Glitch in NCAA09 Corrupts Custom Rosters

About two weeks ago we reported that this is crunch time for the independent roster editors for NCAA 09, which goes to the street today. But as this video — of NCAA 09’s roster screen — shows, using a third-party edited file can can corrupt a team’s depth chart and its overall rating, if not delete the team entirely, until EA can patch the game.

For roster editors, this is a setback in a niche that has prided itself on near-instantaneous turnaround of complete roster files by the date the game drops. EA, we’re told, is working feverishly on a patch to resolve this problem. But for now, anyone who downloads any roster file should avoid editing it; and those who do choose to edit it should do so offline, as doing so online risks corruption and can crash the game, according to our source.

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The corruption — and this could be a total shot in the dark — appears to involve nonstandard ASCII characters in certain players’ names in the roster file, such as the infamous A’Mod Ned of Florida International

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If you intend to game with custom roster files on NCAA Football, you probably should not use them until you see that the game has downloaded a patch from Electronic Arts.

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The main rub of this is that the only person to release a complete set of rosters for the 360 is Pasta Padre. He released them over a week ago (a full week before the game's street date), and refuses to say how he got them. Others who have started from scratch editing rosters have found that after a while, their game will crash, and it's impossible to get any further into the roster editing process, essentially making a full roster impossible to make. So, they have been trying to use his as a base, and simply correct a lot of his mistakes (spelling mistakes, equipment on the player, etc), but then it was found that after editing a few schools, teams were completely disappearing from the game (schools like WKU and Troy, among others), and other schools were having their rankings set to 0.

Right now, the only solutions are as such:

1. Wait for EA's patch, which they have developers who have posted on various boards around the net saying they are definitely looking into this pretty hard.
2. Find and use Pasta Padre's roster file, if you can live with some spelling mistakes and such.

Personally, I'm going with option 2, because what do I care if some random player on some other team I don't care about has their name misspelled? Plus, after 4 seasons, most everyone will be pushed out and all generated names and players will take their place.

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