*sigh*
I've never been much of a sports fan. I used to play baseball when I was little, a little bit of soccer, and a very small amount of football.
After I got older and out of shape (as in, 314 pounds today) I just decided things like football were too physical for me.
Now, what I lack in strength and physical prowess, I make up for in intelligence, hand-eye coordination and mental sharpness. Which means I'm a gamer, and spend my time playing video games. When sports and video games get mixed into one package, it's not a bad thing at all; but it's not the kind of thing I would want to get hooked on.
Now, my whole family are gamers, all of us; me, my stepfather to a ten, my little sister who is an avid Pokemon fan, and my mother, though she mainly sticks to casual games like the Candy Crush variety.
As sort of a way of bonding and spending time with me, my stepfather, whom most of you may know as Maddog, has a system of tasks in which, when he needs sleep or doesn't have the energy to play, he has me play his games for him in order to advance in levels or experience gains, or any other type of digital game profit (gold in an MMORPG, a set of missions in an action game, challenge modes in other games, etc.)
If it's an MMORPG like World of Warcraft or Final Fantasy 14, he'll have me do instance dungeons, where a group of 10-25 or so players get together with their own gear sets, assign roles to each other (Healer (your job is to keep everyone alive, DPS [Damage Per Second], Tank (you have to keep the boss focusing his attention on you and attacking you while everyone else throws everything they have at him) and work to take down a number of floors containing bosses, the main purpose being to level up or get gear you can later sell at the auction house or use in other quests. In the case of Final Fantasy 14, there's the Palace of The Dead, a special roguelike instance dungeon which follows the same formula, but before the boss, everyone works together to travel through a maze-like dungeon that changes with every playthrough.
In the case of sports games, eg Madden NFL 19 which he loves to death, there are the Madden Ultimate Team Solo Challenges.
THESE ARE THE BANE OF MY EXISTENCE AND I CAN TELL YOU WHY:
1. The difficulty is never balanced. Each challenge presents you with a different football situation starting in the 4th quarter of the game, and one of the following criteria will apply:
A): You will be ahead of the Home/Away team's score and must essentially defend your score against the enemy team with minimal time left.
B): You will be BEHIND the enemy team's score, the clock will have a very strict amount of time left and you have to rush to score ahead before the clock runs out.
C): You will be tied with the enemy team and one of the above will apply.
2. The A.I. of the enemy team, I swear to all heavens above, it is nearly %100 sentient. I cannot tell you in words or numbers how many hours I sat there till my rump started hurting that I mashed away at the buttons on the controller, trying every, single, defensive AND offensive play in the playbook that catches my eye, running and passing the ball until my thumbs feel like they have calluses. It seems like every single time I play these challenges against the AI, it always knows what I'm about to do, and instantly knows what to do to combat that. I realize that the point of the Madden video games is to simulate what it's like to play against a football team in real life, but there's a very, very thin line between life-like simulation and unwinnable disputes to a logic puzzle. No matter what I do, no matter what I try, the computer-controlled players on the other team always seem to know where to run to stop me, which play to use against me, how to use them, and how to execute every movement. The computer cheats and they know it.
There is this one set of challenges themed after Thanksgiving dinner (why they chose that I'll never know), and it's called the Turkey Bowl. Every challenge is named after the different foods you see at a Thanksgiving dinner, with Mashed Potatoes being the easiest and Turkey being the hardest (I think). The team that plays you is the Gobblers, and I kid you not, I have memorial proof of this, but they seem to be specifically programmed to be near-unwinnable.
I say this.... BECAUSE IT TOOK ME A WHOLE MONTH TO BEAT ALL THE CHALLENGES!!
That's not a joke! That's not an exaggeration! For the whole month of Christmas I toiled away at my stepfather's PlayStation in an effort to learn what he was teaching me about football, and I could never execute anything he was teaching me, because of something I found: I took footage of the Gobblers' team when they are running after you as you run the ball, and I noticed something; normal teams like your own are programmed to run at real-life running speed, about a half second from one yard line to the next adjacent to it. But the Gobblers appear to be programmed to run four times that speed, because they caught me at EVERY PLAY I USED! It didn't matter which play I used, whether I ran the ball or threw a pass, one guy or the other got me. I ran it through slow-motion too, there's no way a normal-level football player can run that fast in real life. And in a game where the whole point is to mimic what happens with the setting in real life, they're doing a pretty sucky job.
