Connected Careers Questions

SantryRed

Hi lads.

Game drops on season ticket today at 12 and my first thing I'll be looking at is the connected careers mode that we'll be playing.

Does anyone have any questions about the mode that they'd like answered? If so, post them up and I'll get them answered from about 2 onwards.

linebacker52

ben im going to be getting it today as well if you need a hand with anything let me know

Raoul

linebacker52 wrote: »

ben im going to be getting it today as well if you need a hand with anything let me know

Not fair! All that extra practice you will be getting :mad:

helimachoptor

Raoul wrote: »

Not fair! All that extra practice you will be getting :mad:

Ah its ok.. he's going to have a $hit team !

linebacker52

was the final draft order ever posted up

Paully D

linebacker52 wrote: »

was the final draft order ever posted up

This is it I think, from Dave's mock draft:

helimachoptor

McG isnt coming back unfortunately, I need a new rival in the AFC South!
Challengers welcome (except Ben and berty)!

helimachoptor

My only question on this, what happens if you have 20 hours a week to practice, you are going to get an massive advantage on someone who can only play their franchise game and maybe 1 or 2 hours of practice each week?

BigBadRob83

Paully D wrote: »

This is it I think, from Dave's mock draft:

Guess I'm BigBadDave83 now

helimachoptor

helimachoptor wrote: »

My only question on this, what happens if you have 20 hours a week to practice, you are going to get an massive advantage on someone who can only play their franchise game and maybe 1 or 2 hours of practice each week?

Not a lot can be done snout that it will even out in season 2 anyway

Can we start setting a date for the first draft pick so

Paully D

BigBadRob83 wrote: »

Guess I'm BigBadDave83 now

Sorry Rob, got completely mixed up there :pac:

Paully D

helimachoptor wrote: »

My only question on this, what happens if you have 20 hours a week to practice, you are going to get an massive advantage on someone who can only play their franchise game and maybe 1 or 2 hours of practice each week?

Not at all mate. Certainly not a big advantage, it's a very, very slight advantage which almost isn't even worth talking about.

The most you can get from doing the hardest practice challenge (which you have to come back from 30 points or something like that with a quarter left) is around 1250 XP. That's about one tenth of what it costs to get any sort of advantage worth talking about each week and you can only do that practice challenge once a week.

That's what I understand from looking and videos and reading etc. I guess you could easily not practice at all each week and it wouldn't make a difference really.

SantryRed

Quick run through lads.


Connected Careers Review
Start Career
• Begin by picking your coach; Options: Own Coach/Current/Legend
• Choose your name, look, and offensive and defensive playbooks
• Things which need to be decided: Player Progression Frequency, Coach Firings, Pre Existing Injuries, Trade Deadline, Fill Roster, Re-Sign Players, Progress Players, Sign Offseason Free Agents,
• Can connect Twitter account to broadcast all your league’s tweets
• Maddencareer.com (trade, sign players, operate the draft)
• Sliders can now be put on the CPU
• Can put players on autopilot which makes CPU do things for them


Pre Season
• 4 Advances
• Cut Days, can delegate and leave CPU to make cuts, gives you information on how much salary cap will reduce by and bonus hits if player is cut
• Can only do one practice session a week, earns you XP
• Any players put up on the trade block will appear on your checklist, i.e. things to look at before the week is advanced.

Regular Season
• 17 Advances
• Practice still available in Regular Season
• Given 2000 Scouting Points a week to scout players for the upcoming draft, Points carry over to next week if you don’t use them.
• Throughout season, players who want their contracts negotiated come up in the checklist section
• Given weekly/season goals to do in your matches which if passed will earn you XP to spend on upgrading your team
• Constant draft stories about upcoming players appear in the news center area
• AFC/NFC Offensive/Defensive players of the week appear on newsfeed but can’t find them in any other section detailing how a player played

Post Season
• 5 advances
• Wildcard, Divisional, Conference, Pro Bowl(can’t play it), Superbowl
• No scouting can be done during post season until Superbowl week
• Scout players using XP, first spend on getting a grade on certain thing, can spend more XP for exact rating in area

