[INFO/How to:] Madden 21 MUT Solo Battles

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My personal opinion and suggestions to improve this mode

Even though I've played (or more accurately: tried to play) almost every single Solo Battle game in the last 3 years and I became able to rank top 10 (on PC), my assessment of this mode is ambivalent. I went through a long learning process (regarding football itself and how the game works) where I really struggled to win against the Solo Battle opponents on low difficulty levels in the first year but learnt how to easily beat the strongest teams on the highest difficulty. Based on my experience from a newbie becoming a top 10 Solo Battle contender, I would like to argue in this section, what I like and what I dislike and what I would suggest to improve the fun of playing this mode.

I would be very grateful if you would take your time to read through my thoughts and give me your feedback on them!

In a nutshell, summarizing advantages and disadvantages: I really like the idea of Solo Battles (i.e. playing against player lineups), the chance to play on the highest difficulty, and that it does matter what you are doing in every play. On the other hand, this mode is a potential source of facing 1) stress (because you have to plan your week to be able to play 13 games when they are available) and 2) huge frustration (in particular if facing DNFs compromising the rewards of a whole week playing!). Furthermore, the enormous difference between extremely high rewards when ranking top 100 and mediocre rewards for the basic reward tiers incentivizes to search for money plays (glitches?!) to be exploited again and again and again. Players who are in principle able to compete for the top 100 leaderboard therefore have to decide to either play for fun or for rewards.

I’d therefore like suggesting the following modifications to improve the fun of playing and the fairness of how the mode’s rewards are divided among players. From my perspective, …

1. Solo Battles should be one-game-events to be played as often as you want and whenever you find your time to play them.
2. When starting a Solo Battle, players can decide about the average OVR of their opponent’s lineup. The opponent is then chosen from all currently available (at a fixed weekly cut-off date) lineups with an average OVR that equals the players’ decision.
3. Rewards should be based on your performance in one single Solo Battle game only.
4. Rewards in terms of coins should be based on your achieved skills score but taking into account the average OVR strength of the opponent’s lineup too.
5. Rewards in terms of packs could be based on the total Solo Battle score which is converted into a probability what packs you get for completing a Solo Battle.
6. The weekly leaderboard should be based on the highest Solo Battle game score the players were able to achieve in any of their Solo Battle games in the respective week.
7. The leaderboard should be used to give away a special prize as part of Good Morning Madden (GMM) to give the (non-competitive) community a more prominent and game-related role in GMM.

I will describe my thoughts on my suggested improvements in more detail at the end of this section, but first I would like to describe my experiences playing almost every game in the last 3 years where I started as a Madden newbie but became a top 10 contender in MUT Solo Battles (on PC). My suggestions are heavily based on my experience both in terms of the negative and the positive. I will spend more time on the negative since my main intention of writing down my thoughts is about further improvements of the mode.

With my suggestions I would like to contribute improving the mode so that it provides both fun (even over a long period of time while avoiding potential frustration due to DNFs, bugs, etc.) and worthwhile rewards for all players, while it does not incentivize 1) searching for and exploiting (glitch) plays and 2) doing the same plays all the time again and again in order to maximize rewards by ranking top 100.

What do I like about this mode?

1. The chance to play against lineups from other players is a nice feature. You always face different teams when starting a new game and you can also see how other players’ lineups look like.
2. You can play Solo Battles on the highest difficulty level available (Competitive, All-Madden). Against teams with a high OVR average, these games can be challenging (in particular if you are less experienced in playing Madden and/or have a low OVR lineup).
3. This mode offers the highest rewards players might earn in MUT playing with their own lineup without having to play H2H, if you are able to rank top 100.
4. The event is available every week again.
5. Your (sticks) skills matter. The better you play, the higher (potentially) are your rewards.
6. It is not just about chewing the clock in order to finish the game as fast as possible, but you have an incentive to get everything right every play, because every play counts (either positively or negatively).

What I do not like about this mode?

