Day of Errands

Slow day for Madden and Head Coach stuff. I have an eye doctor appt at 11 and then have to go to a landscaping company to get gravel delivered for our walkway. We've been in our new build for a little more than two years now and we're still walking up to the front door via square stones covered in weeds. I like the country life but this is ridiculous.

Yesterday was a day of HC so this evening I'm going to try to get back into Madden and hopefully it'll continue to get better as my previous day with the game was a heck of a lot more fun than the first few.

That said, I wanted to make sure everyone was aware of the great job the Head Coach team is doing talking with the unclean masses. This is such a huge part of customer service that often times gets overlooked by large publishing houses. Getting in the trenches, answering questions, is really important even for a big dog company like EA. I dunno what's going on with them but there has been a much greater presence from the actual designers in forums of late and I for one hope that trend continues.

This is what I mean. This is lead designer Josh Looman responding to what I said about some of the quirks in Head Coach 2009 over on OS.

I really appreciate your honesty, Bill. As I mentioned before, there will obviously be some issues but I'm glad that the positives outweigh the negatives for you. I'm also pretty excited that you haven't even seen 90% of the cool stuff we added into the game. I can't wait until you get a little bit further.

The weather thing is weird. It uses this system that maps out the average temp, precipitation and highs and lows for the city each week and then randomly picks from a range. It's usually accurate but I'm still damned if I don't see it snowing in Houston once a year. ugh.

As for the throwing deep stuff, they should go into attack mode at the end of the game and use plays designed to go down field. That may be an issue with teams that don't go vertical a lot. I know we built a lot of vertical routes into the Browns playbook, but I don't think there were a ton in the Cowboys playbook.

The lack of an audibles system was a design mistake that I take full responsibility for. We had an idea early on to let your captains call audibles but when we prototyped it, Peyton Manning would audible into another play every down it seemed so we took that out. The hurry up issue was always a sore point that we never really figured out how to handle well. That frustrates me to no end.

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I'm going to withhold the cliches of pigs flying and Hell freezing, but I find comments like that shockingly refreshing.