As I try to get back into console video gaming for relaxation, I've been playing a "dynasty" season of NCAA Football 11 (from Electronic Arts (EA)). As with previous years, I seem to be hitting a major frustration that I really wish the geniuses at Electronic Arts (or whomever programs the game for them) would figure out is a real and serious problem that totally detracts from a good portion of the game: the school rankings/ratings that are preloaded in the game.
Fans of some teams (teams like say Ohio State, Alabama and other teams that were highly ranked going into this season) may not see any issue at all, but as a fan of a school/team that is not a perennial powerhouse, I find the game a bit too realistic perhaps and it ruins a lot of the potential enjoyment for me.
My problem is this: if I start a Dynasty game and start working on building up a dynasty with a lesser school I'm severely handicapped in that no matter how good my team performs on the field the well known powerhouses will never lose enough reputation points (or whatever the term is for the scheme) and I'll never gain enough of them to move up in the school rankings, so I'll never get the better recruits and never get the tougher schedules and never be able to improve my dynasty's lost in life no matter what happens in the game.
Realistically, unless I "cheat" and play games against the top 25 teams over and over again, beating them senseless with a bunch of lesser known and unranked teams, I have little or no control over those team's rankings and reputations and meanwhile my team can move up the top 25 but so far before I run into the BCS problem that real schools do -- unless I'm guaranteed a spot in a BCS game I have chance to play for the National Championship, and even if I am the conference winner in one of the right conferences, there's no guarantee that I'll be able to play for the Championship either.
What EA or their programmers seem to fail to understand is that gamers like me play the game to have fun, even though we'd like a certain amount of realism in the game, we still want fun and we still want to stand a chance at playing for the big prizes at the end of the season. What I'd like to see EA offer in the game is the current situation -- fairly realistic, based on pre-season rankings and such -- along with a couple of new options: one where the gamer gets to totally randomize the reputations/rankings for all the teams in the game, and perhaps another option where gamers can pick a starting point from a pre-determined level of their choosing. That would offer the current level of realism while also giving fans that don't mind rolling the dice a chance to roll a starting point that doesn't seem to permanently handicap them. Once the season starts, the game's AI (Artificial Intelligence) would then need to take into account how teams are performing and trending so that teams reputations improved over time or went downhill over time while others around them improved.
Once the game play starts, I am having fun playing the game and think it does a pretty nice job of offering football fans a good college football game to play. The graphics are nice and sharp, the sounds of the game are good, the announcers are fairly tolerable, etc. If they (EA) would just improve the dynasty feature, we might really have a great game on our hands.
