary cap off as well as trade and negotiation difficulties set to Easy. Other settings such as wear-and-tear stamina and injuries as well as some of the more intricate aspects of franchise mode (RFA, Compensatory Picks, Waiver Wire) would default to off. This would be your freewheeling, fast paced setting that prioritized a more fun experience focused on the short term rather than extended over multiple seasons.



Simulation



This would be for the hardcore franchise player. Trade and Negotiation difficulties would default to Hard and all intricacies would be included. This would be for the player looking to replicate the day-to-day workings and challenges of running a real NFL franchise.



Season Mode



TSIA. Allows the user to play through a season without having to worry about anything but the games. The most simplistic way to play a season. They could also take this a step further where you could play multiple seasons and still do things like the draft and just have all the scouting done or show full attributes and draft that way. The idea is just to create an even quicker and less meticulous way to play a season.



Live CFM



Play alongside real NFL stats for the entirety of the NFL season. Take over a team or teams and change their reality while the rest of the leagues stats and results mirror the current NFL season.



Franchise Settings







Injuries

[Full | Games Only | Off]



The change here would be that Full would allow for injuries during both practice and games. Games only would be the current system and off would obviously be no injuries at all.



Sim Game Injury Slider



This slider would allow you to tune the amount of injuries that happen in simulated games. The CPU usually universly gets hit pretty hard by injuries so allowing that to be something the user controls is beneficial.



Position Injury Slider



Another way to tinker with injuries. This would be similar to XP sliders where the higher you go, the higher a player at that position has a chance to get injured, the lower you go, the less players at that position get injured. Just another way to combat potential imbalances or frustrations within the game.



Injury Severity



This would allow you tune the average severity of injuries in your franchise. A lower setting would result in a significantly larger portion of minor injuries (strains, bruises, tweaks, etc.) while a higher setting would result in more injuries resulting in long term injuries (fractures, breaks, tears, etc.).



Trade Difficulty



Adjusts the difficulty of making trades. The more difficult the setting, the more stingy the CPU will be when it comes to making trades. No longer will you be able to acquire the league's best QB for a likely low 1st rounder and a couple of mediocre players.



Free Agency Difficulty



Adjusts the difficulty of free agency. Easy would be basic free agency without much trouble, Normal would make teams a bit more aggressive and players a bit harder to compete for, Hard would make teams very aggressive in going after their players and more willing to outbid teams for players they really wanted. The one thing I really want when it comes to free agency is for it to feel rewarding and challenging and something like this could go a long way in allowing the user to decide how easy or hard they want this part to be.



Negotiation Difficulty



Adjusts the difficulty of contract negotiations. The more difficult the setting, the more likely players will be to push the limits of their market value when entering contract negotiations as well as the more likely players will be to flat out reject offers.



XP Allocation

[Free | Restricted | Strict]



This option would change the way XP was able to be allocated to players within a franchise. A start-up option that would allow multiple or 32-team control through the use of only one profile. No more slogging through profiles and horrid UI to monitor team's rosters. Easier said than done but a godsend for any multiple or 32-team franchise player.Think Xbox/PS2 era control. Basically owner mode without all the (pretty much pointless) financial stuff. Hire/fire coaches and have complete control over all roster management aspects. I think this should actually straight up replace owner mode but that would kind of leave relocation out to dry and I don't want that to be the case.Play franchise as a coordinator in the NFL and try to work your way to a head coaching job. Playing as a coordinator would focus your gameplay on one side of the ball but would also allow you to play entire games if you so chose. You'd also be in charge of preparing your given unit each week.Currently the only options are to start at the beginning of the preseason or regular season and I'd like to see this taken a step further. Offer the ability to start in the off-season prior to the current season and allow the user to "alter the NFL's reality" to start your CFM. You could make this as deep or as simple as the user wanted. I'd probably keep it at just the draft but if you were to introduce the free agency mechanic I mention later on then this would be a good opportunity for the user to go through a dry run to learn it as well as immediately improve their roster. And then you could do the whole draft or just the first round as that'd be much quicker and more simple rather than a 'process' or hinderance to starting a new season. Maybe you're a Bears fan who hated the move to go up and take Trubisky. Maybe you're a team in the teens or twenties and wanted Mahomes or Watson to be your QBOTF, this would give you the opportunity to go back and make the move your favorite team wouldn't.Same idea applies here for CFM as it does for gameplay. When you started your franchise you'd be presented with multiple options of playing using an Arcade, Simulation or Season Mode settings. Each of these settings would default aspects of CFM to a certain setting and give the user the ability to tailor franchise aspects to their liking or, in certain cases, give the user the capability to turn certain parts of CFM off.This setting would default to having things like the salary cap off as well as trade and negotiation difficulties set to Easy. Other settings such as wear-and-tear stamina and injuries as well as some of the more intricate aspects of franchise mode (RFA, Compensatory Picks, Waiver Wire) would default to off. This would be your freewheeling, fast paced setting that prioritized a more fun experience focused on the short term rather than extended over multiple seasons.This would be for the hardcore franchise player. Trade and Negotiation difficulties would default to Hard and all intricacies would be included. This would be for the player looking to replicate the day-to-day workings and challenges of running a real NFL franchise.TSIA. Allows the user to play through a season without having to worry about anything but the games. The most simplistic way to play a season. They could also take this a step further where you could play multiple seasons and still do things like the draft and just have all the scouting done or show full attributes and draft that way. The idea is just to create an even quicker and less meticulous way to play a season.Play alongside real NFL stats for the entirety of the NFL season. Take over a team or teams and change their reality while the rest of the leagues stats and results mirror the current NFL season.The change here would be that Full would allow for injuries during both practice and games. Games only would be the current system and off would obviously be no injuries at all.This slider would allow you to tune the amount of injuries that happen in simulated games. The CPU usually universly gets hit pretty hard by injuries so allowing that to be something the user controls is beneficial.Another way to tinker with injuries. This would be similar to XP sliders where the higher you go, the higher a player at that position has a chance to get injured, the lower you go, the less players at that position get injured. Just another way to combat potential imbalances or frustrations within the game.This would allow you tune the average severity of injuries in your franchise. A lower setting would result in a significantly larger portion of minor injuries (strains, bruises, tweaks, etc.) while a higher setting would result in more injuries resulting in long term injuries (fractures, breaks, tears, etc.).Adjusts the difficulty of making trades. The more difficult the setting, the more stingy the CPU will be when it comes to making trades. No longer will you be able to acquire the league's best QB for a likely low 1st rounder and a couple of mediocre players.Adjusts the difficulty of free agency. Easy would be basic free agency without much trouble, Normal would make teams a bit more aggressive and players a bit harder to compete for, Hard would make teams very aggressive in going after their players and more willing to outbid teams for players they really wanted. The one thing I really want when it comes to free agency is for it to feel rewarding and challenging and something like this could go a long way in allowing the user to decide how easy or hard they want this part to be.Adjusts the difficulty of contract negotiations. The more difficult the setting, the more likely players will be to push the limits of their market value when entering contract negotiations as well as the more likely players will be to flat out reject offers.This option would change the way XP was able to be allocated to players within a franchise.

Free - The current system. Allows all attributes to be upgraded freely.



Restricted - Physical attributes are locked from upgrade but all intangible ratings can still be fully upgraded



Strict - Physical attributes are locked from upgrade and intangible ratings are capped based on a players DEV trait.



Award Bonuses

[On | Off]



This would turn the ridiculous amounts of XP gained as well as the potential upgrade in DEV Trait nonsensically given through weekly and season awards off. Turning this off would eliminate the incentives placed on stat chasing to upgrade players which is something I'm strongly against.



Practice XP Distribution

[Very High | High | Normal | Low | Very Low]



This kind of pairs with the above. If you're going to take away the ability to get large those chunks of XP there needs to be a way to make that back up and this would be a setting to help with that. It would essentially be a modifier for how much XP a player gains from practice. So just as a hypothetical example, Player A earns 100 XP for a given practice. On Very High he'd receive 250, on high he'd receive 200, Low would be 75 and Very Low would be 25 hypothetically. This would just help users dictate how much XP was being distributed through practice and allow them to change it if they felt it was too high or too low.



Ratings

[Visible | Perceived | Hidden | Progressive]



Visible would be the current system. Perceived would be non-exact ranges. Hidden would be completely hidden. Progressive would be a combination of all three. Essentially there'd be very little info known about younger players and players who haven't played much and as they played and/or spent more time in the league they'd advance through tiers of evaluation where more information about their ratings would become available and a more exact player picture would be painted over time. More on this later.



DEV Trait

[Visible | Hidden]



This would allow you to decide whether or not the DEV trait was shown or hidden from you during your CFM. The benefit of this is having the challenge available to not always be fully aware and able to directly pinpoint a players developmental arch.