At long last after a month passed, I finished the Turkey Bowl. I vowed never to go near that set ever again.
Anyway, so, I don't know exactly what Maddog gets on his account for doing these challenges. And he does do them himself sometimes, but I guess he wants a constant flow of action done to stay ahead on the leaderboards, I think he's taking a completionist route, it could be one of those or both, I'm not going to judge. Either way, he should at least put some better players on his roster. He has Chad Johnson, and he's super OP on offense but I've noticed it's the only real good player he has, everyone else is controlled by A.I. unless you hit Circle to take control of them.
Now, all this being said, I do not have a problem with helping Maddog with one of his games. I can understand wanting to be ahead of others because in a setting like this kind of online game, when you're behind one, everyone else will utterly shame you for it, and your reputation suffers, so the only thing you can do is work to be ahead. (It's just like my "kill or be killed" philosophy; if you're behind everyone, they will all keep you from reaching the front of them.) I guess he wants to be qualified to play in a tournament. I don't know.
I don't have a problem with helping Maddog. I don't have a problem with helping anyone. But there's only so much I'm capable of, only so much I can do as a human being. Having high expectations for this game doesn't really make him a bad person, he's just competitive with this game because its online community is 2/3 of an animal kingdom. He gets disappointed when I stop playing to detox the frustration out of my system with another game or, if I've been up for a long time, to sleep, and while that does make me feel a little bad, I don't want him to think I don't want to bond with him. I do. I do want to bond with him; he's the only father I'll ever have.
Just so everyone knows and doesn't think he's a bad person; we do other stuff too, like fishing, when the weather's good enough for it, but life always gets in the way of doing outside stuff, so this is us bonding for the most part.
TL;DR: I hate football video games, and EA Sports doesn't know how to balance a game.
I've never been much of a sports fan. I used to play baseball when I was little, a little bit of soccer, and a very small amount of football.
After I got older and out of shape (as in, 314 pounds today) I just decided things like football were too physical for me.
Now, what I lack in strength and physical prowess, I make up for in intelligence, hand-eye coordination and mental sharpness. Which means I'm a gamer, and spend my time playing video games. When sports and video games get mixed into one package, it's not a bad thing at all; but it's not the kind of thing I would want to get hooked on.
Now, my whole family are gamers, all of us; me, my stepfather to a ten, my little sister who is an avid Pokemon fan, and my mother, though she mainly sticks to casual games like the Candy Crush variety.
As sort of a way of bonding and spending time with me, my stepfather, whom most of you may know as Maddog, has a system of tasks in which, when he needs sleep or doesn't have the energy to play, he has me play his games for him in order to advance in levels or experience gains, or any other type of digital game profit (gold in an MMORPG, a set of missions in an action game, challenge modes in other games, etc.)
If it's an MMORPG like World of Warcraft or Final Fantasy 14, he'll have me do instance dungeons, where a group of 10-25 or so players get together with their own gear sets, assign roles to each other (Healer (your job is to keep everyone alive, DPS [Damage Per Second], Tank (you have to keep the boss focusing his attention on you and attacking you while everyone else throws everything they have at him) and work to take down a number of floors containing bosses, the main purpose being to level up or get gear you can later sell at the auction house or use in other quests. In the case of Final Fantasy 14, there's the Palace of The Dead, a special roguelike instance dungeon which follows the same formula, but before the boss, everyone works together to travel through a maze-like dungeon that changes with every playthrough.
In the case of sports games, eg Madden NFL 19 which he loves to death, there are the Madden Ultimate Team Solo Challenges.
THESE ARE THE BANE OF MY EXISTENCE AND I CAN TELL YOU WHY:
1. The difficulty is never balanced. Each challenge presents you with a different football situation starting in the 4th quarter of the game, and one of the following criteria will apply:
A): You will be ahead of the Home/Away team's score and must essentially defend your score against the enemy team with minimal time left.
