general topic regarding app...

[DarthViper3k]

Speaking of improving the off-season... another thing I'd love to see are compensatory draft picks for free agency losses

I don't know. I think we could definitely do it in a draft engine provided we could get a hold of the formula the NFL uses to calculate who gets picks and at what round. I'm not sure if madden would be able to recognize the players as being drafted then and store it in the player history.

That could be done... the draft engine would also have to have roster management. Once your drafted players are moved to the roster management side of the equation it shouldn't be much different than other roster editors where you're adding additional players to your rosters. So signing your draft picks would have to be done outside of Madden. Not sure how one would handle skipping that in Madden to allow the editor to take over.

As for the formula for compensatory picks... I actually read a brief description of how it works. It's based entirely on player performance in the following season as well as their new contract.
IE. Packers lost Matt Flynn to free agency in the 2012 off-season... How he performed during 2012 and the contract he signed would determine his FA value to GB in the 2013 draft. Each player receives a numerical score which correlates to draft round/pick scores.
Thanks to packers.com editor Vic Ketchman for this brief description.

The formula is proprietary so I don't know that any amount of searching the internet will find it. The only people that even need to know what the formula is are the NFL Execs (or the draftnics working for the NFL and are assigned to the compensatory picks) when they give out the compensatory picks at the annual NFL Owners meetings. And I'm sure if the formula leaks there are only like 5 people in the NFL to blame so it'd be easy to track.. lol. Long winded way of saying the formula isn't likely to be out there to even be found.

But.. If one would be willing to take the time to examine a team's FA signings/losses in a given off-season and compare it to the picks they receive the next off-season... a rudimentary equation could be written up.

In terms of the software though an extra roster would have to be stored in order to keep track of each team's FA losses/signings.
I'm not sure what other people's experiences are.. but in my experience (especially with the new gen Madden's)... losing a player to FA can get expensive (in terms of compensation) for somebody with a draft & develop philosophy. So I'm not sure what that would be worth to anybody else beyond the realism factor.

http://football.about.com/library/weekl ... ftcomp.htm
http://bleacherreport.com/articles/1121 ... d-analysis
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_F ... tory_picks
http://www.behindthesteelcurtain.com/20 ... ree-agency

Have you seen madden amp? It tends to favor the much more in depth approach to training camp. I for one find micromanaging the workout routines of 55+ athletes to be a little tedious and unrealistic. I think the previous months of offseason probably have a much greater effect on player fitness than the two weeks of training camp. Also if you are going to ask the user to micromanage 55 people workout routines the user is going to want to see returns on all the time they spent doing it. This means you generally have to reward them with serious progression from the players. This means progression becomes far too reliable and too fast. While I'm not opposed to an in-depth version of training camp I would prefer it to be optional so that not everyone who uses the app has to spend 2 hours on it between every season.

I'm of a similar opinion.. but I would love to see some form of in-depth approach to some part of the off-season & in-season practices. Like, for example, if I have a real good player.. say a HB.. that I've been able to rely on all season suddenly get the dropsies in a game.. I'd like to be able to punish his ass with some ball security drills in practice that week.
If you follow off-season workouts.. one thing they talk about are "scheme/play-book installs" Spending time teaching the entire team the new playbook and philosphy for that season.
(I don't follow the Offseason for any team other than GB so bare with me)
A good example.. after the SB season of 2010.. HC Mike McCarthy made a point to increase point production.. made it a focus in the off-season... and in 2011 they set records.

I think that would could make for an interesting off-season setup.

[torontogrudlies]

In terms of the software though an extra roster would have to be stored in order to keep track of each team's FA losses/signings.
I'm not sure what other people's experiences are.. but in my experience (especially with the new gen Madden's)... losing a player to FA can get expensive (in terms of compensation) for somebody with a draft & develop philosophy. So I'm not sure what that would be worth to anybody else beyond the realism factor.

Don't know if this helps, but what I had come up with was an entire secondary database which would have a record for every player (and every team/GM.) It's a copy of one of the EA-type databases in the same storage format as a .ros or .fra file (meaning the DB Editor can access it, as can the TDBAccess) but this DB is never opened in-game.

The work that I had done is in VB. As I mentioned, some of the notes are now scattered because the wiki where I had them is MIA. If you would like, I can get you the code... it also includes some object-oriented stuff to make it easy to access players, teams and even individual games and seasons.