Franchise UI



This is something that doesn't really get touched on very much but that is the overall UI of CFM. Everything is oversized, slow, clunky and just an overall pain to use. The News Feed is still buried and doesn't do a good job of providing relavent information from around your franchise (who cares that I practiced Cover 3 this week, that's not news). Getting information takes moving over tabs and then clicking through screens. It's just overall a very inconvenient experience and this would aim to change that. For this I basically just straight up copied NHL 17's franchise UI and mocked up what it would look like if Madden were to use it.



Main Hub







This would be the main CFM hub. You'd have quick access to virtually every aspect of your CFM from this menu. Standings, roster breakdown, cap space, and upcoming games all on the front page. Also quick access to full standings and stats with the Stats Central tile. And then at the bottom is a CFM ticker that constantly cycles through information relevant to your CFM. Also by pressing the Start/Menu button you'd be able to quickly change teams/owners.



News Hub







This is the News Hub. Not on the front page but just a click away and also gives you a more intuitive look at stories from around the league. Features two main stories and two side stories. Scrollable Twitter feed along side all stories with talk from around the league. Also features transaction news from around your CFM on the bottom tile. Again, ticker is along the bottom no matter what hub you're on.



Draft News Hub







This is the Draft Hub or Draft News Hub. This would be separate from your NFL news and would be accessible through the Start/Menu button similar to how you would change teams or owners on the main hub. Obviously the actual NCAA screenshots will never happen so this section would look a lot more dull and stupid without them but it is still far better than Madden's current offering. Also included along the bottom bar is relevant information pertaining to the draft with overall draft depth, deepest position, weakest position, and the projected number one overall pick for the upcoming draft and a click of the RS would take you directly to scouting.



Team News Hub







This would be similar to the League News and Draft hub except it would only house stories related to your team. Stories about upcoming and previous weeks games, injury and transaction news, etc. Along the bottom you'd have more team stories directly relevant to your "big decisions."



Team Hub







This is where you'd want to be for any and all roster moves. Big Decisions tile on the right would alert you when certain moves needed to be made or opportunities were available. Each tile has relevant baseline information pertaining to the section it opens (i.e. Scouting>Points Available, Free Agents>Cap Space, etc.). Along the bottom is another quick link to Stats Central and displays your team leaders in passing yards, rushing yards, receiving yards, and sacks (or INT).











Starting with the preseason, probably the most commonly skipped item in all of CFM and rightly so. I used to play every preseason game back in the Madden 2004 days and even into M12. The problem with the preseason is that somewhere down the line, the already little incentive there was to play them was lost. There isn't many ways to spice up preseason games and I'm not looking to make them anything more than they are which is exhibition games predominantly played by backups.



Choosing Preseason Opponents







This was always one of my favorite things from past Madden's. It's obviously a little thing but would be a colossal improvement over playing the exact same preseason opponents (and often division foes) for the entirety of your franchise. I always used to do things like play the SB champs, the team with the #1 overall pick, try to play in stadiums I liked and against teams that were really active in free agency. Again, nothing huge but something that can incentivize playing preseason in some way. It would be another way to let users play the way they want to rather than being restricted by static opponents or even random ones.



90-man Rosters



Off-season NFL rosters allow for 90 players while Madden currently allows for only 75. It may not seem like much adding another 15 players to the bottom of your roster but for those that want even more ability to tinker with their roster it gives them that ability while more importantly being authentic to real life. Additional elements that come along with this is an increased free agent pool so that players won't disappear completely from your franchise as well as increased draft class sizes to account for more UDFA's being available.



Multi-Team Depth Charts







I don't know if this would make preseason more fun, so to speak, but I think it would definitely make it more practical and functional. The idea here is that as the user you'd be able to create unique depth charts to represent each "team" that may take the field during a preseason game. So to the example, you can see there's a first team, second team, third team, etc. To go with this, prior to each game you would choose the number of series each team would play before being subbed out. So rather than seeing your starters come out at halftime, or mid-drive at a quarter change like in previous Madden's, as well as obnoxious things like your starting CB's and WR's in on Nickel and 4WR sets, you'd now have full control of who is playing, when they're playing and how long they're playing during each preseason game. This is something that also would work wonderfully with Play The Moment. Say you're still not really interested in playing the preseason, you could hop into a game, play one series with each team while simming everything in between and still get a look at virtually your entire roster in a very minimal amount of time.



Big Decisions - Preseason



Cut Day



This pretty much goes along with the expanded rosters. It wouldn't make sense to add more players for preseason if you didn't get a decent chance to play with them. A recent NFL rule change has eliminated 'cut days' and turned them into one major "Cut Day" after the last preseason game. So that's going from 90 to 53 all at once. Being that it could be quite overwhelming to make that many decisions at once, I'd like to see multiple options for how cutdowns work with a few different choices of four-stage (weekly), two-stage (after weeks 3 and 4), and then one-stage which would be the authentic rules.



Position Coach Cut Suggestions







I'll get to the coaching staff later but this is something aimed at both helping the user as well as incorporating tangible effects of your hired coaching staff. The better a position coach is, the better he is at identifying and ranking players according to their value. Green circles indicate players the position coach recommends keeping while red X's would signify players that he suggests be cut. This would help make the task of cutting so many players a bit less overwhelming as well as providing a tangible risk/reward to your coaching staff.



Waiver Wire







This isn't exclusively a preseason item but this would be the first place you'd encounter it. This is something that in preseason can be quite an overwhelming experience as there will there can be a very large number of players available for claim. What I'd suggest for the preseason is that immediately following Cut Day you're presented with something similar to a View Roster screen with all the players cut from other teams all in one place and sortable by position with a checkbox so that you could easily see any players you may potentially want to claim.



Another way to help alleviate this is to allow you to search or sort for a certain criteria of player available and narrow the field to those 'targets.' So maybe you're in need of a KR you can scan the waiver wire for players with only, say, 85+ KR rating and go from there. Players claimed in this portion go directly to the 53-man roster and once this event has passed, you can then move on to adding players to your Practice Squad. Claiming priority throughout all of the off-season and preseason would be the same as the draft order from the most recent draft.



And once again you'll notice in the screenshot the green circle and red X signifying that your position coach is either recommending or discouraging you to claim a player which could also be another search criteria to limit the sheer overload of players.



Practice Squad & Accrued Seasons



Pretty straightforward. Only thing here is changing the eligibility rules (and more so how seasons are accrued in-game) to accurately represent real life. Rules allow for 10 players on the practice squad with four of those players allowed to have up to two years of accrued service. Currently if a player spends an entire year on free agency, he accrues a season played and a full year of service when he really shouldn't. An accrued season is any season that a player is on a team’s roster (both active and inactive), Injured Reserve or Physically Unable to Perform (PUP) list for more than six games. Simple enough.



Active/Reserve Physically Unable to Perform List (PUP List)



This is a smaller thing but affects roster management early on in your season. It would become a more prominent tool if it allowed you to place players injured in preseason on it but that also goes against its intentions and authenticity. However if they added a few weeks of Gameplanning prior to preseason to represent Training Camp and then tuned more serious injuries to have a longer recovery time then this would become a much more important factor in roster management early on in your season.



How the PUP List works is that the Active PUP is used exclusively during the preseason for the players that are unable to practice at the start of training camp. They are still counted as part of the 90-man roster and are available to practice at any time once medically cleared. However, once a player either practices or returns to practice they are no longer eligible for any form of the PUP list.



If a player ends preseason and is still on the Active PUP List they're automatically transferred to the Reserve PUP List. These players don't count towards the 53-man roster but along with this designation comes the requirement that the player is inactive from both games and practice for the first six weeks of the season. Upon the end of those six weeks teams have another six week window in which the player can return to practice. If the player returns to practice the team has three weeks from that day to either activate the player, release him, or place him on season-ending IR. If at the end of that six-week window the player has still not returned to practice he must then either be released or moved to season-ending IR.











On to the regular season. I think that I may have a different view of how I'd like regular season to play out than others. I would personally prefer to leave a good amount of the off-season roster management type stuff like re-signings to the off-season and have the regular season majorly focus on playing games. I'm not completely aversed to it, it just has to be interesting enough and have enough of a tangible effect to make it feel worthwhile. And the issue without having those things is that the games have to make you feel like you're actually progressing through a living season and not just playing a series of consecutive Play Now games. To accomplish this I'm going to try to achieve the best of both worlds where you feel in charge of your franchise outside of the game and like you're in a living one while playing the game.



Game Prep (Gameplanning)



Practice Strategy







Mostly the same as setting up a practice in M17 where you choose an offensive focus and defensive focus but with one key change in shifting focus players into a position group focus for the week and one key addition in the form of practice intensity.