Off Season
• 7 Advances (1st stage is just to resign your own players) (Stages 2 and 4 are for signing free agents) (Stage 3 and 5 just skip over) (Stage 7 is for scouting and trading) (1 after is just shows rookie signings and cap hit)
• Can delegate CPU to deal with Re Signings
• Get immediate response if one of your players rejects contract
• Can’t backload a contract with salary, has a scale to which it increases per year, but can offer bonus of any amount.
• Tells you what teams have made offers on the free agents available,
• Given 3000 scouting points per week during off season which accumulate

Draft
• 2 minutes per pick, doesn’t seem to be a way to change times
• Draft board automatically made by players that you have scouted.
• Options to advance to next pick, next user pick, end of round, end of draft
• Every player has a predicted round and predicted pick.
• Rookies automatically signed

Raoul

Ezekiel Wide Manger wrote: »

Not a lot can be done snout that it will even out in season 2 anyway

Can we start setting a date for the first draft pick so

Most likely it will be around Monday the 10th of Sept. I think we should go with Santrys idea of pmming a full list of 32 picks to him or me if he is too busy. Means that there can be no picking teams based on an easy division or anything like that. Its a lot of hassle but its only a once off and won't take too long.

SantryRed

Could you play NFL Fantasy Football through Madden last year? You can this year

Raoul

SantryRed wrote: »

Could you play NFL Fantasy Football through Madden last year? You can this year

What exactly does that mean? Just the same as the site cept on your xbox?

SantryRed

Raoul wrote: »

What exactly does that mean? Just the same as the site cept on your xbox?

Pretty much, don't think you can do the draft on it but all other options are there. Pretty cool.

BigBadRob83

Raoul wrote: »

Most likely it will be around Monday the 10th of Sept. I think we should go with Santrys idea of pmming a full list of 32 picks to him or me if he is too busy. Means that there can be no picking teams based on an easy division or anything like that. Its a lot of hassle but its only a once off and won't take too long.

Think this came up before. Santry could do first 10 picks or so and then I can take over once my pick is done so he doesn't know everyone's team before he's drafting.

Instead of listing all your teams in preferential order, could do it like:
- 1st pick only needs to list one team, 2nd pick two etc.
- After few picks whoever is running it could PM the next guy with a list of all the available teams & add in 2/3 random teams that have already been drafted (to keep that little bit of mystery).
- That person then has to send over their top 4 teams and they get whichever is the highest one available.
- If guys have their own list of preferred teams done in advance then it should go pretty quickly


Santry - Great stuff on detailing the Connected Careers.
With all those options to decide depending on how people feel we could leave it up to the commissioners to pick the settings for the league, or could do a poll similar to the one I did for the fantasy league where we can vote on each item.
If we went with poll, could put it up when the game is released and leave it open until the draft so everyone has time to get there heads around it. And then we go with whatever majority decides for each issue.

SantryRed

At the moment I think we should go with the following:

Player Progression Frequency: Weekly
Coach Firings: Off
Pre Existing Injuries: Off
Trade Deadline: Week 9
Fill Roster: CPU
Re-Sign Players: Human
Progress Players: Human
Sign Offseason: Human
Free Agents: Human

Pudsy33

I think pre existing injuries should be on, adds another level of realism.

SantryRed

Pudsy33 wrote: »

I think pre existing injuries should be on, adds another level of realism.

But the fact we're playing from Pre Season, those pre existing injuries wouldn't be there, unless they happened during off season.

adrian522

I'd turn off pre-existing injuries.

I'd set the trade deadline to week 6.

I'm not a huge fan of the proposal for the draft if i'm honest.

Everyone has to put 32 teams in order no matter where they are drafting? It seems a bit silly.

I don't see the issue with knowing who might be in your division. After all the best players are picking last so you won't be able to avoid them anyway.

It's also much better craic if we get a bit of chat going on the draft and who has drafted what team.

Just my 2 cents.

