1st "OFFICIAL" NDL Online Dynasty - ...

[ChampDizzle]

if you need one in a create a school OD, count me in. Would love to represent Augusta State University!

[RanDawg]

added to waiting list, champ

[buckeye76]

if you need one for a "create a school" i would be up for that.


Mount Union bitches...... The Purple Raiders live!

[RanDawg]

April 23, 2009 - Ever since NCAA Football first made its way onto next-gen consoles, it has been without a hugely popular feature that debuted back in 2000 on the PlayStation. For the last three years (the first iteration of NCAA on Xbox 360) people have been waiting for the re-launch of Create-a-School. Thankfully that wait is now over.

This week in New York City EA Sports revealed TeamBuilder, a reworked Create-a-School feature that incorporates new technology and mechanics to bring your created squad into NCAA Football 10. Cooler still is the fact that fans of the collegiate videogame series will be able to create their dream program well before the game hits store shelves.

This time around Create-a-School (TeamBuilder) is all web-based and operated from your PC. Pigskin fanatics can hop onto TeamBuilder.com, (once the site is live) sign in with their EA Sports ID, and then get down to the nitty gritty of designing the look and attributes for their school. EA Sports was kind enough to create IGN University (average GPA 1.1) to give us a look at just how deep the creation goes.

There are hundreds of pieces to every uniform and many can be tuned to your liking. From the stripes on your pants to whether your logo appears on the helmet or your uniform number (ala Alabama), there's a lot of depth there. There are more than 70 base styles for your uni and 11 different logo placements aside from the helmet designs that I just mentioned. There's less customizability to the pants, but it's a similar mechanic. As fun as it is to fiddle with the look of your uniforms, what really impressed me was the freedom afforded to nailing down a team logo.

The IGN field EA Sports created for us.

First you'll need to track down a primary logo which must be a 256x256 PNG file. Next, you'll need to convert that image (or find another) into a 128x128 PNG. Keep in mind, there really aren't any restrictions on what that image contains. That means you can take an already-established logo, massacre it in any number of ways in PhotoShop, then upload it to TeamBuilder. EA Sports thankfully used the traditional IGN logo and color scheme for ours. Picking your colors is a simple process that has you place three markers on your logo to ensure that you aren't using fuchsia when you really just wanted pink (and who doesn't).

Next you'll pick from any of the pre-existing college, generic or high school stadiums to act as your battleground. Thankfully the fans in your stadium will be wearing your team's colors. For IGN University that meant a sea of intimidating red. Be afraid.

After picking out your stadium, it's time to design the field itself. You can pick from four field types: turf, blue (Boise State style), grass, and multi. Then you can place your logo in the middle of the field and at opposing 20, 25, 30 or 35 yard lines. As if that wasn't enough, you can then design the text that will appear in both endzones.

From there you're off to design the attributes and player rosters for your school. This is the one area that worried me about TeamBuilder. Since you can upload your created team to Dynasty or Online Dynasty modes, the fact that there's nothing stopping gamers from maxing out both their school's attributes as well as the players' skills seems like it could create an unfair advantage. All the usual school attributes are tunable. That means you can mess your school's academic prestige, your fan base, television exposure, even the amount of athletic facilities on-campus. Unsurprisingly, IGN had none.

That's me handing off to Mike Pereira.

Once it's time to customize your rosters you'll first need to select a school's already established roster and tweak from there. Again, all the usual speed, strength, and awareness attributes can be maxed out if you like.

After you've set your created school in virtual stone it's time to take to the field. You can create and save up to twelve schools that can then be downloaded by your friends over Xbox Live or PlayStation Network. It's important to note that if you decide to take your team into a dynasty mode (online or off), you'll need to replace one of the schools from the conference you're inserting the team into.

It's about time EA Sports made a Create-a-School mode worthy of this generation of hardware. The online integration and the interaction between your PC and 360 or PS3 should be great if everything goes to plan. It's also a wise move to offer up TeamBuilder to players before the game ships so you can have your custom squad fully built in time for launch.

