Madden Roster Scrutiny

Is this the year they get it right?

 In no time at all, the first official Madden Roster Update will be among us. While we've gone on record as saying that the ratings are too high and hurt the game in many instances (hard to swallow now because the game is actually good and has a rock-solid foundation) Rosters are critical to the success of any sports game. Fair or Unfair, Madden is under more scrutiny than most. So is their ratings team.


At their core, Sports Games are Rosters and Ratings fitted onto an engine, that's it. If these areas are lacking then the game itself is lacking. Past interviews has told us that Madden, for all intents and purposes had to be "enshrined" as the 33rd NFL franchise to get access to many of the team playbooks and other team-specific info/NFL intellectual property. With all of this access you'd think that the NFL's so-called "33rd Franchise" would have access to the correct roster info at the very least, I mean Yahoo NFL does. I can reference an NFL story like a roster transaction and within 24 hours I can guarantee Yahoo has updated it. The Question begs asking: Why is Yahoo NFL's roster more accurate than Madden's? Madden roster accuracy has been a crapshoot for all of recent memory with a ridiculous amount of missing players, incorrect depth charts and even wrong player positions. Apparently its gotten so bad that the so-called ratings czar had to ask followers on Twitter for updated player numbers. That doesn't sound very 33rd NFL Franchise-like to us.

There's no excuse at this point, Madden finally has full rosters, so players will apparently have access to all of the players that are on the team of their choice and with weekly updates (again--excessive; rating week by week is the knee-jerk reaction version of rating players; every 4 weeks gives you a much more reliable set of data) the many player transactions that are sure to come will be addressed with efficiency. We'll soon see, with the first roster update right around the corner, let's hope that the roster people don't do anything to hold back what seems to be the truest simulation of football that Tiburon has put together.