Also if we are drafting around September 10th, how long will we give for the draft, and when do we want to kick off the league, I'd be hoping we'd be into the regular season by September 17th

Pudsy33

SantryRed wrote: »

Pudsy33 wrote: »

I think pre existing injuries should be on, adds another level of realism.

But the fact we're playing from Pre Season, those pre existing injuries wouldn't be there, unless they happened during off season.

Fair point

BigBadRob83

SantryRed wrote: »

At the moment I think we should go with the following:

Player Progression Frequency: Weekly
Coach Firings: Off
Pre Existing Injuries: Off
Trade Deadline: Week 9
Fill Roster: CPU
Re-Sign Players: Human
Progress Players: Human
Sign Offseason: Human
Free Agents: Human

Would agree with all that Santry, what's the story with fill roster? Is that if you don't have 53 players then the CPU will sign Free Agents to fill it out for you?

Paully D

SantryRed wrote: »

At the moment I think we should go with the following:

Player Progression Frequency: Weekly
Coach Firings: Off
Pre Existing Injuries: Off
Trade Deadline: Week 9
Fill Roster: CPU
Re-Sign Players: Human
Progress Players: Human
Sign Offseason: Human
Free Agents: Human

Week 6 for the trade deadline surely? If we're trying to keep it as realistic as possible.

Pudsy33

Paully D wrote: »

Week 6 for the trade deadline surely? If we're trying to keep it as realistic as possible.

actually yeah, do that

SantryRed

Paully D wrote: »

Week 6 for the trade deadline surely? If we're trying to keep it as realistic as possible.

Did it not get moved to week 9 or something? It's down as week 9 in the game

Paully D

SantryRed wrote: »

Did it not get moved to week 9 or something? It's down as week 9 in the game

Think they're having an argument about it but nothing seems to be sorted. In any case I think it was to be moved to week 8.

EDIT - Found the article here:

http://www.nfl.com/news/story/0ap1000000053130/article/nfl-nflpa-have-yet-to-agree-on-new-trade-deadline-ir-rules

In any case mate it seems we agree it should follow the proper trade deadline, whatever it turns out to be.

Paully D

When the EA Sports connected careers website gets up and running it will be a great addition, if it's anything like the NCAA one, which is brilliant:

http://www.easports.com/madden-nfl/connected-careers/

helimachoptor

Paully D wrote: »

When the EA Sports connected careers website gets up and running it will be a great addition, if it's anything like the NCAA one, which is brilliant:

http://www.easports.com/madden-nfl/connected-careers/

What can you do with it Paully?

Mikeyt086

Anyone else having a horrible time with Game Face? I'm beginning to think it doesn't work well with Irish skin, as both player and coach are so white that no features are identifiable other than the eyes.

davetherave

Mikeyt086 wrote: »

Anyone else having a horrible time with Game Face? I'm beginning to think it doesn't work well with Irish skin, as both player and coach are so white that no features are identifiable other than the eyes.

Getting a 502 proxy error when I go onto this. Maybe EASports doesn't want to see my face :pac:

Paully D

helimachoptor wrote: »

What can you do with it Paully?

You can do all your scouting, trading, progressions, sign free agents, depth chart, view stats, etc. Basically it's a much more detailed version of the League Manager site which is done directly by EA Sports. Very handy if you can't spare the time to get on the Xbox to do all of the above.

helimachoptor

Paully D wrote: »

You can do all your scouting, trading, progressions, sign free agents, depth chart, view stats, etc. Basically it's a much more detailed version of the League Manager site which is done directly by EA Sports. Very handy if you can't spare the time to get on the Xbox to do all of the above.

Super.. hopefully with none of the LM mess ups!

Raoul

Mikeyt086 wrote: »

Anyone else having a horrible time with Game Face? I'm beginning to think it doesn't work well with Irish skin, as both player and coach are so white that no features are identifiable other than the eyes.

I did it for Fifa last year. I did not look pretty on it ha

Justin10

Raoul wrote: »

I did it for Fifa last year. I did not look pretty on it ha

Does that mean gameface is extremely realistic?