1. The helplessness to avoid unintended DNFs while not being allowed for making up for it afterwards is a potential source of huge frustration. The idea of not allowing to restart or replay a Solo Battle game is to verify the integrity and fairness of the leaderboard (i.e. players who have more time to repeat games would have an advantage if they could replay games where they got a low Solo Battle score in their first trial). If players could abandon the game (and therefore interrupt the connection intentionally) as soon as something bad happens, the leaderboard might be skewed.
   However, there are so many reasons why the connection could be lost (just happened the day when I was writing this post: I faced 3 DNFs out of 9 games (because I did not manage to play all 13 games on time) due to different reasons, whereas I ranked 2nd in the week before). For instance, the game might crash (e.g. I recently started to try to play some Solo Battle games on my laptop because I would not be able to play all of them on my PC on time. While the game works well in e.g. Solo Challenges, I did not manage to complete a single Solo Battle game. Every time there is a turnover in a Solo Battle game, the game freezes leading to a complete game crash and I have to restart my laptop again…); you might face a bug such as not being allowed to even play all 13 games, bad internet latency just because there are too many nodes between your device and EA’s servers and you cannot do anything to improve your situation, etc. This issue would be much less severe if the DNF would only affect the result and rewards of one game only. But it feels really bad if you already invested 6-7 hours and your rewards are significantly reduced by a factor you can't influence at all.
2. The Solo Battles mode only offers high rewards for the players ranked top 100. Furthermore, it is the only Solo mode with rewards that high and it is not possible to gain a similar amount of rewards (as the top 100) by playing all other Solo mode games available in one week. The difference between top 100 rewards and the normal reward tiers is just huge. How frustrating it must be if you miss the top 100 by only a couple of score points! You don't really have an alternative to earn a satisfying amount of coins and packs if you want to play with your lineup but do not want (or are able) to play H2H. [as a sidenote: I’m really wondering what role the lack of a repeatable solo mode plays in Coin Distribution and Coin Selling leading to such an enormously high number of bans and suspensions?]
3. In order to qualify for good rewards, you have to commit yourself to spend a lot of time within one week to play all 13 games but you are limited in your planning because not all Solo Battle games are available all week long. On average, I guess it takes about 6-7 hours to complete all 13 games. It is much less fruitful if you do not play all games because every additional game potentially increases your rewards more than the previous games because rewards increase faster with higher reward tiers.
4. This pattern incentivizes to “either do it all or nothing”. In other words, you start to play this mode if you think you will be able to play all 13 games (or are at least able to complete enough games to reach a rewards tier high enough to be worth the time playing). This can cause tremendous stress if you want to participate in this event just because it is the only Solo mode allowing you to earn additional coins (in addition to available Solo Challenges but the number of games and also the amount of coins you can earn with them is limited. On the other hand, you can play H2H Seasons all day all year long and might easily get tons of coins if taking into account that (some of) your opponents might quit in the 1st quarter just because of your high OVR average…). If you don't have enough time to play all the games in time (i.e. in a single week), then the mode is much less interesting. You also can't divide the necessary time (of playing 13 games) over several weeks (for example, if you have time for playing only on Tuesdays). Unlike H2H Seasons, in Solo Battles you can't freely divide the time and number of games.
   And if you did not find the time to participate in a week’s Solo Battle event, you have no chance to retrieve the rewards (you might have received) by playing any other Solo modes: just because the amount of available Solo games (and linked rewards is limited).
5. The AI needs some improvement. In particular, the fact that the AI doesn't react (or adjust) to the player's strategy at all, even if it is screwed with the same (small range of) play(s) over and over again, reduces the challenge and fun of playing Solo modes. As soon as you have a good enough lineup and found out how to read and how to beat the AI, you will easily beat it again and again and again.
   To say it bluntly, the AI allows to make use of money plays that always work (therefore, we might call these plays glitch plays?). Competing in Solo Battles (i.e. ranking top 100) is therefore more about finding the “best glitch plays” to trick the AI and less about playing well in a football game. From my point of view, this pattern is reflected by the fact that the weekly scores of the players ranked top 100 do not strongly differ from week to week. As soon as you’ve found out how to get a specific Solo Battle score, you most likely will be able to (approximately) get there again and again.
   Although the exploit of glitch plays is penalized with disqualification (in theory, if the MUT team became aware of the glitch), but most likely players will search for (and find) other (maybe less severe) glitches to be exploited. The bad thing is that those players who actively search for glitch exploits most likely will not report the bug / glitch and inform the MUT team about it. Therefore, it might always take some time till the MUT team realizes the existence of the glitches that are exploited by some players. And while cheating players might be penalized ex-post, other players who would have qualified for a better reward if the cheater was disqualified (and deleted from the leaderboard) on time, will not receive the rewards they should have gotten.
6. Occurring bugs sometimes result in weird-looking animations or very unlucky results. I would not care if this pattern just happened but does not have an impact on the rewards you get. But due to the fact that every play counts, facing a bug on the field (in particular when caused by non-usered players where you cannot do anything about it or could not avoid it) costing you a huge amount of Solo Battle score points can be so frustrating. The existence of bugs or unlucky animations (the latter one should be part of the game because otherwise the game would be much too easy!) reinforces my thesis from before even more: maximizing the Solo Battle score is much more about finding the best glitch play, because that also minimizes the risk of having bad luck due to bugs or unfortunate animations.
   Focusing on a very little amount of (glitch) plays (and formations) reduces the risk of facing a bug you have not seen before and you might learn how to avoid it. However, taking this thought to its logical conclusion means that you make your own game more and more monotonous, and the game loses a lot of its fun as a result.
7. Taken together the points above, when playing Solo Battles, you have to decide between trying to have fun or trying to receive good rewards. The best strategy to maximize your Solo Battle score and rank top 100 (i.e. your rewards) is focusing on a very small set of plays which almost always work and where you learnt how to minimize risks of making mistakes or facing bugs. In other words: do always the same!
   On the other hand, if you are interested in having fun playing a football game, you might have to use various plays trying to react on what your opponent is showing you, trying to benefit from reading your opponent correctly and adjusting or audible the play to beat him at his weak spots. If you try to do that, making mistakes is part of the deal! If you would not make mistakes anymore or every play easily works, why should the game be challenging (and therefore fun) anymore at all?
   I want to cite one of the players who was able to rank top 10 on PC too: “I do not play Solo Battles for fun, but just for the coins!”
8. Depending on your lineup’s OVR, you will probably either struggle to beat strong opponents (if you have a team with relatively low OVR or are not yet experienced enough in playing Madden) or it is no challenge to beat weak opponents (if you are either good at playing Madden or your team is very strong). If so, I’d say in half of the games there might be room for improving the fun of playing. In particular, if you try to compete for ranking top 100, you most likely will not face any difficulties winning the games against low OVR opponents (and possibly not even against strong teams). If so, I assume that these games are not challenging and most likely do not provide (as much) fun (as they could), at least in the long run. At least I assume that the gameplay could be increased if the games were more challenging, depending on your skills and lineup.