Practice Intensity



High



High intensity practices are more physical and create a greater risk-reward for you team in terms of both XP gain and gameday boosts. Players who have good practices will see greater boosts for the current week while players who have poor practices during a week of high intensity practices will be subject to harsher reductions. Also, high intensity practices come with a greater risk of injury as well as potential gameday hits to stamina and injury ratings. Save these practices to try and break a losing streak or for the biggest games on your schedule. Use wisely.



Normal



Standard practice intensity. Standard everything across the board. XP gain and gameday boosts are standard. No additional injury risk. Your ordinary practice



Low



Low intensity practices are the lightest practices and come with the lowest potential XP gain and gameday boosts as well as the lowest injury risk but also carries the possibility of seeing harsher penalties to emulate players not being prepared for the ferocity of gameday. Limit these practices to points in your season where your team is beat up as well as short weeks where making sure your team is as fresh as possible is imperative.



Key Players







First things first, showing a few of the key players on both sides of the ball that you need to watch out for and potentially game plan around. You could also take this into gameplay by placing a star icon under these players so you know where they are at all times.



Statistics







This is more of an aesthetic thing but I always enjoyed in the older Maddens the ability to click the right stick and get a matchup breakdown that showed both teams stats and where they (and you) ranked in the league and this is a good place to do it. As it currently stands you only get a couple rankings and I'd like to see this expanded to showing YPG (total, rushing, passing) for both sides of the ball along with where they rank in the league. You could also throw in a couple extra stats like sacks and INT as well. This is also something that easily keeps the user aware of things going on in their league without really having to look for it which is always a big plus for immersion IMO.



Personnel/Formations







This is another aspect I'd like to see represented and that's knowing how often the opponent uses certain personnel and lines up in certain formations. The formations isn't nearly as important but knowing the likelihood of the personnel grouping you'll see greatly aids in preparing for an opponent. At the very least it gives you an idea of what to be prepared for. In addition to showing how often personnel packages and formations were used, there would also be run/pass ratios attached to them. You could go even further and break it down again by down and distance but I think that would admittedly be a quite a bit of information to handle. The idea would just be to give you more general knowledge of how the opponent plays and what you can expect. Alternatively you could show how the opponents defense reacts to certain personnel as well showing their counter personnel as well as man/zone percentages and blitz percentages given the personnel they're facing. However in this mock up, I just followed the offensive format and showed how often the defense uses certain personnel and what they tend to do out of each.



Tendency Tracking



Going to stick to the topic of tendency tracking first because I feel it's the most important aspect of Gameplanning as well as what needs the most work. For those unaware tendency tracking in M17 was pretty much useless. For online users the data tracked was only first down plays from the previous game. For AI teams the data shown was completely made up as well as static regardless of coach or personnel. So as an offline user the numbers you saw for the Chargers or any other team would be the same in 2045 as they were in 2016.



Now tendency tracking isn't something that is overly complicated to understand and with suggestions already in place there's really no reason for it to be as shallow as it is. The goal should be to provide the user with a detailed look at what their opponent has done so that they can be prepared as well as formulate a gameplan to attack and defend their opponent.



Down & Distance



This is the obvious one. Expand the tendency tracking to represent the full spectrum of situations to include 2nd/3rd & long, medium, and short as well as additional scenarios like Red Zone, Goal Line, and an overall run/pass ratio. This would provide a much better picture of your opponent and would prepare you for your game in far greater detail. Now this may seem like a bit of a overload but I'd imagine this is exactly what kind of information that someone in an online franchise would love to have.



Run/Pass Tendencies







This would also be a very simple visual aid to show the user certain tendencies that their opponent may have. Have a chart showing the percentage of runs that go left, right, up the middle, etc. You could expand this to outside left, inside left, middle, inside right and outside right but that wouldn't be essential to the purpose. You could throw in YPC averages into each slot as well to show how effective your opponent is at running in each direction. Also show a "spray chart" of pass tendencies that shows the direction and distance in which passes go. You could also have things like target and carry distribution and little nuance stats that just give you that much more information about your opponent. Same things would be shown for the defense where you'd see where they are the best and weakest at stopping opposing offenses.



Concepts



Only improvement here would just be expanding the concepts to more than three that are currently shown on the offensive side. Show percentages for all the concepts that an opponent runs for both runs and passes. This isn't something that really needs to be broken down by down or distance and I think a simple percentage for each side would suffice. This would be something more expanded for the defensive side of things where it could provide man/zone percentages as well as blitz percentages and even blitz tendencies as well.



Injury Report



This would just be an ease-of-use addition. Rather than having to go to the injury report and scan through a bunch of teams to see what your opponents situation was, it'd be made readily available at on the teams game prep report



Practice Participation







Pretty much the same thing here. This would show you something similar to your injury report but it would illustrate who wasn't practicing that week, who was limited and what players would be full participants which would all play into XP gain, gameday boosts, etc.



Enhanced Stat-Tracking



So having all of this info for your opponent is great but I think it is equally important to have all of this information tracked and easily visible to the user as well. It might just seem like something for the stat nerds but the way I look at it is that it's also an easy way to identify and be aware of your own playstyle and tendencies. This benefits users in two ways: it shows them their potential strengths and weaknesses from a gameplay and philosophy standpoint as well as showing what portions of their roster they could stand to improve to help bolster those strengths and tighten up any weaknesses.



The Solo Struggle



Now I haven't mentioned how any of this would work with the CPU and I'm not sure there's any pretty way to go about tracking stuff for nothing but simulated games. But earlier in the OP I talked about Dynamic Gameplans and what they could bring to CFM in regards to CPU playcalling and I believe it's something that could also work together very well into Gameplanning for the solo CFM or offline player. When you're playing another user, there's hard data based on actual games to base it off of. With the CPU all you really have is the sim stats but fortunately for a lot of what I've described above it can easily be manufactured simply by using the Gameplan Playbooks. The playbooks show how likely a team is to run vs. pass, run a certain direction or use a certain concept so most of the data would already be provided by the playbook itself. And not only is this data actually usable but it is far more relevant on a week-to-week basis which is something this feature completely lacks for the offline crowd. Obviously something like Dynamic Gameplans would be a full fledged feature but even with the base feature that is currently implemented it would still work just fine. Ratios and other stats could be directly pulled and provide the user with reliable data for every game rather than just fabricating it and having it be completely static.



Practice



Not a game! Not a game! We talkin' bout Practice! As someone who would rather do literally anything else within Madden than practice, it's good that there is the ability to sim practice but locking it behind having to do a drill first is a huge mistake IMO. You can sim practice without playing but it also comes at the expense of having your team progress at the slowest pace possible which I don't feel like is a reasonable trade off. To the other side if you get a couple drills Gold you're automatically locked into the best possible progression for an entire season without doing much at all. I understand this was done with Online CFM's in mind but I still think it is a poor design decision. In the end it's extremely monotonous and feels more intrusive than anything and having it be what essentially dictates the level of development for an entire unit of players is a poor choice IMO. I'm fine with keeping it as it is so that it can continue being a teaching tool for less experienced users but there needs to be some more options to make it a better and more well rounded experience. For me personally, I don't think you should be required to ever play practice or penalized for not wanting to do so.



Position Group Restrictions



This is something I'd like to see removed and that's restricting development to certain position groups every week. If that means that you have to reduce the amount of XP given on a per week basis then that's fine but I don't like that each week it can only be certain units and the rest of your team gets no credit for practicing. It should just be offense and defense and everyone should be eligible for some sort of gain. You can still use the current system to an extent where maybe those position groups are "emphasis groups" and get potentially a slight boost for everyone in that unit but everybody practices and that should be rewarded as such. And having the emphasis groups could be a nice way of expanding the "focus players" that it's more of team oriented focus rather than individual.



Medals



I do like the idea of players earning medals in practice. It emulates and can accurately depict a player having a good or bad week of practice which definitely is a good thing. However their implementation is quite basic and shallow. You earn a gold and the whole unit earns a gold. You earn a bronze, the whole unit earns a bronze. I'd like to see medals distributed individually to players rather than just allowing for one all encompassing medal for the unit. Now, this obviously presents a problem for those that do play practice and feel if they earn a gold, everyone should earn a gold and I'm not entirely sure how that can be handled. The idea I'd propose is having two options for practice (Manual & Auto), similar to progressing players where if you're on Manual you play practice and your players get the medal they get and then there's Auto where you can sim practice and each player gets a random medal largely based on a combination of morale, DEV trait, coaching staff, etc.



