Which scouting agency madden 12

Given my obsession, I probably spend way more time pouring through the minutia of the contract systems, scouting mechanics, and player progression than your average gamer. Almost everything I could want in a franchise experience is there — the ability to front-load and back-load player contracts, a scouting system that lets me take the guys on the court to test them myself, relatively smart trade logic, player roles that I can adjust at the beginning of each year, and player personalities that dictate how they feel about your club and whether or not they are interested in signing with you.

Madden has been treading water in recent years, but this year EA renewed its focus on the mode to give it a much needed makeover. While the new elements they added sound great on paper, in practice I found that most of them come with a new set of issues.

My first problem is with the new menu system. This is admittedly a minor annoyance that I can live with, but hiding the entire menu players interact with on a minute-to-minute basis for the sake of a full-screen stadium shot doesn't make a lot of sense.

I also wasn't a fan of the cascading player profiles in the team management, which are disrupting when navigating depth charts and player contract screens. Preseason It took EA long enough, but they finally expanded the rosters and instituted realistic player substitutions during preseason games. My favorite aspect of the renewed focus on the preseason is the inclusion of undrafted free agents — the players who slipped through the cracks on draft day but still have a shot to make your roster.

Most of these guys never develop into full-time players, but every once and a while teams stumble on a diamond in the rough like hall of famer John Randle. As the preseason progresses, more of these player's ratings are revealed. Great concept, right? The only problem is you don't get to choose the undrafted free agents — the game arbitrarily assigns you players.

This doesn't give you the option to stock up on UDFAs in positions of weakness or to determine what type of players you want on your roster. The substitution system, which cycles through your depth chart as the games progress, needs some work, too. Your star players should be on the sidelines for the later quarters during preseason, but the sub system often places them in foreign positions.

It's not uncommon to see your first team wide receiver lining up as a nickel back in the fourth quarter your starting running back filling in at wide receiver, further subjecting them to injury. Obviously you can go into the depth chart and fix this yourself, but why EA Tiburon didn't make it right in the first place since they were reworking the feature is beyond me.

The Cut Day feature also fails to work properly. Sometimes teams decide to cut veterans to free up cap space instead of dropping the young talent, but when I was in the cut day screen my moves were limited to dropping UDFAs. It wouldn't allow me to cut a vet until finished cutting rookies and drilled into the player management screen.

Why can't I do it all from the same spot? I also noticed that after you cut UDFAs, they don't always appear in the free agency pool. I guess they're off bagging groceries. If you wrote down the names of the players with the most potential, it was easy to locate when the draft starts and pick up very skilled players in the later rounds.

While that system gave you too much information, the new system gives you almost nothing to work with. During the course of the season you're allowed to 20 players for their common ratings a handful of times. Once the season concludes you go through the combine, pro days, and individual workouts with an increasingly smaller number of players. When you get to draft day, you have great amount of information about a mere handful of players, but you know next to nothing about everyone else on the market.

As an NFL fan, I can gather a wealth of information about players before the real draft thanks to public combine numbers, YouTube video, coach impressions, and pundit predictions.

In Madden, you're largely left in the dark, not even knowing the basic intel about the vast majority of draft-eligible players. You won't even have the combine numbers for these guys! If the player you have targeted gets drafted before it's your turn to pick, you have two options — cross your fingers and pick a guy you know nothing about, or trade down to a safe place where you can grab the next player you feel comfortable selecting.

The best player available draft philosophy is impossible to execute. For the most part teams drafted sensibly, but I did see a few questionable decisions. I know if I were the Bears I would draft a replacement for Jay "Throw into Triple Coverage" Cutler, but objectively he's still in his 20s and has a good Madden rating so I'm not sure why Chicago would chose to draft a first-round QB when they have glaring holes elsewhere on the roster.

Free Agency I think EA did a great job with the new bidding process for free agency. Essentially, once a player receives a bid from a team a countdown starts. Whoever bids the highest salary by the end of the timer wins the rights to sign the player. Once you win the bid, you can then determine how you want to pay the contract.