[DarthViper3k]

That helps as it'll be easy to call up a list of stats as well as the new contract for that player... but unless you wanna get fancy with recursion another list would be required to determine what player was lost by what team. This would be important as players that are released aren't eligible for the compensatory picks. Unless there is something in that .ros or .fra that also lists how the player went from Team A to Team B.. no amount of programming would be able to keep track of why players change teams without storing that data somewhere.

Already looked at the Steelers, Cardinals, and Packers to start working on a formula. It was late so I only glanced at the info though.

edit: How many types of coaches does your software allow for btw?

[torontogrudlies]

That helps as it'll be easy to call up a list of stats as well as the new contract for that player... but unless you wanna get fancy with recursion another list would be required to determine what player was lost by what team. This would be important as players that are released aren't eligible for the compensatory picks. Unless there is something in that .ros or .fra that also lists how the player went from Team A to Team B.. no amount of programming would be able to keep track of why players change teams without storing that data somewhere.

I would probably find an unused field in the player table, and could use it to reflect what team they came from, and then there could be a reason code for why they left. How many possible reasons would there be for leaving?

[DarthViper3k]

Well.... there's trade, release, and FA... and when it comes to compensatory draft picks.. only FA matters.
It's been revealed that not all FA players count towards compensatory draft picks... but no information on what makes a FA player count or not count in their formula. From what I've been reading it looks like most of the players that don't count in the formula are restricted FA... As far as I can tell at least... could also simply be a case of loss/gain ratios

[Drizzt_13]

Does anyone know if there is a fast way to extract player stats just for a single position rather than by team? I'm trying to figure out how to relate snaps with the stats players rack up and it's proving extremely time consuming to go through each teams stat report each week and cut and paste out the relevant data. I doubt there is I just didn't want to sink the time into this without checking.

[DrBrownsFan]

That helps as it'll be easy to call up a list of stats as well as the new contract for that player... but unless you wanna get fancy with recursion another list would be required to determine what player was lost by what team. This would be important as players that are released aren't eligible for the compensatory picks. Unless there is something in that .ros or .fra that also lists how the player went from Team A to Team B.. no amount of programming would be able to keep track of why players change teams without storing that data somewhere.

I would probably find an unused field in the player table, and could use it to reflect what team they came from, and then there could be a reason code for why they left. How many possible reasons would there be for leaving?

I know that in the franchise player management screen, in the box at the top right, one of the pages is how the player was acquired (either trade (which tells what team the player was on previously), draft (which tells round and pick), and FA), I don't know if this will help, but I just thought I'd let you know that the game does keep track of that.

[DarthViper3k]

That helps as it'll be easy to call up a list of stats as well as the new contract for that player... but unless you wanna get fancy with recursion another list would be required to determine what player was lost by what team. This would be important as players that are released aren't eligible for the compensatory picks. Unless there is something in that .ros or .fra that also lists how the player went from Team A to Team B.. no amount of programming would be able to keep track of why players change teams without storing that data somewhere.

I would probably find an unused field in the player table, and could use it to reflect what team they came from, and then there could be a reason code for why they left. How many possible reasons would there be for leaving?

I know that in the franchise player management screen, in the box at the top right, one of the pages is how the player was acquired (either trade (which tells what team the player was on previously), draft (which tells round and pick), and FA), I don't know if this will help, but I just thought I'd let you know that the game does keep track of that.

That wouldn't work properly.... Team A could simply release a player... thus when Team B picks him up.. he's acquired via FA. The fact that he was simply released and thus doesn't count towards compensatory draft picks isn't stored

Note: From what I've been reading it's fairly consistent that restricted FA players don't garner compensation.

[Drizzt_13]

Maybe this is a dead end but if a player is released there is almost always a cap hit left over, if his contract runs out there usually isn't. That data is stored somewhere in madden, though it might be just a team total rather than the leftover from individual contracts. If it's stored individually for players you could tell whether or not someone was traded/cut or just walked away in free agency.

[DarthViper3k]

Thats an interesting way of looking at it.
I can start a dummy franchise.. let the CPU handle everything... and keep track of how the players are handled.... If you're right we'll likely find something in the data we can use.

I can't remember... does 08 deal with RFA/UFA?