NCAA 12: EA SPORTS Launches New Dynasty Wire

EA has released an updated version of the Online Dynasty Wire and we at TSO are swooning. It is simple to navigate yet bombards the user with information. It’s so good that it will make us lament even more the fact that most of our leagues have had to restart several times and thereby delete our history. But enough negatives, let’s talk about this great new feature.

This update does not just put lipstick on the proverbial pig. This is a major overhaul that not only changes the appearance but adds new functionality for the end user. The updated Dynasty Wire is organized in a series of 9 tabs at the top that take you to separate sections.

Starting on the “home” tab, the the page is aligned with the most recent story centered and to the left, with additional stories in a menu to the right. That menu can be sorted by team, or for weekly updates/game recaps, etc. You can also click the archive tag and see previous seasons. Each story is very easy to navigate with the left and right click areas on the sides of the main image which easily let the user see the various pictures and videos available for that game. There are several tabs including Recap, scoring, player stats, team stats, and comments. The data tables that pop up for scoring, players stats, and team stats are miles ahead of what was available before. As somebody who has been using Online Dynasty since the beginning and wishing for Online Dynasty for many years prior to that, this is exactly what I’ve been pining for all the while. It’s bright, simple, and yet in depth. When you navigate to the player stats, each player has a link and you can click and see all of his stats and skills on the right.

The “teams” tab is an overview of the dynasty. Here you can see all the league members and their corresponding teams. It shows last week’s result, this week’s game, and recruiting time along with a big green or red button that shows whether or not they are ready to advance. Very, very useful for league commissioners. Anybody in the dynasty can go here to see the progress the league has made that week or change their own status to ready, if so desired. It’s nice to see that you can now put yourself on auto pilot from this screen.

The “schedules” tab shows your team’s schedule by default with all scores, and any game you click on will take you to the story for that game. If you click the ‘by week’ tab at the top, it takes you to an expanded overview of the entire week and can be sorted by conference or by all teams. Here I would like to suggest that they add “Top 25″ and “User teams” dropdown options.

The “stats” tab refers to player statistics and is sortable by any conference, team, or by all teams to see the statistical leaders for any category. Each statistic is also sortable within each category. The “standings” tab is just as it suggests, takes you to a neat and very well-presented overview of the standings for the entire league.

The “rankings” tab is very useful because it now shows all three polls side by side, and has little icons next to the users. It also shows teams that dropped from the rankings over the week, or other teams that received Top 25 votes for each poll.

The “roster” tab will make analyzing any team a breeze. You can quickly navigate to any team, sort by position and then sort by any category such as OVR, or even hometown (clicking this sorts by state, then city within that state). This is useful to determine if an opponent has a certain state as a pipeline. Again, you can click on any player and a bio will pop up on the right with his height/weight, hometown, OVR ranking and then tabs that show his current stats and ratings.

The “recruiting” section has been completely redone. This is now a very useful tool. For instance, they have now done away with the “percentage” interest (which was ambiguous and confusing when compared to the points system in the game version) and have now organized it by points. You can see how many points the #1 team has accrued in their pursuit of a player, and then see how many points the following teams are behind them. Even if two teams have a full bar on the player, it will show exactly how many points the other teams are behind the leader. In the game version, the #2 team will be -1 many times, but here I can see that I’m really 400 points behind. That’s valuable information. For each recruit you can click and get a profile that shows all of their position-specific skills, pitch information, etc.

It should be noted that the spreadsheet downloads for stats, recruiting and the like are still available at the top of the page. Overall, this new feature is a huge boon for online dynasties and fully shows off the potential of the online dynasty wire.

By Hellisan