Madden Online Problems/Questions

Some things concerning me with the omissions, so I'd like to fire up a separate discussion to go over just that.

Salary Cap/Free Agency: How do weak teams get better? With endless contracts, there's no chance of some star player getting full of himself and hitting free agency for some cellar dwellar to scoop him up. Thus, the FA pool will potentially be loaded with mediocre talent at best.

Draft Pick Trades: Obviously, without being able to trade draft picks, and contract years/salary being pretty much irrelevant... trades seem limited to like value for like value without the 'Future Picks' gamble to sweeten a potentially lopsided deal. That, coupled with the way FA is hamstrung, seems to really suck the strategy out of team management.

Any others?

Hmmm, I am sorry I don't have any answer for you but those are some really good questions, hopefully someone else can answer.

I think it's a work in progress. There are a lot of gaps simply because they wanted to get to market this year. Hopefully it will improve over time. Beats me why they can't just take the core from offline and move it to online, but there must be issues with that. And frankly, I kinda wonder about a LOT of things that used to be in regular franchise mode that are no longer there. Seems like they really stripped it down over the last few years and are starting almost from scratch. That definitely shows up online.

I didn't mention it since I was mainly talking about Online Franchise, but...

Superstar Mode is craptastic this year. I don't mind because they improved the gameplay dramatically, but just thought I'd throw it out there. It's almost an afterthought this year. If you're going to half-ass it, just scrap the entire mode and put the time into making the online franchise more franchiselike.

No kidding. I used to love franchise mode, even to the point of treating it like a coaching sim rather than actually playing the games. Now the focus is defintely on playing rather than managing, in my opinion. Takes away half of the fun for me.

I'm still thumbs-up on the game, but I think I would have much rather had Head Coach 2010. I don't think Madden got what they paid for in Franchise bringing 'em over to M2k10. Just the head coach draft day was better than the majority of M2k10's franchise.

Oh, don't get me wrong. I love the game for the actual game time game play. I just miss the heavy sim and analytical aspects of HK '09. I LOVED preparing for the draft in that game and all of the manuevering on draft day. I intentionally stayed off the message boards so I wouldn't know who the sleepers were and would have to find them for myself. I really with they had updated that one this year, too.