Attribute Boosts/Reductions



Definitely not a fan of how these worked in M17 but I think they can still have a place in CFM and add an interesting dynamic to matchups and even presentation. So under the system I've laid out, rather than having specific position groups (LB's, QB's, etc.) getting those boosts, it'd be expanded to specific players. So a player that earns gold will receive a very slight ratings boost (for the whole game, not just certain concepts) for that given week but if you only earn a bronze then it is considered a bad week of practice and those players see a slight reduction in certain attributes. Maybe a CB loses a couple points in MCV or PRC for the week due to a poor week at practice. Maybe an OL receives a couple point boost in RBK and PBK for the next weeks game because of a good week of practice. It would change week-to-week adding a new dynamic to certain matchups like a WR-CB matchup where both players had a great week of practice or maybe a T-EDGE match-up where a one had a bad week and the other a good. This also presents a great opportunity for commentary lines mentioning how coaches raved about his week at practice or how a player struggled through the week.



Morale Modifiers



The idea here is that based on a players morale they will progress differently based on their morale. The main goal being an increased emphasis put on maintaining a happier and more cohesive roster. How this would work would be that tied to each players DEV trait would also be a happiness modifier. For example, there'd essentially be Superstar-Happy, Superstar-Neutral, Superstar-Unhappy instead of just Superstar or any other DEV level. A happy player would receive a slight boost in the amount of XP earned while neutral would be normal and an unhappy would result in a slight reduction in the amount of XP earned. So hypothetically, a happy player with Quick DEV could be actually progress better than an unhappy player with SS DEV.



This could be taken a step further where you have five tiers of Very Happy, Happy, Neutral, Unhappy, and Very Unhappy but I think the main goal is still accomplished with just the three tiers. Something like this puts an emphasis on keeping players happy and maintaining that happiness to get the most out of them. Knowing that offering a contract or making a transaction could have a drastic impact on both a players (or multiple players) happiness or ability to progress adds an interesting dynamic to making every roster move.



Injuries



Having injuries available in practice would be nice. Adds a bit more risk/reward in a couple of different facets. On one hand you risk any player at anytime getting injured which is something we see every year (hey Dante Fowler and Teddy Bridgewater). Having that risk of a player getting injured during practice and missing that weeks game or (far less likely) the season is something that adds some dynamism while placing a greater emphasis and priority on roster management as well. And secondly, it could propose a new "big decision" where you're faced with the proposition of practicing an injured player and risking further injury or the chance he misses the upcoming game or sitting him and sacrificing development time for health while a player lower on the depth chart gets their reps.



Other Game Prep Ideas



Practice Makes Perfect - Progress What You Practice



This is an additional idea I had for practice but it is quite a bit more restricting although, in my mind, it makes a bit more sense. This would be something that would be better paired with the 'Strict' XP allocation setting that I mentioned and how it would work is just like it sounds -- progress what you practice. The idea here is that whatever you practice dictates what you earn towards progression. Practicing Cover 3? Your DB's earn XP towards ZCV and PRC while DL earn XP towards FMV and PMV, etc. Practicing Read Option? BCV and AWR for the RB, RBK for WR, OL, TE. This is something that could definitely fit into the scope of what is already there with practicing concepts and even more so if the amount of available practice scenarios was expanded. Obvious this is a bit more restricting as you wouldn't be able to practice Cover 3 or anything else to boost a players SPD or other physical attributes but I also feel as though it would be more strategic.



To add to that, I mentioned that this is something that would work better paired with the strict XP allocation that I mentioned but it is also something that could work in itself as an automated progression system. Because what you practiced would allocate XP to specific attributes, there would be no need for the user to have to upgrade their players. once a player reached the amount of XP available it would automatically upgrade because the XP earned there wouldn't be allowed to be spent anywhere else. Additionally, if players had something like a career cap on certain attributes that essentially dictated their peak potential, it would add another element of strategy into what you're practicing especially if paired with masked ratings.



Just as a quick (and likely poor) example, let's say you draft two CB's that both have 75 for MCV. Player A has slow DEV with a MCV cap of 85 while Player B has normal and a MCV cap of 95. You pump a ton of practice hours into MCV and both players start going up and after a couple seasons Player A has reached his 85 MCV cap while Player B has progressed a bit quicker and is up to 88. Now as you continue to practice MCV, Player B still has the possibility of going up because his cap hasn't been reached. However for Player A his rating is stuck at 85 until he begins to regress but the rating shown still acts as if his cap is 99 and his attributes are continuing to grow until he starts to regress. So if you continued to practice MCV, at the end of the season maybe Player B is a 93 and it is a "true" 93 because he hasn't reached his peak yet while Player A might display as an 88 now because of the time put in but on the surface he's really still that 85. And as he regresses his "true" rating and his perceived rating might always be slightly different.



Obviously this isn't a fully fleshed idea but just something I'd been thinking about and wanted to add. There's a lot of different ways you could take it but it's not nearly as "fun" or user friendly as the other options obviously.



Rare Medals



This could be something to add a little bit of uniqueness to players with Superstar DEV and that's something like Platinum Medals available to them for Gameplanning. They'd be more rare but would give a player a chance at earning a bit more than usual in a given week. You could have this tied into something like all the necessary factors being in line with each other where a player is Superstar DEV, has a good coach, is healthy, etc. Just an idea to throw an added element into the fire.



Dynamic GamePlans



The GamePlan function is one of the most underutilized features in all of Madden. It's original premise was to reduce play time by giving the user the ability to have a "coordinator" call plays for them based on the scenario. This turned out to not have much of an impact but the implementation ended up giving us access and control over one thing that had always been more or less a mystery and that's CPU playcalling. Now when it comes to a User v. CPU franchise this is HUGE. Simply taking the tools that are already present and modifying the existing playbooks would make teams playcalling miles better and more exciting than it currently is but the issue comes with playing over several seasons this could become stale and repetitive. I'm aiming to take the current GamePlan function a step further so that as you play more seasons you get a real sense of teams adapting and changing with their coaches and players.



If you're not familiar how GamePlan works it's essentially a star system for plays in a given scenario (1st & 10, 3rd & long, etc.) that determines which plays are called. The higher the star rating, the greater the chance that play is called in a given scenario. Most teams playbooks consist of about 20 plays per scenario and for the most part most plays are rated at two and a half out of five stars. The first issue is that the playbooks don't take nearly enough of their playbook into consideration in these scenarios. You'll see plays like Curl Flats, Slants, Corner Strike, and Four Verticals prominent in just about every teams playbooks taking up multiple spots in multiple scenarios which plays a part in teams playing so similar. So the first step to this is to make sure each team is utilizing as much of their playbook as possible for each given scenario when possible. Now, that doesn't mean making all of their running plays available in 3rd & long scenarios, it just means applying more of the playbook to scenarios where those plays fit in so as to further diversify playcalling.



