FOF 9 Q & A thread
 

I figured it may be helpful for a thread where people can ask quick questions that may not be worthy of their own thread…

Don’t have the game yet and have a quick question?

Or have the game and not sure where to find something? Ask away!

I do - Injured reserve. Lost a DE and have to place him on IR but damn if I can figure it out.

If injured to the level of IR on his player card under Action: drop down menu should be the option I think.

I do not have any injured players to confirm.

Q: How can I change player position? Cannot find any option for this on roster/player etc. Simmed through a season thinking perhaps it was a training camp only option, but nothing.

As the depth chart does not allow you to play players out of position, regardless of experience, of their fit this is creating some problems for me on the defensive front.

In the players card, drop down menu.

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/b3fk1...v3hzrm39r&dl=0

I found it, player card, right side buried in c aouple of other data fields. Was easy to overlook.

Update - found it but even though I select to place him on IR it doesn't. Activate, deactivate work. He is out for 22 weeks so I know thats not an issue.

How to I change the team nicknames for the default file?

How do I activate multiplayer leagues? Jk. Waiting for the Alright Boyz thread for FOF10 already!

In the player profile page you can hit the "Select an action" drop down and one of the options will be "Change player's position".

I don't want to run a 3-4 defense. Do I need a new defensive coordinator?

Is there any way to print out rosters like you could in previous versions?

How do you change the team names to reflect NFL? Couldn't find that menu.

It’s an acknowledged bug that will be fixed with an update…hopefully soon

Yes, the defensive front is what your d coordinator runs. I did report an issue with the fronts the current coaches are running, as my Commanders in the game are running a 3-4 even though they 100% under Del Rio run a 4-3 (albeit an extremely poor 4-3).

It has to be updated in the default data folder in both the team_info file and the default_teams folder.

Look in the FOF9 Graphics thread as NawlinsFan provided a file you can copy and paste.

I created a folder on my desktop, save a copy of all the original files unedited, and then replaced those files in game with the edited versions.

I prefer to play custom fictional leagues as opposed to the NFL ..

Am I correct in saying that if I want to create a fictional league where I have specific say over where the teams are located and what they are called, I need to completely edit all aspects of the default teams csv file for the specific league structure I want to use, then select "use default teams" when creating the league?

Because the alternative only allows me to basically pick how many teams I want in each country, then the game just creates cities and nicknames, and there's really no way to adjust the team cities/nickname after league creation?

Is all the above accurate?

I'm still a ways away from starting my 'real' league, but just wanted to be sure I had the format correct for how to go about it.

I'm with you Cole and am looking at the same thing. Yes, I do believe you have to edit the csv files to align with the specifics of the league you want. So team names, colors, stadium data, etc. within the default_teams and team_info csv files. I am going to try to do one with the fantasy stuff I have and see how it goes.

Hopefully in the future Jim may come up with an easier way to do this as this can be a lot of work and trial and error.

In game I review the stadium info for the league in a 32 team NFL structure using the supplied team_info.csv and there are a number of errors with incorrect stadium types. Yet when I look into the csv file it appears, to these old eyes, to be correct. I can't track down the issue.

Yeah it’s a shame that the game took some big steps forward in customization (different league size options, player portraits etc), but seemingly a huge step back in ease of use and customization functionality.

I consider myself fairly computer savvy, but it’s looking like it will be some arduous work to get my league up and running.


If you do get any custom CSV files set up, I’d love to see them!

I can see Ben collecting those that the community puts together in a thread here on the site to allow everyone to access and try them.

Maybe I missed the setting … but is there a way to change the name of the league championship game from the Front Office Bowl ?

I know this isn't the place for bug reports but I just wanted to confirm I'm seeing what I'm seeing before I email Jim and ensure I haven't just messed something up on my end ...

I've done a couple 20 year sims just to see what the world looks like after a couple of decades ...these are with smaller worlds ..16 to 24 teams...

And when I look through the players in the Hall of Fame, or career earnings page ... many of them are only showing 3 or so years of actual stats.. then the rest of their years played is just zeroes across the board for everything ...

Anyone else witnessing this or just me? I'm a bit perplexed ...

this...once they get ironed out

"league_info.csv" has the field for Championship.

I've pretty much only clicked through screens to look around so haven't actually seen it in game, but I would assume it will be there.

.

Yes it works. I have mine set to Super Bowl and it shows correctly in the game.

False alarm on my end, caused by lack of hard drive space ...

PSA: Make sure you've got hard drive space - Front Office Football Central

:banghead:

Does the game have salary cap carryover from one year to another? It's been so long since I played it that this wasn't a rule in the NFL when I played...

A page has been added in the documentation with more detail on customizing the files.


data_customization [Front Office Football Nine Documentation]

Position Distribution
 

I haven't been able to find a Position Distribution screen like FOF8 had on the roster screen that let you know how many of each position were required to be active to play a game. Any help would be appreciated!
Thanks.

Its on the depth charts tab on the active tab. Bottom of the screen.

Have experienced this as well switching from a 3-4 DC to a 4-3 DC and still having the defense run as a 3-4. Possible there's something I'm missing but I think the defense is just a bit buggy yet.