I just creamed in my pants a little . . .

[RanDawg]

if you need one for a "create a school" i would be up for that.


Mount Union bitches...... The Purple Raiders live!

gotcha added buckeye

[fsupenguin]

The strength of the teams is the only thing that I am iffy on really, we make all the teams weak? Or max them out?

[RanDawg]

The strength of the teams is the only thing that I am iffy on really, we make all the teams weak? Or max them out?

I would say make the team a 1 or 2 star team (prestige-wise) with an overall team rating of C+ max (I want to put an ACTUAL # instead of a letter grade, so we need to come up with a true number).

We treat it like a TRUE dynasty and work our way up.

All teams will need to be submitted to me and I am sure there will be a way for me to post the rosters on the forums for all to see. Once all rosters are agreed upon, the season will start (no funny business like making all starters in the 90s while all backups in the 50s).

What do you guys think about that??

[fsupenguin]

Should work fine I would think. An even starting point should make it interesting. It would be awesome if we all all started out with crappy teams and had a set number of points to use on upgrading to see who difference strategies would work out.

[RanDawg]

I do agree with you. Some standards need to be set:

(and these are just off the top of my head and can be tweaked and changed as we feel they should)
Overall - NO players above 85, BUT only 2 players in the 80s, YET, the average of the 2 players needs to be 83 (we can decide if we want more).

Speed - NO players above 92, BUT only 2 players in the 90s, YET the average of the 2 players needs to be 91 (we can decide if we want more).

These are just a few ideas off the top of my head, but there will need to be some boundries in creating/editing players. If not, then everyone will have 2 players rated at 85, but with these guidelines set, somone might have 2 83 players and somone else might have 1 85 and 1 80 players. Again, it will be interesting to see who does what.

Any other thoughts?

I guess most of you have come to the conclusion that this WILL be a Create-A-School OD. I will most likely restart another thread in the near future to condense this information and get the talks started.

[brocam]

i am not in the league, but the idea of created schools is very intriguing.

one idea to make things easy would be to recreate the rosters of an existing 1star/2star team in ncaa '10. everybody claims a team and then populates their created school with that team's current roster in the game. it seems like that would help keep people honest.

[Downing11]

I'd be interested in this for sure.

[RanDawg]

http://xbox360.ign.com/dor/objects/1432 ... ld_p1.html

http://xbox360.ign.com/dor/objects/1432 ... ld_p2.html

http://xbox360.ign.com/dor/objects/1432 ... 42309.html

Just incase you guys have not seen this stuff yet . . . WOW . . . badass is all I have to say.

[fsupenguin]

So what is the story here, created teams? Or keeping the same ones from before?

[RanDawg]

Don't think everyone officially decided. After creating my own team, I did notice it would be fairly difficult to monitor created teams . . .

So I am thinking ANY "TEAM" is the way to go. let me know what you guys think.

[fsupenguin]

I am more confused now lol.

[VTrunNgun]

*BUMP*

So now that the game is out and we're finally getting through all the bugs, I'm ready to kick off our dynasty soon.

First:

I'd like to wait until there is a posting 'post patch' for a roster file with all the names. I think we started prematurely last year and were stuck with that FIU bug in our rosters. I don't think it was a big deal in the end, but for sake of playing it safe, I don't mind waiting another week or so.

Secondly:

My vote is for Created Teams. I think this feature is way too fun to pass up. Sure it presents some loops holes but if we establish a foundation from the outset of how we're going to regulate everything, I think we'll be fine.

[runthepound]

if we go with created teams, instead of people bumping up rosters attibutes, we could say everyone just pick a letter grade school's roster for their team. For exabple, everyone needs to pick a roster for not higher than b+ overall school. Their is plenty of flexibility in their and we would have to just trust each other. As far as program prestige and and program info, maybe we could give everyone so many points to "buy" the prestige and info they want for their school.

i sure there is other stuff, but these are just some thoughts and maybe something we could run with.