Now to the dynamic part. The idea I have is attaching star boosts/reductions to certain plays/concepts within a teams playbook based on player ratings, coach tendencies, and team performance. This would turn the ridiculous amounts of XP gained as well as the potential upgrade in DEV Trait nonsensically given through weekly and season awards off. Turning this off would eliminate the incentives placed on stat chasing to upgrade players which is something I'm strongly against.This kind of pairs with the above. If you're going to take away the ability to get large those chunks of XP there needs to be a way to make that back up and this would be a setting to help with that. It would essentially be a modifier for how much XP a player gains from practice. So just as a hypothetical example, Player A earns 100 XP for a given practice. On Very High he'd receive 250, on high he'd receive 200, Low would be 75 and Very Low would be 25 hypothetically. This would just help users dictate how much XP was being distributed through practice and allow them to change it if they felt it was too high or too low.Visible would be the current system. Perceived would be non-exact ranges. Hidden would be completely hidden. Progressive would be a combination of all three. Essentially there'd be very little info known about younger players and players who haven't played much and as they played and/or spent more time in the league they'd advance through tiers of evaluation where more information about their ratings would become available and a more exact player picture would be painted over time. More on this later.This would allow you to decide whether or not the DEV trait was shown or hidden from you during your CFM. The benefit of this is having the challenge available to not always be fully aware and able to directly pinpoint a players developmental arch.This is something that doesn't really get touched on very much but that is the overall UI of CFM. Everything is oversized, slow, clunky and just an overall pain to use. The News Feed is still buried and doesn't do a good job of providing relavent information from around your franchise (who cares that I practiced Cover 3 this week, that's not news). Getting information takes moving over tabs and then clicking through screens. It's just overall a very inconvenient experience and this would aim to change that. For this I basically just straight up copied NHL 17's franchise UI and mocked up what it would look like if Madden were to use it.This would be the main CFM hub. You'd have quick access to virtually every aspect of your CFM from this menu. Standings, roster breakdown, cap space, and upcoming games all on the front page. Also quick access to full standings and stats with the Stats Central tile. And then at the bottom is a CFM ticker that constantly cycles through information relevant to your CFM. Also by pressing the Start/Menu button you'd be able to quickly change teams/owners.This is the News Hub. Not on the front page but just a click away and also gives you a more intuitive look at stories from around the league. Features two main stories and two side stories. Scrollable Twitter feed along side all stories with talk from around the league. Also features transaction news from around your CFM on the bottom tile. Again, ticker is along the bottom no matter what hub you're on.This is the Draft Hub or Draft News Hub. This would be separate from your NFL news and would be accessible through the Start/Menu button similar to how you would change teams or owners on the main hub. Obviously the actual NCAA screenshots will never happen so this section would look a lot more dull and stupid without them but it is still far better than Madden's current offering. Also included along the bottom bar is relevant information pertaining to the draft with overall draft depth, deepest position, weakest position, and the projected number one overall pick for the upcoming draft and a click of the RS would take you directly to scouting.This would be similar to the League News and Draft hub except it would only house stories related to your team. Stories about upcoming and previous weeks games, injury and transaction news, etc. Along the bottom you'd have more team stories directly relevant to your "big decisions."This is where you'd want to be for any and all roster moves. Big Decisions tile on the right would alert you when certain moves needed to be made or opportunities were available. Each tile has relevant baseline information pertaining to the section it opens (i.e. Scouting>Points Available, Free Agents>Cap Space, etc.). Along the bottom is another quick link to Stats Central and displays your team leaders in passing yards, rushing yards, receiving yards, and sacks (or INT).Starting with the preseason, probably the most commonly skipped item in all of CFM and rightly so. I used to play every preseason game back in the Madden 2004 days and even into M12. The problem with the preseason is that somewhere down the line, the already little incentive there was to play them was lost. There isn't many ways to spice up preseason games and I'm not looking to make them anything more than they are which is exhibition games predominantly played by backups.This was always one of my favorite things from past Madden's. It's obviously a little thing but would be a colossal improvement over playing the exact same preseason opponents (and often division foes) for the entirety of your franchise. I always used to do things like play the SB champs, the team with the #1 overall pick, try to play in stadiums I liked and against teams that were really active in free agency. Again, nothing huge but something that can incentivize playing preseason in some way. It would be another way to let users play the way they want to rather than being restricted by static opponents or even random ones.Off-season NFL rosters allow for 90 players while Madden currently allows for only 75. It may not seem like much adding another 15 players to the bottom of your roster but for those that want even more ability to tinker with their roster it gives them that ability while more importantly being authentic to real life. Additional elements that come along with this is an increased free agent pool so that players won't disappear completely from your franchise as well as increased draft class sizes to account for more UDFA's being available.I don't know if this would make preseason more fun, so to speak, but I think it would definitely make it more practical and functional. The idea here is that as the user you'd be able to create unique depth charts to represent each "team" that may take the field during a preseason game. So to the example, you can see there's a first team, second team, third team, etc. To go with this, prior to each game you would choose the number of series each team would play before being subbed out. So rather than seeing your starters come out at halftime, or mid-drive at a quarter change like in previous Madden's, as well as obnoxious things like your starting CB's and WR's in on Nickel and 4WR sets, you'd now have full control of who is playing, when they're playing and how long they're playing during each preseason game. This is something that also would work wonderfully with Play The Moment. Say you're still not really interested in playing the preseason, you could hop into a game, play one series with each team while simming everything in between and still get a look at virtually your entire roster in a very minimal amount of time.This pretty much goes along with the expanded rosters. It wouldn't make sense to add more players for preseason if you didn't get a decent chance to play with them. A recent NFL rule change has eliminated 'cut days' and turned them into one major "Cut Day" after the last preseason game. So that's going from 90 to 53 all at once. Being that it could be quite overwhelming to make that many decisions at once, I'd like to see multiple options for how cutdowns work with a few different choices of four-stage (weekly), two-stage (after weeks 3 and 4), and then one-stage which would be the authentic rules.I'll get to the coaching staff later but this is something aimed at both helping the user as well as incorporating tangible effects of your hired coaching staff. The better a position coach is, the better he is at identifying and ranking players according to their value. Green circles indicate players the position coach recommends keeping while red X's would signify players that he suggests be cut. This would help make the task of cutting so many players a bit less overwhelming as well as providing a tangible risk/reward to your coaching staff.This isn't exclusively a preseason item but this would be the first place you'd encounter it. This is something that in preseason can be quite an overwhelming experience as there will there can be a very large number of players available for claim. What I'd suggest for the preseason is that immediately following Cut Day you're presented with something similar to a View Roster screen with all the players cut from other teams all in one place and sortable by position with a checkbox so that you could easily see any players you may potentially want to claim.Another way to help alleviate this is to allow you to search or sort for a certain criteria of player available and narrow the field to those 'targets.' So maybe you're in need of a KR you can scan the waiver wire for players with only, say, 85+ KR rating and go from there. Players claimed in this portion go directly to the 53-man roster and once this event has passed, you can then move on to adding players to your Practice Squad. Claiming priority throughout all of the off-season and preseason would be the same as the draft order from the most recent draft.And once again you'll notice in the screenshot the green circle and red X signifying that your position coach is either recommending or discouraging you to claim a player which could also be another search criteria to limit the sheer overload of players.Pretty straightforward. Only thing here is changing the eligibility rules (and more so how seasons are accrued in-game) to accurately represent real life. Rules allow for 10 players on the practice squad with four of those players allowed to have up to two years of accrued service. Currently if a player spends an entire year on free agency, he accrues a season played and a full year of service when he really shouldn't. An accrued season is any season that a player is on a team’s roster (both active and inactive), Injured Reserve or Physically Unable to Perform (PUP) list for more than six games. Simple enough.This is a smaller thing but affects roster management early on in your season. It would become a more prominent tool if it allowed you to place players injured in preseason on it but that also goes against its intentions and authenticity. However if they added a few weeks of Gameplanning prior to preseason to represent Training Camp and then tuned more serious injuries to have a longer recovery time then this would become a much more important factor in roster management early on in your season.How the PUP List works is that the Active PUP is used exclusively during the preseason for the players that are unable to practice at the start of training camp. They are still counted as part of the 90-man roster and are available to practice at any time once medically cleared. However, once a player either practices or returns to practice they are no longer eligible for any form of the PUP list.If a player ends preseason and is still on the Active PUP List they're automatically transferred to the Reserve PUP List. These players don't count towards the 53-man roster but along with this designation comes the requirement that the player is inactive from both games and practice for the first six weeks of the season. Upon the end of those six weeks teams have another six week window in which the player can return to practice. If the player returns to practice the team has three weeks from that day to either activate the player, release him, or place him on season-ending IR. If at the end of that six-week window the player has still not returned to practice he must then either be released or moved to season-ending IR.On to the regular season. I think that I may have a different view of how I'd like regular season to play out than others. I would personally prefer to leave a good amount of the off-season roster management type stuff like re-signings to the off-season and have the regular season majorly focus on playing games. I'm not completely aversed to it, it just has to be interesting enough and have enough of a tangible effect to make it feel worthwhile. And the issue without having those things is that the games have to make you feel like you're actually progressing through a living season and not just playing a series of consecutive Play Now games. To accomplish this I'm going to try to achieve the best of both worlds where you feel in charge of your franchise outside of the game and like you're in a living one while playing the game.Mostly the same as setting up a practice in M17 where you choose an offensive focus and defensive focus but with one key change in shifting focus players into a position group focus for the week and one key addition in the form of practice intensity.High intensity practices are more physical and create a greater risk-reward for you team in terms of both XP gain and gameday boosts. Players who have good practices will see greater boosts for the current week while players who have poor practices during a week of high intensity practices will be subject to harsher reductions. Also, high intensity practices come with a greater risk of injury as well as potential gameday hits to stamina and injury ratings. Save these practices to try and break a losing streak or for the biggest games on your schedule. Use wisely.Standard practice intensity. Standard everything across the board. XP gain and gameday boosts are standard. No additional injury risk. Your ordinary practiceLow intensity practices are the lightest practices and come with the lowest potential XP gain and gameday boosts as well as the lowest injury risk but also carries the possibility of seeing harsher penalties to emulate players not being prepared for the ferocity of gameday. Limit these practices to points in your season where your team is beat up as well as short weeks where making sure your team is as fresh as possible is imperative.First things first, showing a few of the key players on both sides of the ball that you need to watch out for and potentially game plan around. You could also take this into gameplay by placing a star icon under these players so you know where they are at all times.This is more of an aesthetic thing but I always enjoyed in the older Maddens the ability to click the right stick and get a matchup breakdown that showed both teams stats and where they (and you) ranked in the league and this is a good place to do it. As it currently stands you only get a couple rankings and I'd like to see this expanded to showing YPG (total, rushing, passing) for both sides of the ball along with where they rank in the league. You could also throw in a couple extra stats like sacks and INT as well. This is also something that easily keeps the user aware of things going on in their league without really having to look for it which is always a big plus for immersion IMO.This is another aspect I'd like to see represented and that's knowing how often the opponent uses certain personnel and lines up in certain formations. The formations isn't nearly as important but knowing the likelihood of the personnel grouping you'll see greatly aids in preparing for an opponent. At the very least it gives you an idea of what to be prepared for. In addition to showing how often personnel packages and formations were used, there would also be run/pass ratios attached to them. You could go even further and break it down again by down and distance but I think that would admittedly be a quite a bit of information to handle. The idea would just be to give you more general knowledge of how the opponent plays and what you can expect. Alternatively you could show how the opponents defense reacts to certain personnel as well showing their counter personnel as well as man/zone percentages and blitz percentages given the personnel they're facing. However in this mock up, I just followed the offensive format and showed how often the defense uses certain personnel and what they tend to do out of each.Going to stick to the topic of tendency tracking first because I feel it's the most important aspect of Gameplanning as well as what needs the most work. For those unaware tendency tracking in M17 was pretty much useless. For online users