Yeah, I did. Maybe it was while you were away? Posted on 2/27. (Key piece highlighted in red.)
World Order Of Football Forum (http://www.fof-woof.com/forum/showthread.php?t=8463)
FOF MP Offseason Helps and Hints - Front Office Football Central (http://www.operationsports.com/fofc/showthread.php?t=79247) Quote:
<table border="0" cellpadding="6" cellspacing="0" width="100%"><tbody><tr><td class="alt2" style="border:1px inset"> Originally Posted by The FOF MP Offseason Hints And Tips Thread
...Big-Play Receiving may be more important to a short-passing offense than the conventional wisdom holds.
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I was intentionally a bit understated there. But the more I have thought about it, the more I want to get this out there, mainly because I'd like to know if this is truly an imbalance in FOF, or if it's a case of one guy loading up on a skill that in real life no team would be able to load up on quite so much. And really the only way to know that would be if the BPR guys start getting distributed a bit more evenly.
Here are the key points.
1. I believe that since 6.3, the Big-Play Receiving bar is significantly more important than it used to be.
2. I'd go so far as to say that BPR may well be *the* most important bar for the passing game, and therefore *the* most important single bar (marginally) in FOF.
3. I'm not sure that BPR isn't at least somewhat overpowered now.
DISCLAIMER: I don't have any controlled testing to back this stuff up. This is an observation based primarily on having Solevisioned a few hundred 6.3 and later games in SP and MP. (In the process of typing this up, I did think of a "sniff test" that I can do pretty quickly. I'll do it after I'm done writing up this post.)
#3 above one is hard to judge. What would happen in real life if the same NFL team had three of the 12 fastest receivers in the league, as I do in WOOF, or 3 of the 15 fastest, as I do now in IHOF? Assuming they had other solid receiving skills as well, would they not be open all over the place simply because very few defenses would have the speed to keep up? I suspect that the answer is "it'd never happen in real life. Real-life teams value speed too much to let one team corner the market on it."
But in FOF, we've gotten away from "football thinking," perhaps to a fault. And that is understandable. It's a computer game, and historically using "football thinking" over "computer game thinking" gets you nothing but yet another Top Ten draft pick. For the most part, I agree that the best way to be competitive in FOF is to value "how does this computer game work" over "how does it work in the NFL." However, I am 100% convinced that Jim wants the play-resolution engine to resemble the NFL as closely as possible. I think that in his perfect game, there would be difference in success between the two approaches. Finally, I'm further convinced that 6.3 and 6.3a were significant efforts to do just that.
And with all that as a backdrop, here's some more speculation, based on all that Solevision I've watched...
Apart from the QB's Accuracy, I believe that YAC in FOF2K7 now works basically* like this:
1. dice roll vs. Getting Downfield rating (Agility)-->Does he get any YAC?
2. dice roll vs. Big-Play Receiving rating (40-yard dash)--->If he does get YAC, how far does he go?
It makes pretty basic football sense: the guy who does well in the agility drill is more likely to have the moves to make the first guy miss, and the faster the guy is, the more likely he outruns everyone after that if the angles are right. The above is also consistent with what I'm seeing in Solevision. Also, when I mentioned this theory in FOxL the other day, RKG responded with a comment that his TE in WOOF (very high GD, very low BPR) seems to have a ton of 6-yard YAC plays, but rarely/never any big YAC gains.
To be fair, there's a chance that other factors that I've changed recently have contributed to a marked increase in offensive production for me (particularly in YAC.) Most notably, I'm spending significantly more time on passing in TC than the default setting. That could play into it, too.
Quote:
<table border="0" cellpadding="6" cellspacing="0" width="100%"><tbody><tr><td class="alt2" style="border:1px inset"> Originally Posted by Part of an email I wrote to Solecismic Support on Thursday
I'm putting up some pretty crazy numbers in MP again, and I wanted to let you know what I'm doing. I can't pin down exactly what it is that's causing it, because I've made several changes in my approach as a GM.
Here's what I'm doing differently, and I'm guessing the answer is in here.
1. Focusing almost exclusively on Big Play Receiving for my WRs and TEs.
2. Changing training camp settings from the default. Specifically, I'm doing the following {EDIT: Exact times changed to leave *something* for myself http://www.fof-ihof.com/forums/images/smilies/icon_wink.gif}:
a. Lower special teams to ___ minutes.
b. Lower film study to ___ minutes when I have a QB (as is the case in the league I'm looking at now) with as many formations as I think he'll learn
c. {EDIT: Irrelevant to this league. I was speaking of CCFL here, where I lower the training room times because of a low injury setting.}
d. Up pass practice to ___
e. Up run practice to _____
f. Up Team Functions to ______
3. Heavy focus on chemistry.
My CCFL team put up a ypa over 10 this year. Using the same strategies, I just had a 37/37 IHOF QB put up 8.5 ypa and a 44/44 WOOF QB has a 125ish rating and 10.2 ypa.
While it could be a combination of "doing everything right," with all the changes, I tend to suspect that Big-Play Receiving may be the factor that's a bit overpowered here. The WOOF team doesn't have a WR rated overall over 64, but the top three WRs have BPR or 98, 92, and 87. The top TE has a 78, and every backup WR has a 63 or better. The worst TE has a 53. My Getting Downfield ratings are solid as well, but nothing like the BPR. I think it's at least worth checking if there's a balance issue here.
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*--There are probably other factors involved. I'm just saying that the two dice rolls I mention above seem to be the most important.