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Madden-ing Glitch Irks Gamers
theodp writes "A vexing glitch in Madden NFL 2005 has players complaining in online forums and even demanding a recall. Because repeated offensive shifts exhaust the defense before the ball is snapped, EA's forced online players to turn off the fatigue setting, which disables the exploit, but spoils the realism of the game. At least you've got an excuse for that first-round Madden Challenge loss."
--
Evan "I trust people across the table when they say they rolled a nat 20"
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
I'd think an even bigger bug would be all of those obnoxious voice-overs:
"Someone in the secondary just got burned!"
"He just reared back and fired that one in there!"
How do I turn those off?
Why not have give the offense players a "fatigue" setting that fatigues the entire offense when they repeatedly shift. That would even the stakes, right?
Wow what a mess for EA, and at the worst possible time. ESPN Football is $20 (or less!) for the current version. Madden? $50. I wonder if that extra $30 goes straight to Mr. Madden himself? Maybe they should be using it to hire better QA testers.
Moo.
He's right, if the offense were running around between formations over and over eventually they'd either tire, strike, or start getting punchy.
Basically, if this catches on, people using this glitch could ruin online gameplay. The people in the know would exploit the cheat. It also makes for a cheap way to win offline as well. The fact that this one affects the mechanics of gameplay should warrant a recall in my mind.
Now, I'm not talking about having the FTC step in here, but EA should do the right thing. They seem pretty screwed by this. If they own up to the mistake they get made fun of in the press, by players, and it gives Sega Sports some more firepower. On the other hand, they could piss off that very large Madden fanbase and a large portion of them could migrate to Sega Sports. Granted, some people do play both. However, many people are already solely playing ESPN NFL Football because of its $20 price point.
If they don't plan on fixing this, they should probably scrap the Madden Challenge. People can probably find sneaky ways to pull this glitch off (possibly over multiple plays) to where a judge wouldn't be able to throw out the person using it to their advantage.
This could become a major blow to EA's bread and butter franchise. EA needs to come to a smart, fast decision on how to handle this. You can bet your ass that they're busting out the champagne at Sega headquarters over this one.
Until Slashdot fixes the funny modifier, use insightful or interesting. The poster knows your intentions.
Yes it would, however that's not really the problem. That this error was never caught is the problem (maybe the playtesters mostly played single player mode.)
;)
Oh well, I guess you'll start seeing 140 to 150 point games with 1200 yards total offense. Yea, back to Madden 92 days!
0- Eamonman Proud member of DNRC
Hmm... I suppose I'll be buying NHL 2005 for my PC instead of my PS2. Gotta love free updates.
----- "All right. It was a miracle. Can we go now?"
If you read the 2K5 message boards, there are similar issues, the "DT exploit" where with a shift of the D-line you can get one of your DT through untouched, and the "QB scramble" issue, where the AI isn't able to cope well with scrambling QBs
I think with the increased complexity and addition of internet multiplayer to console games, they might have to go to "patches" since AI issues and other problems are more likely to be exploited. You'll get your ass kicked if you exploit against your friends in the dorm (so it has been a police yourselves kind of environment), there isn't retribution if you exploit against strangers on the internet.
D6 63 0D 70 89 81 BB 8E 7B 7C 5F 5D 54 EA AB 73
Jeez, that should have been about the first thing on their minds when designing the new formation shift feature. Can online players do anything to unfairly abuse it? Hmm, oh yeah, a formation shift affects the defensive team's fatigue level without the defensive player being able to do anything about it. Whoops! Maybe even more surprising is that apparently no playtesters even thought to try it. Aren't you supposed to be as evil as possible in kicking the crap out of every aspect of the game before it's released?
Use Ctrl-C instead of ESC in Vim!
The game is for XBox and PS2, right? While this doesn't work on the PS2, from what I understand EA could easily release a client-side patch for the xbox version to fix this. This is one of the benefits of having a hard drive in a console.
Of course I could be wrong, but it is my understanding that xbox games can and are patched.
I pretty much worked out of the nickle and dime defensive packages the whole game. Right before the snap, you quickly adjust my defensive line close together and nudge them an inch forward then you pick on of the two in the center and have them take a step back. When the ball is snapped, their offensive linesmen will block yours, but the one that is suppose to block the one you control will block someone else. The double-teamed defensive tackle gets plowed out of the way leaving a nice hole for you to run through and sack the QB. There were a few run plays that could counter this, but the computer rarely called them. In season mode, my record for sacks by a single player is 136 by Bruce Smith. I don't know how many his teammates had, but it had to be similar.
Another one of my favorite SNES games with broken logic was NHL Stanley Cup.
#85 of the Oilers scored 473 goals in one season with only 917 shots on goal. (The counter rolled over somewhere around 250)
Most goals by a team in a game: Oilers 30 out of 51 shots on goal
Most goals in a game by a single player: #16 St. Louis - 17 out of 24 shots.
The trick was to get a break-away with a fast skater, come up along the boards and angle towards the net at the dots, then when you get to the dots - coast. This draws the goalie away from the net and towards you. When you see him advance, you skate around him to the front of an empty net. Some goalies are quick enough to recover, but you should still be able to sneak in a few goals a game against the best.
Another game, Super Tennis, the easy way to beat Don J. is to lob to one of the back corners then run to the middle of the baseline. Don J. always smashes back up the middle. You use his hard smash against him by returning it up the opposite side of the court.
I find it vaguely amusing that Madden is beset with glitches right after EA won the big contract with Microsoft to secure XBox Live! support. I find it much more amusing that ESPN NFL 2K5 is a superior football game for much less. At the game store I work at, we've sold a roughly equal number of the two games. But most of the Madden sales were on release night and in the two days following. I've not heard a single person say that they liked Madden over ESPN after having played both. Not one. That's pretty surprising when you consider how picky a lot of gamers are, especially with football games.
Of course, I enjoy seeing EA Sports suffer a bit, because they pushed out all other competitors, and had a near defacto monopoly on sports titles. It looks like ESPN's $20 gamble has worked, however.
Well, I am afraid to say that perfection is too high of standard to put any game. Every game has a glitch and people sit around looking for them. Unfortunately the glitches do drastically change the game and ruin the realism set forth. But, if you are REALLY into realism you wouldn't be looking for the error in the first place.
This is why I don't play online competitively. Some 13 year old kid who knows nothing of the simulation they are enjoying sits down looking for a way to exploit the principle of the game. I am not sure if they just get some sort of sick joy out of ruining others fun, or just want to win at any cost.
I guess the only way to solve the issue is to just hope more consoles are equipped with hard drives and the consumer can just download patches like other online games.
interesting how exploits are rampant on PC games and it is now crossing over to console games. Ah the joys of playing with only yourself. no one gets hurt and never accused of cheating.
Check it out, it works http://www.
Quote: That's not a "cheat", it's the way the game works. That's a "bug". You can find a good player who won't exploit it, but the blame lies on the company for producing it not the player for using it.
So if I shoot 100 people dead it's not my fault for using it but the gun and bullet manufacturer for making the gun? You logic fails to impress.
Gun...video game. Two different things, toolboy.
Quote: "You logic fails to impress."
Lay off the lead paint, chumpenstein.