Other than that though I am really enjoying the new version of the game so far.

Has anyone figured out if there is a way to export the game data to csv? In FOF 8 you could export all of the data including the game logs to csv or html. I can't seem to find this option in this version.

Has anyone been able to successfully import their FOF 8 playbooks to FOF 9?
I just got the game today and I tried using the load playbook action then navigated over to the file path for FOF 8 playbooks but nothing shows unfortunately.

There doesn't appear to be a way to print out rosters, game stats, etc. FOF8 used to accomplish this by way of a web browser but I'll be darned if I see a way to do this in-game. Am I missing something simple here?

If someone doesn’t mind answering:

In FOF8, you could see the relevant attribute values for position groups of your team’s roster in list form, but not for any other teams’ rosters. Has this changed? Thank you in advance for any feedback.

Dangit, how did I miss that? Much appreciated!

what are you all setting combine accuracy to? By default it's 100% which seems odd.

I don't think it's necessarily a %...

From the manual ...

The manual goes over where to put team logos and player portraits, and the naming convention ... but where do you put/how do you name a league logo file?

Looks like the key files are SolecismicXXX.bmp located in C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Front Office Football Nine\artwork

great thanks. Do we not have a view anymore showing both the overall/future overall and contract years remaining. That is how i would resign players at a glance being able to see who's contract is expiring and their skill/potential.

Even the draft summary not showing the amount of games they've played is a head scratcher. Really sad to see some changes like that. The honors addition is nice, but why remove stats when more should've been added.

Active/Inactive display. I found that theres an issue with an injured player being displayed as inactive. Their name remains red due to the injury even if you do deactivate them. Then as you scrub your roster to ensure you have your 47 aligned the only way you can ensure they are inactive is to go to the player card and check the action drop down.

It would be nice/easier if there was a way to show they are injured as well as being inactive like a non-injured player just from the roster screen.


* Disregard. Just use thge drop down "Filter" on the roster page. For some reason I had completely disregarded it.

I lost a player to a league decision for some inappropriate off field activity. He was suspended for 4 games. Just prior to the 5th game there was a notice that the league upheld his suspension and he is still uneligible to play. We were on a bye for week 6 and now going into week 7 and he is still uneligible.

Does this seem right? Anyone else run into anything similar?


*Update: The player was reinstated after a total of 7 weeks (6 games and the bye) instead of the intial 4 assigned by the league

Yeah, I switched from 43 to 34 and can still put Tampa in my D gameplans. In fact, the game is using 43 alignments for some reason. (I'm Buffalo.):

100 is the new 50 for Combine Correlation. The range is now 0-200, rather than 0-100.

Ok, looking for more feedback. Anyone have a crash to desktop?


I was playing a saved file and had progressed through an additional 7 weeks. On the 8th I made the usual roster preps and proceeded to start the game running it on the fastest setting with coach calling plays. Suddenly the game simply closed out. I immediately went back in and opened the file again only to find that everything I had done from earlier had not been saved and lost when the game crashed.

I know, save often. Still curious if anyone else has experienced this.

Did we lose PBP (log) player grades? Love that in Eight.

Can we still watch other team games? For example, if my team isn't in the Front Office Bowl, I could watch the game in FOF 8. Looks to be gone except if I am missing the button.

You can go in the game book and watch the replay. If you mean with no spoilers, than no (that I know of )

Am I blind? I can't find any way to coach the games. Only option I see is run til...

Under League/Scores there's a checkbox for "Show/Control Your Team's Game". Then when you "Run Today's Actions" on a game day, it'll take you to the game. Not really intuitive, I agree.

Has anyone checked when the last time you can extend contracts? Both saved careers I have aren't in-season, but I'm thinking you might not have to do it before Week 1 now. Can anyoone verify?

This function is not working for me. I see Jim has annotated it for review in his notes, so that's good.

If you are trying to put a seriously injured player on IR, a workaround at this time is to set "AI Makes Minor Roster Decisions" and "AI Handles Depth Chart" sim a day, and I suppose you can turn those back off, but I'm just going to leave them on until I that works.

Minor aesthetic issue. On the league overview page, all the individual leaders logo appears to be their home state and not their actual team. For Team Statistic leaders, they use a snippet of their larger logos and not the small (or shrunk) logos.

On the trade screen I was trying to make a draft trade and I can only put 1 draft choice up on the screen. If I put another draft pick up there, the previous draft pick goes back to the bin as they say. If you put the other teams pick there it makes your pick, go away as well. It makes it hard to make a trade. It appears the best you can do is hit receive offer for one pick and see what the computer offers you. Personally, I like the previous versions where you could add or delete as needed. Hopefully, this can be fixed or changed in the future for more flexibility.

One more question. In the help files there was good information on weight for each players offence and defense type, however there was no height information which would have given you a complete picture of what to look for in a player. Does anyone know the height specs the corresponding weights?

I just simmed forward to test. You can now extend players all the way up to the bowl. Woot!

Correct, the new design is to only allow you to offer a player or pick and have the AI finish the offer.