I’d therefore like suggesting the following modifications to improve the fun of playing and the fairness of how the mode’s rewards are divided among players. From my perspective, …

1. Solo Battles should be one-game-events to be played as often as you want and whenever you find your time to play them.
2. When starting a Solo Battle, players can decide about the average OVR of their opponent’s lineup. The opponent is then chosen from all currently available (at a fixed weekly cut-off date) lineups with an average OVR that equals the players’ decision.
3. Rewards should be based on your performance in a single Solo Battle game only.
4. Rewards in terms of coins should be based on your achieved skills score but taking into account the average OVR strength of the opponent’s lineup too.
5. Rewards in terms of packs could be based on the total Solo Battle score which is converted into a probability what packs you get for completing a Solo Battle.
6. The weekly leaderboard should be based on the highest Solo Battle game score the players were able to achieve in the respective week.
7. The leaderboard could be used to give away a special prize as part of Good Morning Madden (GMM) to give the (non-competitive) community a more prominent role in GMM.

My suggestions are based on my experiences playing almost every game in the last 3 years where I started as a Madden newbie but became a top 10 contender in MUT Solo Battles (on PC). With my suggestions I would like to contribute improving the mode so that it provides both fun (even over a long period of time while avoiding potential frustration due to DNFs, bugs, etc.) and worthwhile rewards for all players, while it does not incentivize 1) searching for and exploiting (glitch) plays and 2) doing the same plays all the time again and again in order to maximize rewards by ranking top 100.

Since there are no other Solo modes (playing with your lineup) available that could be repeated and still provide rewards as many times as desired, Solo Battles might fill this gap. At the moment, the amount of rewards to be gained by playing available Solo games is limited because there is only a limited number of Solo Challenges available (while you could play an unlimited number of H2H games allowing you to earn tons of coins and packs just by playing).

The opportunity to restart Solo Battle games would furthermore decrease (and minimize) the frustration facing a DNF. Due to various bugs, DNFs (and the caused frustration) seemed to be a huge issue in Madden 21 so far.

