Attributes are responsible for determining a player’s quality, and knowing them well can give you the opportunity to choose your team more efficiently. In this new series presented by Silvio Teixeira – also the author of tête-à-tête – you’ll have the opportunity to go deeper on each one of the game’s attributes according to the new FIFA 16 rules. Welcome to “Learning about FIFA 16 attributes”.
The Influences of the FIFA 16 Attributes
Understanding the FIFA attributes is very important, so we started this article series to inform you about each attribute, putting everything into small details. A bar discussion kind of vibe is what we’re used to having here, we share ideas, experiences and redirect subjects according to what the customer prefers. We’ll carry on talking about each one of the attributes, although today we’ll focus a bit more on a subject that came up in our talks recently, which attributes are more important for each position, their relevance not only mentioning whether they have low or high importance but also doing that with exact percentages. Chatting with the lads Cícero Nunes, Henrique and Doug I thought it would be interesting to go a little deeper in the importance of attributes by position and which specific attributes have more influence on each one of the six major attribute calculations. We reckon it’ll be easier to go with the flow explaining the rest of the attributes separately after we approach the theme this way.
The major attributes
As you should know we have six major attributes: pace, shooting, passing, dribbling, defending and physicality. However, there are 28 specific attributes which determine the final value of the major ones, this way in case you want a good dribbler it isn’t enough to just look at the Dribbling major attribute, you also need to see Agility, Balance and Ball Control (plus the specific attribute Dribbling). This happens to every single attribute. Besides, these specific attributes don’t all have the same weight, some weigh more for the final composition. Be sure to take a look:
Pace:
Acceleration e Sprint Speed
We can see that the two attributes have almost the same relevance here. However, Sprint Speed is slightly more important, it weighs 55% over the final calculation for Pace.
Dribbling:
Dribbling, Ball Control, Agility e Balance
Never forget to to tell apart the dribbling specific attribute from the major one which is called the same. In fact, said specific attribute has a 50% weight over the final value, but there are still 50% remaining: 35% for Ball Control and just 15% for Agility and Balance together.
Shooting:
Finishing, Long Shot, Shot Power, Att Positioning, Penalties, Volleys
Shooting is the major attribute that has the biggest number of specific attributes (alongside “passing”). Maybe you don’t consider penalties important to look at because you already have a good taker that’s set to default, so you would just ignore it on other players. However, we’re here to give you the composition of the Shooting value, wanna see how this can be relevant? Suppose you’re checking out Rickie Lampert’s stats and you see he’s worth practically nothing (he’s a non-rare gold) but has an outstanding 81 of Shooting. You might think it’s a pretty good value, but let’s suppose you aren’t gonna choose him just for his penalties specific attribute anyway (which is 96, by the way). Even though penalties weigh only 5% on Shooting, these 96 end up raising the major attribute a lot. Take Tony Kroos as an example, he has the same 81 on Shooting, but since he has only 73 on penalties that means he’s better on the attributes we’re interested in. If both these players had their Penalties attribute reduced to zero, Kroos would end up with 77 of Shooting while Rickie would have only 75. See how one specific attribute can fool you?
Defending:
Marking, Stand Tackle, Interceptions, Heading Acc, Slide Tackle
“Where the hell is speed, Silvio? It’s important for a centre-back!” I’m not saying it isn’t, we’re talking about the composition of the major attribute Defending (DEF). When we do talk about the importance of the attributes by position, then we’ll approach that. The specific attributes contribute more equally this time, there’s only a 20% variation between the lowest and the highest weight.
Passing:
Short Pass, Vision, Crossing, Long Pass, Curve, FK Accuracy
Very important attributes for a FIFA that won’t forgive you for your errors, where even if you do everything right your player might still miss a simple pass, so let’s kneel and praise the Passing attribute for all it’s worth. There are six specific attributes here and, such as what happens with Shooting, we have here some attributes that may not be important to you, but you should always look out for them, otherwise they might give you the wrong idea when you see a high Passing. It’s interesting to point out that, different to what many people think, Short Passes and Long Passes don’t weigh the same. Over the major Passing attribute, short passes weigh 35% while long passes weigh just 15%.
Physical:
Strength, Stamina, Aggression, Jumping
Strength is half this major attribute and it couldn’t be any different, while the other half is composed by Stamina’s 25%, Agression’s 20% and Jumping’s 5%, which still can’t be left forgotten, depending on the player’s position and speciality.
If you look closely you’ll notice there’s one specific attribute that didn’t get into any of the major attribute calculations: Reaction. It’s true, it didn’t, however it participates in the calculation of the player’s Overall Rating and its weigh varies according to his position, but since it’s quite a small influence it’s not really worth it for us to go deeper here in particular.
Attributes by Position
Player overall ratings still confuse many people, and that happens mainly due to untrustworthy sources providing information all over the web, so let’s try and make this clear once and for all here. A player card’s overall is calculated based on the attributes which are considered important for a position, so for example if a centre back has 99 of vision that would do nothing for him, because this attribute isn’t considered important for the calculation of his overall rating. Eventually we’ll see two “apparently equal” players with the same card attributes but different overall ratings, that happens because the less relevant attributes are discarded and don’t make it to the overall calculation.
The table below shows the positions and which attributes weigh to determine the player’s overall rating:
We can see there are some attributes that aren’t considered relevant to determine an overall rating for any position at all. That happens with penalties, curve and free kick accuracy, after all these values are very specific characteristics of some players whilst there’s no direct relation between them and position. One of the best penalty/free kick takers in Brazil is São Paulo’s goalkeeper Rogério Ceni, so you can see there are no position restrictions for this kind of thing.
This way, when we want to choose a centre back, we must have in mind that even though we consider pace important for a player of this position it is not actually considered a crucial characteristic for a good centre back. For EA, a centre back that they “created” who’s supposed to be good has high stats on those attributes from the table. Certainly having good pace will do no harm for a centre back that already has high stats on those main attributes. This is where your preference comes in, maybe you’ll choose a fast centre back over a slower one even though you know he is weaker on heading, for example.
It’s important to mention that we’re not encouraging you to stop looking at the attributes you think are important, we’re doing this to inform you of what EA consider important for a player’s overall rating.
International Reputation – the unknown attribute
On the final calculation for overall rating there’s still one attribute that few people know of: international reputation. In fact we have talked about it here a few times, but it was always kind of let loose, so this is a good time to make everything clearer since we’re already inside the subject.
The additional points are distributed in the following way:
1 star
No Boost
2 stars
No Boost
3 stars
1 extra point for players with overall basis above 50
4 stars
1 extra point for players with overall basis between 34 and 66, 2 extra points for players with 67 of overall basis or more
5 stars
1 extra point for players with overall basis between 29 and 49, 2 extra points for players with overall basis between 50 and 74, 3 extra points for players with 75 of overall basis or more
Now that everything has been cleared up, it’s up to you to decide what’s important for your team, you know what’s going on in EA’s mind but it’s your call. Your choice depends on your play style, maybe you’ll choose heading accuracy for a striker over finishing, or you can have two strikers with different characteristics, swap them how you like, again, it’s up to you. The important thing is to know what characteristic you’re going to explore, as well as your best possible player choices. Once you know what you want you must be aware of which attributes are more important. An example?
Finisher striker – Finishing (85+), Att Positioning(85+), Ball Control(80+)
Ex.: Suarez, Tevez, Benzema, Lacazette
Dribbler striker – Dribbling (85+), Long Shot (80+), Ball Control (80+), Agility(80+)
Ex.: Suarez, Tevez, Jovetic, Giovani dos Santos
We’ll be back with a new attribute next week. Stay tuned!