B): You will be BEHIND the enemy team's score, the clock will have a very strict amount of time left and you have to rush to score ahead before the clock runs out.
C): You will be tied with the enemy team and one of the above will apply.
2. The A.I. of the enemy team, I swear to all heavens above, it is nearly %100 sentient. I cannot tell you in words or numbers how many hours I sat there till my rump started hurting that I mashed away at the buttons on the controller, trying every, single, defensive AND offensive play in the playbook that catches my eye, running and passing the ball until my thumbs feel like they have calluses. It seems like every single time I play these challenges against the AI, it always knows what I'm about to do, and instantly knows what to do to combat that. I realize that the point of the Madden video games is to simulate what it's like to play against a football team in real life, but there's a very, very thin line between life-like simulation and unwinnable disputes to a logic puzzle. No matter what I do, no matter what I try, the computer-controlled players on the other team always seem to know where to run to stop me, which play to use against me, how to use them, and how to execute every movement. The computer cheats and they know it.
There is this one set of challenges themed after Thanksgiving dinner (why they chose that I'll never know), and it's called the Turkey Bowl. Every challenge is named after the different foods you see at a Thanksgiving dinner, with Mashed Potatoes being the easiest and Turkey being the hardest (I think). The team that plays you is the Gobblers, and I kid you not, I have memorial proof of this, but they seem to be specifically programmed to be near-unwinnable.
I say this.... BECAUSE IT TOOK ME A WHOLE MONTH TO BEAT ALL THE CHALLENGES!!
That's not a joke! That's not an exaggeration! For the whole month of Christmas I toiled away at my stepfather's PlayStation in an effort to learn what he was teaching me about football, and I could never execute anything he was teaching me, because of something I found: I took footage of the Gobblers' team when they are running after you as you run the ball, and I noticed something; normal teams like your own are programmed to run at real-life running speed, about a half second from one yard line to the next adjacent to it. But the Gobblers appear to be programmed to run four times that speed, because they caught me at EVERY PLAY I USED! It didn't matter which play I used, whether I ran the ball or threw a pass, one guy or the other got me. I ran it through slow-motion too, there's no way a normal-level football player can run that fast in real life. And in a game where the whole point is to mimic what happens with the setting in real life, they're doing a pretty sucky job.
At long last after a month passed, I finished the Turkey Bowl. I vowed never to go near that set ever again.
Anyway, so, I don't know exactly what Maddog gets on his account for doing these challenges. And he does do them himself sometimes, but I guess he wants a constant flow of action done to stay ahead on the leaderboards, I think he's taking a completionist route, it could be one of those or both, I'm not going to judge. Either way, he should at least put some better players on his roster. He has Chad Johnson, and he's super OP on offense but I've noticed it's the only real good player he has, everyone else is controlled by A.I. unless you hit Circle to take control of them.
Now, all this being said, I do not have a problem with helping Maddog with one of his games. I can understand wanting to be ahead of others because in a setting like this kind of online game, when you're behind one, everyone else will utterly shame you for it, and your reputation suffers, so the only thing you can do is work to be ahead. (It's just like my "kill or be killed" philosophy; if you're behind everyone, they will all keep you from reaching the front of them.) I guess he wants to be qualified to play in a tournament. I don't know.
I don't have a problem with helping Maddog. I don't have a problem with helping anyone. But there's only so much I'm capable of, only so much I can do as a human being. Having high expectations for this game doesn't really make him a bad person, he's just competitive with this game because its online community is 2/3 of an animal kingdom. He gets disappointed when I stop playing to detox the frustration out of my system with another game or, if I've been up for a long time, to sleep, and while that does make me feel a little bad, I don't want him to think I don't want to bond with him. I do. I do want to bond with him; he's the only father I'll ever have.
Just so everyone knows and doesn't think he's a bad person; we do other stuff too, like fishing, when the weather's good enough for it, but life always gets in the way of doing outside stuff, so this is us bonding for the most part.
TL;DR: I hate football video games, and EA Sports doesn't know how to balance a game.