The opportunity to chose the opponent’s OVR would allow players to play challenging games depending on their own skills and lineup strength. If the rewards in terms of coins consider the opponent’s OVR (an “OVR adjustment factor“ comparing your opponent’s OVR to your own OVR, e.g. if you play with a OVR 70 lineup against a team with OVR 80, you would get more coins than playing with a OVR 99 lineup against this opponent), there would be an incentive to play against stronger teams. But since the amount of coins depends on your skills score, playing against a much stronger team would not convert in a much higher reward (because your skills score will be probably lower and the OVR adjustment factor might not balance out the lower skills score resulting in a lower amount of rewarded coins.

After completing a Solo Battle, the total Solo Battle score could be used to calculate a likelihood to get (better) packs. For instance, if you score less than 5k Solo Battle points, you get a Hail Mary Pack, if you score 5k-10k you will get at least a Hail Mary Pack but have a chance to receive a midfield pack. The closer to 10k your score, the higher the probability (e.g. for 75 Solo Battle score points, your odds to receive a Midfield pack increase by 1 percentage point. When scoring exactly 5k (12.5k), you will have a probability of 0% (100%) to receive a Midfield pack). The same pattern could be applied for 12.5k to 20k (i.e. the probability of receiving a Redzone pack increases by 1 percentage point with every 75 Solo Battle score points. If you are unlucky, you will at least receive a Midfield pack). If you are able to score 20k to 25k, your probability to win a TD pack increases by 1 percentage point with every 50 Solo Battle score points.

I would want to see the proposals mentioned in the previous paragraph as a starting point to balance the reward system. For instance, it is definitely important to adapt the Solo Battle score according to the chosen opponent’s average OVR. Otherwise, players would always choose a 61 OVR in order to maximize the Solo Battle score and easily win a good pack. I’d therefore suggest to add a bonus-malus correction factor depending on the relative OVR of your opponent: the higher the difference between the player’s OVR and his opponent’s OVR, the higher the bonus (or malus). I’m thinking of the following formula: for every OVR point (up to 10) your opponent’s team is stronger than yours, you will get a bonus of 1 percentage point added to your Solo Battle score. But for x OVR points (up to 10) your own lineup is stronger than your opponent’s OVR, you will get a malus of x2 percent deducted from your Solo Battle score. For instance, if your own team has an OVR average of 80 and your opponent of 90, your Solo Battle score will increase by 10 percent. On the other hand, if your OVR is 90 and that of your opponent is 80, your Solo Battle score will be 0 (because -102 = -100), but if you played against a 81 OVR team, the deduction would only be 81% (=92). This adjustment would avoid that players choose to play against 61 OVR teams only because it is easy to get high Solo Battle scores (which would then translate into favourable odds of receiving good packs). In other words, the bonus-malus correction would incentivize playing against stronger teams but would punish playing games against weak opponents (=> Solo Battles should be challenging!).

Finally, if the weekly leaderboard is not directly linked to rewards, it would still be nice for players to see the ranking showing how good they have been compared to other players. Furthermore, if your highest Solo Battles score of the week would be used to define your odds of winning special giveaways during Good Morning Madden (once a week?), there would be still an incentive (in terms of receiving rewards too) to rank high in the weekly leaderboard. For instance, you could square the Solo Battle score to determine the weight with which a player is likely to be drawn in the draw for special GMM prizes. A numerical example: a player with his personal weekly maximum score of 20k would be 400 times more likely to win a prize than someone with only 1k (400 = (20k*20k) / (1k * 1k)). Compared to a player with a weekly top score of 10k, the likelihood would be 4 times higher (4 = (20k*20k) / (10k * 10k)). 

On the other hand, the incentive to exploit glitches (or other cheats) would be much lower, since higher scores (which might be feasible by using glitches) would not automatically convert into rewards. Players most likely will decide in favor of having fun playing instead of using glitches and monotonous playing just for a slightly higher likelihood of winning a giveaway. From my point of view, it would also increase the visibility and inclusion of the community in Good Morning Madden.

One final remark: the worst thing that could happen (at least from my perspective) is to further reduce the amount of rewards players could earn from Solo modes (in particular from Solo Battles). This would further increase incentives for players to search for alternative sources to get packs or coins (buying coins, using secondary accounts, etc.). I guess it is important to implement a mechanism in order to avoid that one could use bots (or similar cheats) to farm rewards. But if the only reason for not improving a MUT Solo mode is because it could be abused by a few cheaters, then MUT as a game (and business model) has a really serious problem.

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