the data tracked was only first down plays from the previous game. For AI teams the data shown was completely made up as well as static regardless of coach or personnel. So as an offline user the numbers you saw for the Chargers or any other team would be the same in 2045 as they were in 2016.Now tendency tracking isn't something that is overly complicated to understand and with suggestions already in place there's really no reason for it to be as shallow as it is. The goal should be to provide the user with a detailed look at what their opponent has done so that they can be prepared as well as formulate a gameplan to attack and defend their opponent.This is the obvious one. Expand the tendency tracking to represent the full spectrum of situations to include 2nd/3rd & long, medium, and short as well as additional scenarios like Red Zone, Goal Line, and an overall run/pass ratio. This would provide a much better picture of your opponent and would prepare you for your game in far greater detail. Now this may seem like a bit of a overload but I'd imagine this is exactly what kind of information that someone in an online franchise would love to have.This would also be a very simple visual aid to show the user certain tendencies that their opponent may have. Have a chart showing the percentage of runs that go left, right, up the middle, etc. You could expand this to outside left, inside left, middle, inside right and outside right but that wouldn't be essential to the purpose. You could throw in YPC averages into each slot as well to show how effective your opponent is at running in each direction. Also show a "spray chart" of pass tendencies that shows the direction and distance in which passes go. You could also have things like target and carry distribution and little nuance stats that just give you that much more information about your opponent. Same things would be shown for the defense where you'd see where they are the best and weakest at stopping opposing offenses.Only improvement here would just be expanding the concepts to more than three that are currently shown on the offensive side. Show percentages for all the concepts that an opponent runs for both runs and passes. This isn't something that really needs to be broken down by down or distance and I think a simple percentage for each side would suffice. This would be something more expanded for the defensive side of things where it could provide man/zone percentages as well as blitz percentages and even blitz tendencies as well.This would just be an ease-of-use addition. Rather than having to go to the injury report and scan through a bunch of teams to see what your opponents situation was, it'd be made readily available at on the teams game prep reportPretty much the same thing here. This would show you something similar to your injury report but it would illustrate who wasn't practicing that week, who was limited and what players would be full participants which would all play into XP gain, gameday boosts, etc.So having all of this info for your opponent is great but I think it is equally important to have all of this information tracked and easily visible to the user as well. It might just seem like something for the stat nerds but the way I look at it is that it's also an easy way to identify and be aware of your own playstyle and tendencies. This benefits users in two ways: it shows them their potential strengths and weaknesses from a gameplay and philosophy standpoint as well as showing what portions of their roster they could stand to improve to help bolster those strengths and tighten up any weaknesses.Now I haven't mentioned how any of this would work with the CPU and I'm not sure there's any pretty way to go about tracking stuff for nothing but simulated games. But earlier in the OP I talked about Dynamic Gameplans and what they could bring to CFM in regards to CPU playcalling and I believe it's something that could also work together very well into Gameplanning for the solo CFM or offline player. When you're playing another user, there's hard data based on actual games to base it off of. With the CPU all you really have is the sim stats but fortunately for a lot of what I've described above it can easily be manufactured simply by using the Gameplan Playbooks. The playbooks show how likely a team is to run vs. pass, run a certain direction or use a certain concept so most of the data would already be provided by the playbook itself. And not only is this data actually usable but it is far more relevant on a week-to-week basis which is something this feature completely lacks for the offline crowd. Obviously something like Dynamic Gameplans would be a full fledged feature but even with the base feature that is currently implemented it would still work just fine. Ratios and other stats could be directly pulled and provide the user with reliable data for every game rather than just fabricating it and having it be completely static.Not a game! Not a game! We talkin' bout Practice! As someone who would rather do literally anything else within Madden than practice, it's good that there is the ability to sim practice but locking it behind having to do a drill first is a huge mistake IMO. You can sim practice without playing but it also comes at the expense of having your team progress at the slowest pace possible which I don't feel like is a reasonable trade off. To the other side if you get a couple drills Gold you're automatically locked into the best possible progression for an entire season without doing much at all. I understand this was done with Online CFM's in mind but I still think it is a poor design decision. In the end it's extremely monotonous and feels more intrusive than anything and having it be what essentially dictates the level of development for an entire unit of players is a poor choice IMO. I'm fine with keeping it as it is so that it can continue being a teaching tool for less experienced users but there needs to be some more options to make it a better and more well rounded experience. For me personally, I don't think you should be required to ever play practice or penalized for not wanting to do so.This is something I'd like to see removed and that's restricting development to certain position groups every week. If that means that you have to reduce the amount of XP given on a per week basis then that's fine but I don't like that each week it can only be certain units and the rest of your team gets no credit for practicing. It should just be offense and defense and everyone should be eligible for some sort of gain. You can still use the current system to an extent where maybe those position groups are "emphasis groups" and get potentially a slight boost for everyone in that unit but everybody practices and that should be rewarded as such. And having the emphasis groups could be a nice way of expanding the "focus players" that it's more of team oriented focus rather than individual.I do like the idea of players earning medals in practice. It emulates and can accurately depict a player having a good or bad week of practice which definitely is a good thing. However their implementation is quite basic and shallow. You earn a gold and the whole unit earns a gold. You earn a bronze, the whole unit earns a bronze. I'd like to see medals distributed individually to players rather than just allowing for one all encompassing medal for the unit. Now, this obviously presents a problem for those that do play practice and feel if they earn a gold, everyone should earn a gold and I'm not entirely sure how that can be handled. The idea I'd propose is having two options for practice (Manual & Auto), similar to progressing players where if you're on Manual you play practice and your players get the medal they get and then there's Auto where you can sim practice and each player gets a random medal largely based on a combination of morale, DEV trait, coaching staff, etc.Definitely not a fan of how these worked in M17 but I think they can still have a place in CFM and add an interesting dynamic to matchups and even presentation. So under the system I've laid out, rather than having specific position groups (LB's, QB's, etc.) getting those boosts, it'd be expanded to specific players. So a player that earns gold will receive a very slight ratings boost (for the whole game, not just certain concepts) for that given week but if you only earn a bronze then it is considered a bad week of practice and those players see a slight reduction in certain attributes. Maybe a CB loses a couple points in MCV or PRC for the week due to a poor week at practice. Maybe an OL receives a couple point boost in RBK and PBK for the next weeks game because of a good week of practice. It would change week-to-week adding a new dynamic to certain matchups like a WR-CB matchup where both players had a great week of practice or maybe a T-EDGE match-up where a one had a bad week and the other a good. This also presents a great opportunity for commentary lines mentioning how coaches raved about his week at practice or how a player struggled through the week.The idea here is that based on a players morale they will progress differently based on their morale. The main goal being an increased emphasis put on maintaining a happier and more cohesive roster. How this would work would be that tied to each players DEV trait would also be a happiness modifier. For example, there'd essentially be Superstar-Happy, Superstar-Neutral, Superstar-Unhappy instead of just Superstar or any other DEV level. A happy player would receive a slight boost in the amount of XP earned while neutral would be normal and an unhappy would result in a slight reduction in the amount of XP earned. So hypothetically, a happy player with Quick DEV could be actually progress better than an unhappy player with SS DEV.This could be taken a step further where you have five tiers of Very Happy, Happy, Neutral, Unhappy, and Very Unhappy but I think the main goal is still accomplished with just the three tiers. Something like this puts an emphasis on keeping players happy and maintaining that happiness to get the most out of them. Knowing that offering a contract or making a transaction could have a drastic impact on both a players (or multiple players) happiness or ability to progress adds an interesting dynamic to making every roster move.Having injuries available in practice would be nice. Adds a bit more risk/reward in a couple of different facets. On one hand you risk any player at anytime getting injured which is something we see every year (hey Dante Fowler and Teddy Bridgewater). Having that risk of a player getting injured during practice and missing that weeks game or (far less likely) the season is something that adds some dynamism while placing a greater emphasis and priority on roster management as well. And secondly, it could propose a new "big decision" where you're faced with the proposition of practicing an injured player and risking further injury or the chance he misses the upcoming game or sitting him and sacrificing development time for health while a player lower on the depth chart gets their reps.This is an additional idea I had for practice but it is quite a bit more restricting although, in my mind, it makes a bit more sense. This would be something that would be better paired with the 'Strict' XP allocation setting that I mentioned and how it would work is just like it sounds -- progress what you practice. The idea here is that whatever you practice dictates what you earn towards progression. Practicing Cover 3? Your DB's earn XP towards ZCV and PRC while DL earn XP towards FMV and PMV, etc. Practicing Read Option? BCV and AWR for the RB, RBK for WR, OL, TE. This is something that could definitely fit into the scope of what is already there with practicing concepts and even more so if the amount of available practice scenarios was expanded. Obvious this is a bit more restricting as you wouldn't be able to practice Cover 3 or anything else to boost a players SPD or other physical attributes but I also feel as though it would be more strategic.To add to that, I mentioned that this is something that would work better paired with the strict XP allocation that I mentioned but it is also something that could work in itself as an automated progression system. Because what you practiced would allocate XP to specific attributes, there would be no need for the user to have to upgrade their players. once a player reached the amount of XP available it would automatically upgrade because the XP earned there wouldn't be allowed to be spent anywhere else. Additionally, if players had something like a career cap on certain attributes that essentially dictated their peak potential, it would add another element of strategy into what you're practicing especially if paired with masked ratings.Just as a quick (and likely poor) example, let's say you draft two CB's that both have 75 for MCV. Player A has slow DEV with a MCV cap of 85 while Player B has normal and a MCV cap of 95. You pump a ton of practice hours into MCV and both players start going up and after a couple seasons Player A has reached his 85 MCV cap while Player B has progressed a bit quicker and is up to 88. Now as you continue to practice MCV, Player B still has the possibility of going up because his cap hasn't been reached. However for Player A his rating is stuck at 85 until he begins to regress but the rating shown still acts as if his cap is 99 and his attributes are continuing to grow until he starts to regress. So if you continued to practice MCV, at the end of the season maybe Player B is a 93 and it is a "true" 93 because he hasn't reached his peak yet while Player A might display as an 88 now because of the time put in but on the surface he's really still that 85. And as he regresses his "true" rating and his perceived rating might always be slightly different.Obviously this isn't a fully fleshed idea but just something I'd been thinking about and wanted to add. There's a lot of different ways you could take it but it's not nearly as "fun" or user friendly as the other options obviously.This could be something to add a little bit of uniqueness to players with Superstar DEV and that's something like Platinum Medals available to them for Gameplanning. They'd be more rare but would give a player a chance at earning a bit more than usual in a given week. You could have this tied into something like all the necessary factors being in line with each other where a player is Superstar DEV, has a good coach, is healthy, etc. Just an idea to throw an added element into the fire.The GamePlan function is one of the most underutilized features in all of Madden. It's original premise was to reduce play time by giving the user the ability to have a "coordinator" call plays for them based on the scenario. This turned out to not have much of an impact but the implementation ended up giving us access and control over one thing that had always been more or less a mystery and that's CPU playcalling. Now when it comes to a User v. CPU franchise this is HUGE. Simply taking the tools that are already present and modifying the existing playbooks would make teams playcalling miles better and more exciting than it currently is but the issue comes with playing over several seasons this could become stale and repetitive. I'm aiming to take the current GamePlan function a step further so that as you play more seasons you get a real sense of teams adapting and changing with their coaches and players.If you're not familiar how GamePlan works it's essentially a star system for plays in a given scenario (1st & 10, 3rd & long, etc.) that determines which plays are called. The higher the star rating, the greater the chance that play is called in a given scenario. Most teams playbooks consist of about 20 plays per scenario and for the most part most plays are rated at two and a half out of five stars. The first issue is that the playbooks don't take nearly enough of their playbook into consideration in these scenarios. You'll see plays like Curl Flats, Slants, Corner Strike, and Four Verticals prominent in just about every teams playbooks taking up multiple spots in multiple scenarios which plays a part in teams playing so similar. So the first step to this is to make sure each team is utilizing as much of their playbook as possible for each given scenario when possible. Now, that doesn't mean making all of their running plays available in 3rd & long scenarios, it just means applying more of the playbook to scenarios where those plays fit in so as to further diversify playcalling.Now to the dynamic part. The idea I have is attaching star boosts/reductions to certain plays/concepts within a teams playbook based on player ratings, coach tendencies, and team performance.

