Hey Everyone, by now most of you have started to hear some details about Season Showdown, and some of you got uncomfortably close with me as I talked with Pasta Padre and cdj about Season Showdown couple of weeks ago. This week’s blog will focus on the format of Season Showdown, and in the coming weeks we will go in-depth on the Skills, Strategy, and Sportsmanship components that make up a lot of what Season Showdown is all about.
Before I dig into the feature I wanted to mention that the seasonshowdown.easports.com site will not go live until we launch on July 14th. If you try to access the site before then you will just get redirected until the site is live.
Selecting your school
First let’s layout what Season Showdown is all about. This is a competition combining all Xbox 360, PS3, and EA Sports World members to put their school pride on the line to try and prove their school is the best. All you need to do is select the school you want to represent, and from that point forward every game you play will help your school’s cause. Your school selection is permanent, so make sure you’re picking the right school or else you might find yourself repping Miami of Ohio instead of “Da U”.
Schedule Format and Phases
Since there is a little over a month between NCAA Football 10 hitting the shelves and the start of the college football season we will treat that time as the Season Showdown pre-season. During this time you will be able to earn credits for your school by playing any game vs. the CPU or vs. an online opponent. We will track the number of credits each person has earned individually as well as how many credits each school has earned. Your goal is to try and get your school at the top of the leaderboard by August 31st, which is the start of our regular season. In addition to playing the game, you will also be able to earn credits by logging into seasonshowdown.easports.com and playing the NCAA Trivia Challenge. The credits you earn for showing off your college football knowledge will be added to your school’s total as well as your own personal credit count. Since the trivia game is completely handled on the web, you don’t even need to own the game to play trivia and help your school.
The reason you want to get your school at the top of the leaderboard is so you can make your school’s path to the championship as easy as possible. Since Season Showdown replicates the real world season, we will have our own weekly polls based on the outcome of the Season Showdown games. The initial poll rankings for week 1 of the regular season will be where each school finished on the leaderboard at the end of the pre-season.
Once the regular season begins, each matchup will last the entire week, and your school’s opponent will be the same as their real world opponent. So in week one Bama fans will be squaring off with Virginia Tech fans and Cal fans won’t have to wait all week for their chance to get some revenge over Maryland. Every week of the season you will have a new opponent, and a new poll will be released every Monday letting you know where your school stands in the overall competition. Once we hit the first week in December its conference championship time. This is the first time we will part ways from the real life season. The schools that will be battling it out for their conference titles are the schools that win their divisions in the Season Showdown regular season. So while the real world SEC championship game might be UF vs. LSU, if Ole Miss fans and Kentucky fans fight hard enough, they will be playing for the SEC title in Season Showdown. And if you didn’t finish #1 or #2 in the final rankings of the season don’t sweat it, cause the top 32 schools will be placed into a single elimination tournament to crown the Season Showdown champion. Each round of the tournament will last one week, just like the match-ups during the regular season, and the Season Showdown Championship week will be played out the same week as the real world National Championship game.
Once the champion has been declared, we return to the pre-season format where you will battle for leaderboard positioning.
How does a school win their match-up?
Since the Season Showdown isn’t about the school with the most members or earns the most total credits for the week automatically wins, you will need to divide your credit earning into five categories. You can view the progress of each matchup by selecting the game from the schedules screen. Here you will see the match in progress screen, that shows each of the 5 categories, and who is leading. For the vs. Showdown Opponent category, we don’t show who is leading until the week is over, since this is the one instance where if you know you are in the lead for the category, you can guarantee your school wins the category by no longer playing any Showdown games for that week. The school that takes three of those categories gets the win for the week. These categories are:
Games vs. CPU – anytime you play a CPU opponent the credits earned from that game will count towards this category.
Games vs. your Showdown Opponent – This category is all about taking on someone that represents your school’s opponent for that week. So if it’s week 1 of the season, LSU and Washington fans will play against each other in an online game; and the credits won during those games count towards this category. There are a few ways to find a Showdown Opponent, you can search for one from the schedules screen, head to your match-ups lobby room, or take a look at someone’s Season Showdown ID card which is displayed in the top right corner of the screen whenever a player’s online info is displayed on the screen. Here you will be able to see which school they represent, how long they have been a member, their total credits earned, and their skills, sportsmanship, and strategy levels. By taking a look at these levels you can get an indication as to what type of player the opponent is before heading into a game with them. If their Skills level is off the charts, then expect that person to be a gameplay master, if they have a lot of total credits but their Sportsmanship level is low you can probably figure that their punter hasn’t seen much action.
