Interview With OS Member studbucket, College Football 26 Round-Up, and Our New Discord

It’s another big week in the sports game world as Madden 26 hits super duper early access on Thursday August 7 (one week before the official launch). It should be available around 12 p.m. EST and that’s a universal launch date for everyone. It will be available for anyone who bought “premium” versions of the game, which does include those who did the bundle pack with CFB and Madden. My plan is to have some brief first impressions in Friday’s newsletter since I’ll be there along with everyone else who pre-ordered on Thursday afternoon.

The other big note is OS now has an “official” Discord and anyone can join right now. We’ve kicked around Discords for individual games in the past, but it felt like the right time to make it more of an official thing. Steve and I have wanted to get this going for a bit because we obviously still hear y’all who are unhappy with some stuff on the forums, plus when there are forum outages we still want to have a place for everyone to hang. My overarching goal for the longer term is to have both Discord and the forums ultimately work together. There are some logistical issues with the vBulletin forums that don’t allow things to sync right with Discord so there will be a little maneuvering as we try to get mods and forum members any proper roles/tags they need on the Discord, but we can work through that stuff easily enough as people join.

Our general goal is to give people more options to interact with OS community members, whether that’s Discord, the forums, this newsletter, or improved apps. If people want to stick more to the forums, that’s cool. If people want to stick more to the Discord, that’s also cool. In my perfect world, we do a lot of BSing and day-to-day chatting on the Discord about games and sports, and then more of the “in-depth” discussions or hefty things like long slider breakdowns or analysis of gameplay end up on the forums so we can have that as sort of a “best of” area for anything OS community related. That said, you all will ultimately shape how the ecosystem shakes out, I just want to give you spaces you like so you can have a good time with other folks in the community.

As for today’s newsletter, I’ve long wanted to do this interview with OSer studbucket, and he’s been extremely patient with me as I gave him a bit of a runaround while figuring out when this premium newsletter would be launching a couple months back. I’m happy to finally share that interview with him today. In addition, since we do have a packed sports game schedule the next couple months (and I care a lot about quality aggregation), my plan is to try and give anyone who is super into each game as many resources as possible to keep tabs on it even if I don’t focus as much on it in the short term as I bounce to each new release.

College Football 26 is first up on the list, so today’s newsletter will involve me sharing a lot of links to everything from franchise playthroughs to sliders, so you can always have this specific edition of the newsletter available to you as a resource. By the way, CFB 26 dropped a new patch this morning, and it should be a big one (but no roster update as of yet).

I also want to thank anyone who has already signed up as a Supporter for this newsletter. The 30-day free trial offer is up for now, but I hope to continue to see more folks sign up over time (you can sign-up for just $4 a month). The newsletter schedule has already been changed up during this first month, but in the near future I’m still planning a fun retro deep dive of NFL GameDay as the 30th anniversary is this year, plus at least one Madden 26 deep dive of some sort.

Anywho, without further delay, let’s jump into the interview with OS legend studbucket.

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