A few examples:

A QB with a high great passing intangibles bumps all passes in the playbook a half/full star, alternatively a lower overall QB lowers pass plays

A QB with high SPD raises read options and QB runs while a pocket QB largely eliminates those from being called

A QB with low THP lowers stars on deep passes and plays with more routes deep down the field

A HB with a high OVR raises all run plays, a HB with high TRK raises all inside runs, a HB with high SPD raises all outside runs, a HB with high catch raises screens and plays where the HB has receiving responsibility



Now, obviously player attributes shouldn't be the lone factor in determining how a team calls their plays. Every coach/coordinator has their own preference and style when it comes to playcalling as well so that should also play a role in how this works. So apply the same logic as you would with the player ratings for coaches (and coordinators but more on that later). Instead of having star boosts based on ratings, essentially create a philosophy or personality trait for each coach where each concept is either neutral, boosted, or reduced. So a coach like Mike Martz would have traits that call for a boost in passing plays while a coach that loves to pound the rock would have boosts for running plays. These would work together with the player ratings to create a unique star system for every team that would adapt and change over time and make teams truly feel unique as you progressed through a CFM. Another big part of this would be the ability to create unique fictional personalities that enter your CFM and provide something new and exciting to the franchise.



And for the last part of this, team performance and personnel. This is something that would more appopriately tied to the Gameplanning/Game Prep side of things but I'll talk about it here and how this is where things could become really interesting. What I'd do is similar to what is set up now except maybe expand it to two or three concepts on offense and defense and have those based on an opposing teams tendencies as well as strengths and weaknesses. What would factor in this is ratings as well as team performance. So let's say your team is ranked in the low-20's against the run and you've been getting gashed up the middle or you have poor to average DT's. I'd like to see the CPU prioritize inside runs and runs in general in their gameplan to attack your weakness. The big change I would make to Gameplanning is that instead of having the attribute boost be based on this, I'd follow the format of star increases and apply that to inside runs in this scenario so that they're called more against you so you really get a sense that teams are trying to attack your weaknesses. Alternatively, each week you'd be faced with the decision to either try and spend more time focusing on trying to attack the other teams weaknesses and strengths or spending time trying to compensate for your own weaknesses. I want there to really be a sense of teams attacking your weaknesses and playing to their strengths and having that chess match feeling while prepping and playing.



Team Chemistry/Player Morale







This is something that would essentially replace Confidence. I haven't been much a fan of Confidence and the issues with Drive Goals pretty much sealed its fate for me. I don't like the attribute boosts or reductions as it is and especially so when they're predominantly based on stuff like wins and goals. So what I'd do is replace it with a Player Morale system similar to The Show which directly correlates to overall Team Chemistry. Each player's happiness could vary from very unhappy, unhappy, neutral, happy, and very happy. It would be based on a number of factors including contract status, player role, playing time, production, and team record. It could play a role in contract negotiations, performance on the field and during practice, as well as potentially affecting other players and bringing team morale down if he is very unhappy.



Big Decisions - Regular Season



Injuries







This is the other big one when it comes to week-to-week type things. I'm glad they finally did something about injuries in M17 but I'm not exactly fond of how they did it. Giving XP boosts for opting to start backups and the static nature of how injuries are handled doesn't make much sense to me and isn't something I'm a fan of. A few things here:



More Injury Variety



More sprains, strains, bruises, contusions and just overall more variety. Injuries like broken collarbones are far too common and I don't feel as if there as many of those nagging and intermediate injuries as there should be. I also feel like there should be a good number of injuries available to each body part (hands, shoulders, feet, etc.) to go along with the expanded injury ratings that I'll talk about later.



Wear-and-Tear/Season Stamina Effect



This is one of the biggest things that I think would help convey a feeling of progressing through a season although maybe in a less noticeable fashion. Think something similar to Fight Night, UFC or MVP Baseball. The idea being that each player has a Season Stamina that is separate but also coincides with game stamina. The goal is to create something that represents the wear and tear of an NFL season while providing an effect on gameplay based on what happens over the course of each game and throughout the season.



