Teddy_Pop

I quit two years ago but I want to start again just to join your league.

You mean I won't be getting a card? After all those Madden News Alerts?

I am satisfied with HSD's response and won't go on and on about this. If the developers say that the difficulty level does not shift between drives, then it doesn't shift.   But it still seems to me that certain kinds of plays are sometimes easy and sometimes hard, even when playing the  same opponent three times in a row, and perhaps this is because the defense is programmed to respond in certain ways that make the difficulty appear to change.   Anyone who has done a live event over and over and found it harder and harder to get 30 running yards after the fourth or fifth try will know what I mean. I found it was better to do those events five times, get my five reward packs, and then repeat. The defense stops the run much better after repeated runs.   Could it be that 70+ yard runs trigger the defense to play super tough against the run, but a fourth and out brings them back to normal? Could that explain why the difficulty of running seems so vary so much from drive to drive?

Well ok then!

I wonder if the developers would be interested in weighing in here : does the difficulty level in LvL change from day to day, drive to drive, or not at all?

Quote from Sulaiman23 >> Quote from Teddy_Pop >> I didn't know any one but me had noticed this bug. It still annoys me, and it's been like this for months.   There is a play I like (or used to like) to run when doing live events and League Survival: Sam Buck. It was always waiting in my recent plays box, and it was easy to choose.

I didn't know any one but me had noticed this bug. It still annoys me, and it's been like this for months.   There is a play I like (or used to like) to run when doing live events and League Survival: Sam Buck. It was always waiting in my recent plays box, and it was easy to choose.   Sometime around the new year (I seem to remember an announcement about a new feature called Favorite Plays that never worked and never happened) the recent plays box stopped working properly, and Sam Buck became a pain to select, all the way at the bottom of the Blitz page. So now I just make do with whatever  is in the "Recommended" box.   The recent plays box seems to work in Overdrive mode, but it doesn't carry over to other modes.   Not a catastrophe - a first world problem, sure - but a daily irritation.

Speculating about the thoughts of the programmers wouldn't do any good beyond what I've already proposed, so ultimately this is all I want to say:   I would recommend to the programmers that, before a live event/LvL drive/OD match/tournament game begins, the player is told the difficulty level.    The difficulty level definitely changes from mode to mode, so simply say what it is.   Difficulty levels that shift without any outward indication, if they do shift and I think they do, make the game feel random and make team-building feel irrelevant.

@ Bouncer -  Of course you're correct that the hacker rumor, even if it's true, doesn't prove anything. But here's what I was trying to say in the shortest way possible:   If hackers were able to break open the code and switch the difficulty, it means that such a switch exists and that it's right there in the code.   And now that I think about it, I think the hacking rumor emerged at about the same time as the shift I am talking about - roughly three months ago.   Reading your comment again, I realize that you are not disputing whether the programmers could vary the difficulty - you are asking whether the programmers would do it and why. I should have been more careful and not said that the hacking rumor "goes a long way to showing that the difficulty level does indeed shift from drive to drive," but instead that the difficulty level could change from drive to drive, and could change very easily.

That's a good point Apex - I had forgotten that hacking thing. Was it ever openly stated by EA or anyone else that hackers were being punished for changing the difficulty level with a third party app? I remember the rumor but I never heard anything conclusive.   If it's true that hackers were successfully changing the difficulty level for each drive, that goes a long way to showing that the difficulty level does indeed shift from drive to drive - otherwise why would hacking it even be possible? And how would EA even know that the difficulty had been hacked, without looking at the code and seeing what the difficulty levels were?