European needs help (basic questions)

[Tures]

Hello there!
I've been watching the NFL since this season, and although I have worked myself into the game using FOF7, I still have plenty of beginner questions, and I'll just shoot straight away:

1. What is a veteran holdout? Why can players stop working and demand a higher (ludicrous) salary (which even exceeds the salary cap by far)

2. What is actually a good value for players? I'm used to the FIFA system ("soccer"), where there is no salary cap and therefore you can easily field a first team of 80-100 rated players and backup/youth players in the 70s.

Is a "43 Average" Right Guard actually decent? As an example, this guy has 60 Run blocking,
9 pass blocking,
66 Blocking strength and
16 Endurance

3. Continuation of 2, I drafted Wide Receivers with combines all in the blacks and using this as a reference. (http://www.operationsports.com/fofc/showthread.php?t=89290&highlight=combine+bar) How come they are all scouted as "30 - fair" at best? He was a 2nd round pick aswell.. Are the prospects after round ~1 or 2 really that bad? Is there no hidden diamond at all?

4. Due to the salary cap, I usually switch out current players (free agents) who are below 50 with other free agents on the market. I'm more used to keeping a squad and developing it from other games- am I doing this right?


5. How do I tell my couches or whoever to play a 3-4 defense most of the time, or a 4-3?

6. Combine accuracy. What the hell is this? I had it set to 100 for a while to help me drafting. I then sometimes picked people with high bars because I thought that 100% accuracy = what you see is what you get

And lastly, a few questions about the game itself/"multiplayer":

7. I want to simulate an entire season with as minimal player input as possible, ie. AI vs AI. I literally want to do nothing.

8. I saw this wonderful site (http://www.younglifenorthdekalb.com/ccfl/ben/home.php) filled with statistics (from the .CSVs you can export I assume), and was wondering how I can set up something similar? Webhosting is no problem at all, I just want to know if there's a template or some other easy way to doing this, since I saw another page with this exact same setup.

I thank you guys in advance for all your help and taking the time to bother with this thread! You're also welcome to add drafting tips, as that's currently my favourite part in the game :D

[corbes]

At a general level I would recommend starting here: FOF2K7 Reference Thread - Front Office Football Central (http://www.operationsports.com/fofc/showthread.php?t=63429). It's for an older version of the game, but most of the underlying theory remains more or less the same...

1. A holdout is refusing to play unless you pay him more money. You can renegotiate or try to wait him out, but if you wait him out he might not return or he might hold a grudge and refuse to resign at the season's end. You might not agree with the player's estimation of his value; that decision is up to you. It's not accurate that the player's request would ever exceed the salary cap.

2. Replacement level varies by position but is generally somewhere in mid-high 30s plus or minus.

3-4. Cannot answer the questions. Keep playing the game and enjoy!

5. It's on one of the defensive gameplanning screens, miscellaneous options I think.

6. See the in-game help file.

7. You can't do it all in one shot, but check the single-player in-game boxes to have staff handle as much as possible.

8. Those are the proprietary work of one commissioner. Code your own if you like!

[Tures]

Okay, thank you.
You guys seem to be very reserved about your information on this board :D
I'd probably do the same if I was playing MP, but it makes getting into the game a bit harder for a greenhorn.

I still don't understand combine accuracy though, whats supposed to be accurate, the bars or the values?

[rush_27]

I wouldn't say anybody is reserved about giving information. To be honest most of your questions could be answered by doing a simple search of the forums or by pressing F1 in game.

Take it from a fellow European who has had the game less than a year

[Dutch]

#4 - Players build chemistry with your team the more seasons they play with you. Perhaps a good rule of thumb is to add 5 ratings points for each year a player is on your team (probably should put a ceiling in that at 20 points or so).

A 40/40 player on your team that's been there for 6 seasons is more valuable than a 50/50 player in his first. Unless you are building for the future, it makes sense to keep the squad together as much as possible.

[Dutch]

#3 ) Combines. Bars are the primary focus and combines help you determine if the bars will go up or down over time.

Combine Color Coding

Red: Superior
Blur: Good
Black: Above average, average, below average
Green: Way below average

[Dutch]

#8 - Ben E Lou, Cuervo, VPI97 all were great influences on me to the point I started doing this myself. Its not for the faint of heart though, unless you are spread a web developer...I spent a lot of time learning HTML, PHP, and MySQL (and Photoshop)....but finally started making ground once SQL querying became easy enough for me to build what outputs I wanted. It literally took me years (scattered free time) to get close to their level....and by close, I mean, compared to most of you suckers! I'm still far away from them in terms of fluency and ease of implementation. Before FOFMP and web-sites, I was basically a web-site Neanderthal....now I'm an 18th century web-site gentleman. If you have any specific questions, PM me.

[Tures]

I wouldn't say anybody is reserved about giving information. To be honest most of your questions could be answered by doing a simple search of the forums or by pressing F1 in game.

Take it from a fellow European who has had the game less than a year
Most of it seemed pretty dated to me, that's why I asked (I have been lurking for a week or so, but reading 2004 posts stating players should go to summer camp seemed pretty pointless to me)

#3 ) Combines. Bars are the primary focus and combines help you determine if the bars will go up or down over time.

Combine Color Coding

Red: Superior
Blur: Good
Black: Above average, average, below average
Green: Way below average
That's awesome to know. I've always looked at their combines and partly ignored their bars

[Dawgfan19]

6. [/B]Combine accuracy. What the hell is this? I had it set to 100 for a while to help me drafting. I then sometimes picked people with high bars because I thought that 100% accuracy = what you see is what you get

Here's additional info regarding combine accuracy. From the in-game help:

The Combine Accuracy setting determines how closely player combine results reveal a player's ratings. This can be set from 0 (least accurate) to 100 (most accurate). A setting of 50 is considered average, though this makes the combine quite accurate. This setting applies to both single- and multi-player games where you are the commissioner.

Also, with the release of V7.2, there was a fairly significant change to combine accuracy.

Version 7.2 Released - Front Office Football Central (http://www.operationsports.com/fofc/showthread.php?t=91032&highlight=39)

[Tures]

Also, what about masked bars? I keep reading about those in drafting threads, is most of that still applicable? Do I pick players who have paired "masked bars"?

[corbes]

Each draft class is about 800 players. In the most competitive MP leagues, most players can reliably identify the best players in the draft by considering all of the information made available about the player, including the bars, the combine numbers, the player's draft bureau rating, volatility, age, % developed, interview results, etc. All of the information tells you something, and the art is to figure out what it's telling you. Is the information consistent? If not, what are the different clues telling you?

It's an art, not a science. It's impossible to reduce this to concrete advice because the best players are relying on literally *years* of looking at thousands upon thousands upon thousands of draftees and learning how to see the information. I sincerely can't be more specific about this, not because I'm withholding information, but because the variations are so many. If I told you to look for something, it would be incomplete advice because there are so many variables. It's not one thing in particular; it's the totality of the circumstances for each player.

Put another way, masked pairs are a rather esoteric strategy for finding one of the very few needles in a haystack in competitive MP drafts--and one that produces more misses than hits. By focusing on masked pairs, you'd be missing the many more good players that exist. For this reason, as someone new to the game, you're MUCH better off learning to look at the whole player than getting into the weeds with a microscope.

[Dawgfan19]

Also, what about masked bars? I keep reading about those in drafting threads, is most of that still applicable? Do I pick players who have paired "masked bars"?

I don't recall any specific studies, but I believe most GMs believe masked bars no longer apply in V7.X.