A look at Progression in NCAA 13 Online Dynasty

Howdy!

Every year hardcore dynasty fans always ask what their dynasty might look like after a few seasons. In some previous iterations of EA Sports NCAA Football there has been an issue where recruit attributes and aggressive progression have led to a number of problems for moderate to long-term dynasties. More specifically, a larger percentage of elite players and a larger number of players with elite speed. I took the time to take a look at progression through the first five years of a test dynasty and my results are below.

First, if you missed them, here are the videos we took at E3 for initial player and team ratings.

Team Ratings

Player Ratings

Part I Part II Part III

The initial breakdown for the year 1 rosters looks like this:

After year 2, the numbers look like this:

Year 2 Team Ratings

Year 2 Player Ratings

What we see is a pretty significant increase in player overalls. The increase in the number of players with elite speed is noticeable as well. The key thing to note is that 20 out of 30 of the fastest players on the default, year 1 roster are underclassmen. So the large increase in numbers is to be expected. A small percentage increase can be attributed to true freshmen recruited during season 1 (only 5 appeared in the top 30 fastest players in year 2, including JUCOs).

After simulating to season 5, I took another look at the numbers. They are as follows:

Year 5 Player Ratings

Year 5 Team Ratings

This looks much more encouraging. After four years and the process of graduation and player departures rid of the default roster players, we see what represents the end of a bell-curve distribution for overalls and speed. It appears from this test that the only problem we will encounter as our dynasties advance through the years is the disparity between the inflated default roster players. Barring any progression tuning or the ability of a user to impact progression (unrealistic success or what have you), we should end up with a very good distribution between average and elite players.

With regards to speed, although the numbers do increase quite a bit over the default roster numbers, I do not feel like it’s anything to necessarily be worried about. It depends on your speed threshold setting for your league and the distribution of these elite speed players. While Online Dynasties with multiple users will likely see them distributed over several user and (hopefully) multiple competitive CPU teams, it should not prove to be that much of a noticeable difference with regards to gameplay.

Moving forward:

I think we need to do more to make sure that there is a smooth transition in years 3-5 of dynasties. Making sure that the default roster players are rated similarly to how the CPU rates generated recruits every year (or at least fit them under a similar bell-curve distribution). Besides myself, a few other EA Sports Game Changers from TraditionSportsOnline.com have a lot of ideas on how to handle progression. I think Madden 13 will hit a lot of the points on the head, but in my opinion the age difference of college players and the development of such should be captured much differently (and dynamically). Stay tuned for more concrete ideas after the launch of NCAA 13 and as the community, developers and EA Sports Game Changers turn their focus on NCAA Football 14.

Thanks for reading! Please leave your feedback below and let me know what you think!

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