Open letter to EA

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Luvtotha9s, the premier NCAA Roster maker for PS3 tweeted this out yesterday, and then followed it up by posting it on his roster forum. The Utopia website has tried posting this in other venues only to be banned and have their posts deleted.

It's not without holes in its logic, but overall, they do raise a lot of the same sentiments that get brushed over by EA as they try to cover their broken game. And yes, at this point, NCAA Football is broken and Madden teeters on the edge of becoming broken if they rest on their laurels much longer. What do you think?

Great read, even though I haven't bought NCAA for about 4 years probably. So I can't comment on the bugs and problems specifically, but given what I've read elsewhere I can assume the issues are legitimate and not fiction.

I have a very strong love/hate relationship with EA. My problem is the exclusive rights they have. I totally understand why they would do it, but I just wish it was somehow illegal or didn't happen. I'd probably still buy Madden over a 2K sports game, but competition in any business produces the best products. It's basic business. Hell, look at other video games. Look at Call Of Duty and Battlefield battling and both games continue to be great.

My feeling is that EA purposely puts out games with mistakes and issues knowing that their sales probably won't decrease. THEY DON'T WANT TO MAKE A PERFECT GAME. For awhile I would wonder how certain problems could exist...surely they have tested the game a million times before release...but then I realized that they will need a selling point for the next season's game. And if they create a perfect game, then next year's version becomes kinda worthless. Their customers will be happy, but they'll lose a lot of money in sales, which is really what this is all about.

With Madden, I just hate how there is seemingly no set direction for the game to go in. Like last year's game was terrible in my opinion, and it was obviously directed towards casual football fans, families, and children. C'mon, you could literally throw drag routes and swing passes EVERY play and be close to unstoppable. Remember that dumbed down version of Madden where you only needed to hit like one button to do everything?? All the commercials with kids and their dads, it was obvious what they were marketing towards. They basically dumbed it down 15 notches. Then this year it's like the complete opposite. It's like...do they have a direction they are going in or every year do they just drunkenly throw darts at a dartboard to decide the demographic their game is for??

The way EA selects their community or whatever reminds me of a government. Like a corrupt government who pushes propoganda to their people and even though the smart ones understand what's going on, there's 10X as many dumbasses who don't get it. Think Nazi Germany lol... I really do think we all forget it's completely business. Of course they aren't going to let anyone who doesn't dickride EA into their little clique. All they really care about is whether or not we buy their product every year, and we all do. Because the only alternative is playing no sports game for the year.

All that ranting aside, I absolutely love Madden 12's gameplay. I haven't liked gameplay in Madden this much since the ps2 days, but that was mainly because I was unstoppable (when they had QB vision), not because of the realistic gameplay. I don't even know what MUT is or any of the other features. All I care about is online franchises, and thank God for Derek Adams and League Manager. EA continues to not give a shit about cohesiveness with their online play so I'm glad someone does.

/rant

The sad thing is, we may not be able to even have an NCAA 12 Online Dynasty this year. The game is broken that badly that any use of the No-Huddle, a prevalent part of NCAA football means you can't pick a specific play or a different formation. There's instances of CPU teams breaking the max schedule to play 14 games and starting the season with in-conference games. The work to make a tackling engine and limit "suction" destroyed the audio commentary, which is why Madden sounds so awful and broken this year.

Part of EA's marketing features this year was a new Online Franchise that they scrapped and didn't tell anybody until after the pre-orders had been announced. Why share the bad news until after you've secured some funds. Another broken marketing feature was custom playbooks. There was not a single word that they didn't work online until release day. Once you tear open that package...no more refund for you because of the piracy fear that you copied the disc before trying to return it. That willingness to not disclose pertinent information about your product is shady and irrehensible. I'm one of the most passionate Madden guys out there as can be seen by my loserdom visiting this site 10 times a day. But I'm old enough that I don't need to buy the game anymore. I could easily get by without video games and survive just fine keeping busy with real sports, volunteerism, and coaching. I'll be moving within a couple of weeks, and like last year, I really didn't have the urge to play the game offline. The only thing keeping me back when my internet was set up was the community. Something that can be fulfilled by a shooter like Battlefield. As great as you guys are, if the games are severely broken, or embellished on what they're offering, I will not be spending my money on it.