Games Online vs. the Nation – These are games played online against anyone that is not representing your current showdown opponent school. So using the example above, if an LSU fan takes on someone representing Ohio State in week 1 of the season, the credits earned will be awarded to this category.
NCAA Trivia Challenge – Just like the pre-season you will be able to earn credits for your school by showing your college football knowledge. In addition to historical questions, we will also be adding questions during the year about the current college football season. Only your top score for the week will count, and your goal will be to finish in the top 50 for your school that week. At the end of the week we add up all of the credits earned and declare the winner for the category. If you are outside of the top 50 your credits will still count for your individual score, they just won’t be added to the team score for the week. The trivia challenge will be accessible from seasonshowdown.easports.com, and as stated above, can be played even if you don’t own the game.
Allies & Rivals – this category is 100% decided by your votes. Every day of the week everyone that logs into Allies & Rivals will have 5 votes to use however they want. At the end of the week the votes are tallied and whichever school in the match-up has the most votes takes the category. We track and display which school are your allies (who’s been voting for you to win) and your rivals (who always wants to see you lose). It’s up to you how you spend your votes each day, If you are an FSU fan it’s a pretty safe bet that one vote will go to FSU (you want to win right?), and one vote will go towards whoever is playing Miami and Florida that week, and with the other two votes, you can either try to help take down the top ranked school, or help an ally defeat their opponent. Once we hit tournament time, even if your school is out of it, you will still be able to have a say in who wins, as your votes will count towards who wins this category. Just like the Trivia Challenge, Allies & Rivals is accessible from seasonshowdown.easports.com and can be played even if you don’t own the game.
How do I earn credits during a game?
There are a number of ways you can earn credits by playing the game. With Season Showdown, how you play the game is as important as winning the game. No matter if you win or lose, you will still earn credits just for participating, however you will be able to earn extra credits in a number of categories (Skills, Strategy, Sportsmanship, Loyalty, Underdog, and ESPN Instant Classics).
We will go into great detail in the coming weeks about Skills, Strategy, and Sportsmanship, so for this blog I’ll focus more on the other extra credit categories.
Loyalty – When you are choosing a school to represent, all credits you earn go towards that school, but that doesn’t mean you have to use that school in every game you play, you will still earn credits for Notre Dame even if you wanted to start a dynasty with Kent State. However, when you do play with the school you represent, you will earn an additional loyalty bonus.
Underdog – Without fail, whenever you go online you find that a majority of the people use the same top ranked teams whenever they play, instead of sinking to their level, take a lower ranked team and beat them to earn Underdog credits. The larger the gap between schools the more credits you will earn.
ESPN Instant Classics – If the game you have just completed is considered an ESPN Instant Classic you will receive credits for playing a thrilling game.
Quit Penalty – one of the goals with Season Showdown is to improve the quality of play online, and there are few things worse than an opponent that quits on you. With Season Showdown, you will actually earn credits for ending a game early the right way (by granting mercy, conceding defeat, etc.) that you don’t need to just pull your connection anymore. If you do, you will get docked 50% of your total credits earned the next time you play an online game.
Following along with Season Showdown
On the console as well as on the web you will be able to follow all of the Season Showdown action. There will be daily audio podcasts hosted by the Thompson Brothers that fire off automatically when you enter the Season Showdown feature in-game as well as weekly video podcasts that will wrap up the last week’s action and get you ready for the big match-ups ahead. Every Monday the latest polls will be released that ranks all 120 schools based on their season showdown performance, conference standings, credit history for that tracks the credits earned in each category for each player as well as each school, and leaderboards that allow you to see which player and which school are the best at any category.
There’s a lot that went into the creation of Season Showdown, and a lot to discuss here. Please feel free to post your questions about the feature in the comments.
-Ben Haumiller