Raoul

Rochey18 wrote: »

Does that mean gameface is extremely realistic?

Well....we all know who isn't joining the franchise next season!

Ha, nah i am actually even better looking than freddie ljungberg and ryan reynolds put together. So thats how bad game face is.

I will try it again and see if it is any better this year.

Mikeyt086

Just on the Game Face, I uploaded it to the site and downloaded it in game, they give you a preview similar to the pictures the real pro's have beside their name on things like the depth chart and rosters, and it looked great. Exactly what I would look like if I was an NFL player :pac: But when they apply it to a pro or a coach it's bright white and looks terrible. Very annoying.

As for the game itself, I'm really enjoying it. Been playing the season ticket version (mainly got that for FIFA but it's certainly nice for Madden too) all day and I'm doing an offline career as coach of the Jags. My D is great, #1 in the league, and MJD is doing what he does getting 100+ yards and all my TD's, but my god the passing game is awful. I signed Chad Johnson from free agency, and himself, Justin Blackmon and Laurent Robinson make up a decent receiving core, but my QB options of Chad Henne and Blaine Gabbert leave a lot to be desired. If I get the Jags like I plan in the Boards franchise, I'll have to look for a trade as they just aren't good enough.

Ronaldinho

Quick question re the Offline Franchise Mode / Connected Careers. Is it possible to do a fantasy draft when starting a new game? Cheers

SantryRed

Ronaldinho wrote: »

Quick question re the Offline Franchise Mode / Connected Careers. Is it possible to do a fantasy draft when starting a new game? Cheers

Unfortunately not. They removed that feature. You on Xbox or PS3?

Ronaldinho

SantryRed wrote: »

Unfortunately not. They removed that feature. You on Xbox or PS3?

OK Thanks. I used to love doing fantasy drafts to see how good of a team of rookies and 2nd year players I could assemble. As daft as it sounds I probably won't bother getting the game in that case. It's such a headwrecker that they make retrograde steps like this with the game. I'm on PS3 btw

Raoul

Ronaldinho wrote: »

OK Thanks. I used to love doing fantasy drafts to see how good of a team of rookies and 2nd year players I could assemble. As daft as it sounds I probably won't bother getting the game in that case. It's such a headwrecker that they make retrograde steps like this with the game. I'm on PS3 btw

Well its not totally retrograde as they have completely overhauled the way online is played so it is going to hopefully be much much better. Perhaps the fantasy draft will be brought back in in madden 14.

Pudsy33

Why, in connected careers, are the team ratings so messed up? In week one the saints are 79

Pudsy33

Pudsy33 wrote: »

Why, in connected careers, are the team ratings so messed up? In week one the saints are 79

i think it has to do with play style did you change scheme i know brandon marshall is low 80s whereas outside cc hes in the 90s

BigBadRob83

One thing I will suggest for the Connected Careers lads.

If you want to get the Twitter feed from the league, set up a secondary account. As it will likely clog up your timeline (tried it on mine with a dummy CC league and was like getting spammed).

I basically just added a suffix to mine so '@BigRadRob83' becomes '@BigBadRob83_BFL'

madalig12

What is twitter?

Mikeyt086

madalig12 wrote: »

What is twitter?

It's a social networking site created by EA Sports for use in Madden 13's connected careers mode.

madalig12

Mikeyt086 wrote: »

It's a social networking site created by EA Sports for use in Madden 13's connected careers mode.

But.....why??

helimachoptor

madalig12 wrote: »

But.....why??

Just to add an extra dimension of realism..

madalig12

helimachoptor wrote: »

Just to add an extra dimension of realism..

What is real anymore? I don't use Twitter I have no idea why anyone does.

Raoul

madalig12 wrote: »

What is real anymore? I don't use Twitter I have no idea why anyone does.

I use it as its good for updates on soccer matches, gaa too. Plus its good for updates on whatever your interests are. Also there are somw people on it who are very entertaining to follow. Mainly use it on my phone though.