I'll try to describe this as simple as I can using an RB as an example. Week One and your RB starts at 100% and receives 40 carries in the first game. After the game his season stamina falls to something in like the 60's or 70's and starts to regenerate based on how many days before the teams next game. By the time you reach the game he should be back to around the high 90's where as if he only had 20 or so carries or didn't take many hits he'd likely make it back to 100%. Over the course of the season it becomes harder to get back to that 100% threshold and the max that a player can get back to can begin to drop. The affect this would have is that the further the player falls in Season Stamina, the more it could start to affect certain attributes. So let's say you're going into the postseason with your workhorse running back and he's only at 80-85% maybe that takes a couple points off his injury and stamina rating so he fatigues quicker in-game and is at a little bit higher of an injury risk. The lower you go the more attributes that become affected and physical attributes start to become minorly affected as well. Also to clarify, this wouldn't be something that would mean if your player was at 85% that he would have 85% stamina when you started the game. He would have 100% per normal but he may fatigue faster than normal if the situation calls for it. This is also something that could have a great affect on older players where as they age their recovery period takes longer and they begin to wear down faster which can create a lot of interesting roster dynamics.



This would be something that would emulate the grind of an NFL season as well as helping represent things like short weeks for Thursday night games and/or teams fresh off of a bye. It would also present the user with roster management decisions when it comes to maybe resting players for the playoffs or in blowouts. For those that don't want to have to deal with or manage around this, put in an On/Off "Fatigue Effect" option to disable it.



Expanded Injury Ratings



One, all-encompasing injury rating is extremely antiquated and doesn't do a good job of giving players any sort of identity when it comes to their injury profile. This would look to change that. I really like what 2K does with their injury system and I think it's something that would carry over well to Madden. Assign a Injury/Durability rating to each major body part like the head, arms, knees, feet, and back. You could get a bit more intricate and have INJ ratings for both left and right sides but I don't think that would be necessary. These ratings would determine how likely a player would be to injure that part of their body. In addition, certain injuries would drop the durability rating for that body part and repeated injuries would increase those effects (i.e. repeated torn ACL's). This also adds an interesting element to scouting players with questionable medical grades.



Injury Timeline



This is the big one for me and kind of goes along with Injury Variety. Like I said before, I like that they did something with injuries but I'm not a fan of how they've done it. I don't like the idea that it's always 2 weeks before a player is scheduled to be back that you have the option to play him. This isn't dynamic or realistic and takes nearly all of intrigue away from dealing with injuries. Here's what I would propose as an injury timeline: I think you probably get the gist. The main idea is to giving teams the ability to adapt their playcalling on the fly to fit their rosters strengths and weaknesses rather than simply relying on their base playbook. If a team like Pittsburgh loses Big Ben they shouldn't be running the same air it out offense with Landry Jones or any other scrub QB. If a team like Carolina loses Cam Newton they shouldn't be running QB Powers with someone like Derek Anderson. This could be something that has a hugely positive effect on how teams play and really give you the feeling that the teams you're playing are alive and always evolving and adapting to injuries and the moves they make in the draft and free agency.Now, obviously player attributes shouldn't be the lone factor in determining how a team calls their plays. Every coach/coordinator has their own preference and style when it comes to playcalling as well so that should also play a role in how this works. So apply the same logic as you would with the player ratings for coaches (and coordinators but more on that later). Instead of having star boosts based on ratings, essentially create a philosophy or personality trait for each coach where each concept is either neutral, boosted, or reduced. So a coach like Mike Martz would have traits that call for a boost in passing plays while a coach that loves to pound the rock would have boosts for running plays. These would work together with the player ratings to create a unique star system for every team that would adapt and change over time and make teams truly feel unique as you progressed through a CFM. Another big part of this would be the ability to create unique fictional personalities that enter your CFM and provide something new and exciting to the franchise.And for the last part of this, team performance and personnel. This is something that would more appopriately tied to the Gameplanning/Game Prep side of things but I'll talk about it here and how this is where things could become really interesting. What I'd do is similar to what is set up now except maybe expand it to two or three concepts on offense and defense and have those based on an opposing teams tendencies as well as strengths and weaknesses. What would factor in this is ratings as well as team performance. So let's say your team is ranked in the low-20's against the run and you've been getting gashed up the middle or you have poor to average DT's. I'd like to see the CPU prioritize inside runs and runs in general in their gameplan to attack your weakness. The big change I would make to Gameplanning is that instead of having the attribute boost be based on this, I'd follow the format of star increases and apply that to inside runs in this scenario so that they're called more against you so you really get a sense that teams are trying to attack your weaknesses. Alternatively, each week you'd be faced with the decision to either try and spend more time focusing on trying to attack the other teams weaknesses and strengths or spending time trying to compensate for your own weaknesses. I want there to really be a sense of teams attacking your weaknesses and playing to their strengths and having that chess match feeling while prepping and playing.This is something that would essentially replace Confidence. I haven't been much a fan of Confidence and the issues with Drive Goals pretty much sealed its fate for me. I don't like the attribute boosts or reductions as it is and especially so when they're predominantly based on stuff like wins and goals. So what I'd do is replace it with a Player Morale system similar to The Show which directly correlates to overall Team Chemistry. Each player's happiness could vary from very unhappy, unhappy, neutral, happy, and very happy. It would be based on a number of factors including contract status, player role, playing time, production, and team record. It could play a role in contract negotiations, performance on the field and during practice, as well as potentially affecting other players and bringing team morale down if he is very unhappy.This is the other big one when it comes to week-to-week type things. I'm glad they finally did something about injuries in M17 but I'm not exactly fond of how they did it. Giving XP boosts for opting to start backups and the static nature of how injuries are handled doesn't make much sense to me and isn't something I'm a fan of. A few things here:More sprains, strains, bruises, contusions and just overall more variety. Injuries like broken collarbones are far too common and I don't feel as if there as many of those nagging and intermediate injuries as there should be. I also feel like there should be a good number of injuries available to each body part (hands, shoulders, feet, etc.) to go along with the expanded injury ratings that I'll talk about later.This is one of the biggest things that I think would help convey a feeling of progressing through a season although maybe in a less noticeable fashion. Think something similar to Fight Night, UFC or MVP Baseball. The idea being that each player has a Season Stamina that is separate but also coincides with game stamina. The goal is to create something that represents the wear and tear of an NFL season while providing an effect on gameplay based on what happens over the course of each game and throughout the season.I'll try to describe this as simple as I can using an RB as an example. Week One and your RB starts at 100% and receives 40 carries in the first game. After the game his season stamina falls to something in like the 60's or 70's and starts to regenerate based on how many days before the teams next game. By the time you reach the game he should be back to around the high 90's where as if he only had 20 or so carries or didn't take many hits he'd likely make it back to 100%. Over the course of the season it becomes harder to get back to that 100% threshold and the max that a player can get back to can begin to drop. The affect this would have is that the further the player falls in Season Stamina, the more it could start to affect certain attributes. So let's say you're going into the postseason with your workhorse running back and he's only at 80-85% maybe that takes a couple points off his injury and stamina rating so he fatigues quicker in-game and is at a little bit higher of an injury risk. The lower you go the more attributes that become affected and physical attributes start to become minorly affected as well. Also to clarify, this wouldn't be something that would mean if your player was at 85% that he would have 85% stamina when you started the game. He would have 100% per normal but he may fatigue faster than normal if the situation calls for it. This is also something that could have a great affect on older players where as they age their recovery period takes longer and they begin to wear down faster which can create a lot of interesting roster dynamics.This would be something that would emulate the grind of an NFL season as well as helping represent things like short weeks for Thursday night games and/or teams fresh off of a bye. It would also present the user with roster management decisions when it comes to maybe resting players for the playoffs or in blowouts. For those that don't want to have to deal with or manage around this, put in an On/Off "Fatigue Effect" option to disable it.One, all-encompasing injury rating is extremely antiquated and doesn't do a good job of giving players any sort of identity when it comes to their injury profile. This would look to change that. I really like what 2K does with their injury system and I think it's something that would carry over well to Madden. Assign a Injury/Durability rating to each major body part like the head, arms, knees, feet, and back. You could get a bit more intricate and have INJ ratings for both left and right sides but I don't think that would be necessary. These ratings would determine how likely a player would be to injure that part of their body. In addition, certain injuries would drop the durability rating for that body part and repeated injuries would increase those effects (i.e. repeated torn ACL's). This also adds an interesting element to scouting players with questionable medical grades.This is the big one for me and kind of goes along with Injury Variety. Like I said before, I like that they did something with injuries but I'm not a fan of how they've done it. I don't like the idea that it's always 2 weeks before a player is scheduled to be back that you have the option to play him. This isn't dynamic or realistic and takes nearly all of intrigue away from dealing with injuries. Here's what I would propose as an injury timeline: Player is Injured - A player goes down or comes off the field and you're made aware as you see him leaving the game.



- A player goes down or comes off the field and you're made aware as you see him leaving the game. Initial Diagnosis - Shortly after the player has left the game (also depends on the severity of the injury, the m