You can front-load it to eat up cap space the first few years, balance the money evenly across the years of the contract, or backload it to free up some immediate cap space. The only problem is you don't have a period to examine the pool of free agents before the frenzy begins. I would much prefer to develop a list of targets and contingency plans before charging headfirst into the chaos. The one other problem I found in regards to free agency is that teams neglect to sign respectable backup quarterbacks.

It wasn't uncommon to see several former starters or capable backups on the street while players with ratings more suited to being a third-stringer take the all important role. I miss being able to do this from the comfort of the franchise menu system so I don't have to scramble to set it up while the play clock is running. Think "NFL Head Coach" with this new feature, as gamers will now enter into a bidding war for players eBay-style, highlighting the players they want and hitting "A" to increase the bid.

When all the bidding is over, you sign the player to a contract. This system is so much better in my opinion because the bidding goes by quick and you tend to overpay for guys you really need, just like in real life. It's not like the old days where you had to simulate through 35 days of free agency. Now you're in and out quick in a much more interactive and fun environment.

From "Fumble Prone" to "Shutdown Corner," football fans can look at any player on the field and sum him up in a couple of words. Old school "Madden" included these player-role attributes, but the feature was inexplicably removed from the game in recent years.

Now you can pull up a screen and read about every player role that a guy at a certain position can earn, and it explains how they can be earned and lost and what impact they have on the game.

Most of these roles do have in-game impact. New roles include "Playoff Performer" for guys such as Brady, who will now actually play better in the playoffs than he does during the regular season. Player roles are also now worked into team logic, in which a team with a player marked as "Quarterback of the Future" won't go into the draft and select a quarterback in the first round. It will actually try to build around its young leader.

This is also where the role of "Mentor" comes into play. If you keep a veteran "Mentor" on your roster, he'll actually help make the younger players better.

As an obsessive franchise gamer, one thing that always bugged me about the mode was that week to week I could make even the most erratic quarterback play consistently good just by my skills on the stick. If a guy was an 86 overall, that's what he was and that's what he played like all season no matter how inconsistent he was in real life.

So you might go into a game where Cutler is an 85 overall, you might go into a game where he's a 75 overall or you could go into a game where he's a This really captures the any given Sunday aspect of the NFL. It's no longer a case of every week in franchise, your players all have the same ratings and it never changes. This gives you a fluctuation of ratings with guys getting on hot streaks and cold streaks and really gives you the feeling of everybody being a little different every week.

So now if your star player has a good or bad game, it's finally going to translate into next week. Ever started a franchise only to find in Year 4 that you wish you would've picked a different team?

In the past, that meant deleting your current save file and starting fresh. But in "Madden 12" gamers are finally given the opportunity to change the team they are controlling. We also give you the ability to control all of the teams if you want. It's totally up to you. One of the biggest disappointments in "Madden" every year is the draft. Is there a way to delete You're ultimate team, and start it over? General 2 Answers How to import college players into franchise mode?

Side Quest 2 Answers Be a superstar bug? Tech Support 4 Answers What is the Press attribute? Build 1 Answer How do I turn off the accelerated clock?

General 3 Answers. Ask A Question. Browse More Questions. Keep me logged in on this device. Forgot your username or password? Doing so will sort all the A potential players at the top Now you have your starting spot for scouting To maximize your 20 scouts for the Combine, Pro Days and Individual workouts Also if you pinpoint your indivual workouts early you can save your self spending scout slots at the Combine and Pro Day This is Very Sloppy but figured since i haven't seen anything yet Save Before Your Individual Scouting Scout 5 Players See Full Stats Rinse and Repeat until you get a good feel of who you want to draft I take this one step further I save then go through Individual Scouting and the Draft so i can see who is getting taking where User Info: nuschler nuschler 10 years ago 4 I've been trying to do it by not cheesing, though it's so tempting to do the sort by potential category and pick that way.

How to import college players into franchise mode?