I absolutely love this new method, mostly because it allowed me to acquire 28 picks in the next draft. Unfortunately, I hate the new version of drafting so I've dug myself into an awfully deep hole. :banghead:

Has anyone else seen crazy numbers in the income statement?
 

Playing a game with the Browns and the first season they lost $168,530,000 in jersey sales which resulted in a loss of 181,500,000.

Anyone else see anything like this?

It's the Browns, they had to pay someone to take the jerseys away!




--- sorry, couldn't pass it up.

Hello, a noob here. Looking to purchase FOF9, but have a couple of question. #1: Can you run the game like a commissioner and not as a single team. #2: Can you start this league in a prior year (ie: 80's,90's, etc)?

How do I pull up the box scores? Used to be able to do it in the same screen when simulating so i could see the score. Now I have to click to other areas like the schedule. And when in the box score you used to be able to see it all in one area…now it’s a drop down list taking more clicks. These items really feel like a step backwards

Maybe they had to do their own DeShaun jersey buyback?

But....the actual interface won't allow you to go over 100. Filing this one as a bug (or at minimum a discrepancy between the manual and the actual functionality of the game.)

I successfully laid the foundation for a new universe representing the USFL/XFL merger as a test bed. Everything seems to be in place but there is one issue and I didn't see it on Jims list and may report it.

I had previously noted issues with the base games stadium configurations. With this one I set everything up and when I go in-game the team, date opened and location are all good. After that it looks like the game altered the information pulling it from somewhere else.

I had all open air stadiums with capacities ranging from 45k-49k, all grass and all with the same condition setting to level set the league. All of these were changed.

I would appreciate any feedback from anyone else creating a universe to see if they are encountering any issues.

Another observed issue with league creation. I set the league exhibition games to 0 yet in game they defaulted back to 4. I need to go through each of the games csv's to ensure theres no redundancy. I did find two instances of CAP and salary settings in two different files.

So, as far as I can tell there is no way, at the moment, to change any team primary/secondary colors once a league is created?

Thus far the game has been unplayable for me. I'm unable to advance to the first exhibition game. When I go to sim the next day, a new screen briefly flashes then goes away. Anyone else having this issue?

Huh. That's odd. I've quick-simmed well over a hundred seasons now, and also have played (with the AI handling nothing) several full seasons. Maybe the playbook isn't full? Maybe look around the screen for an error message? (I've noticed that some of the messages are no longer popups, but simply an on-screen note saying you can't move forward until you do X.)

Thanks Ben... that was the problem. In this particular universe I had created a playbook with 190 plays. Apparently you MUST have 200. There was no on-screen or pop-up error message that alerted me to that.

You can go to the team's Change Logo screen and there's a button to change primary and secondary color. Feels like it's meant for you to bring in a default .bmp of generic colors (like a block "A", for example) and use that to colorize the .bmp (so your "A" is now blue), but it doesn't seem to change the team color on the highlighted tab.

Plus, I would like a lot more screens and tables to use the team colors. There are so many screens that are just a wall of text and coloring the team name would help differentiate players and offer a bit more immersion.

Make sure your depth charts are complete/valid before playing game.

Is there a way to adjust # of carries between running backs? Say I want one guy to get around 80% of the carries with backup getting 20%.

I've seen this as well...it's on the list of bugs to fix.

I don't think it changes anything, long term. I can change those things, save the logo, but next time I come there (and in the few places I think the colors are being used) everything is reset to what I assume is in the save file.

Ah well, its only a trial league, so I can work out what I need to do for my first real run! :)

Ok, beyond frustrated - again. :banghead: I have completed 3 test universes, the latest a 1970. I built the team info file paying attention to everything. Even detailed a number of teams with pending stadium development within the next 5 years. yet when I go in-game and pull the stadium data it is all over the place and hardly looks like the info file. Deleting the saved file and regenerating another has the same effect but not the exact same result.

This has become beyond annoying as I continue to try to do this. I cannot identify the disconnect, damn!

I know there are other priorities that Jim is concerned with but this is even an an issue with the base files and something really needs to be looked at to try and determine what the cause may be. If I am doing something wrong and missing something, tell me.

I am trying to resign my players and keep getting "Offer Error" Unable to locate player....Anyone else got this or know what it means?

I was able to edit the csv files to rename the NFL teams, but if I want to create a customer league of 16 teams, how can I pick the cities and name the teams? Can this even be done?

This was identified as an issue for the first day of free agency (which is supposed to be reserved for resigning your own players). You'll have to advance a day and skip that benefit (until the patch comes out which will address that).

I can imagine the frustration. I don't know if he'll get to this right away, but if it's any consolation, I'm willing to bet he'll investigate it.

Are we not allowed to submit for stadium upgrades at the end of the season as we were in FOF8? I am currrently at that stage and only see an option to build a new stadium.


Next up, another observation. Not sure how easy this would be to do but it is a must if the game will allow and support historical mods.

Submitting a stadium plan. Is there an easy method of having the cost align itself to the leagues current year. An explanation that will provide some insight. It's 1970, we just finished our first season and as we move forward attempt to submit a stadium modification plan but the only option is a new build. The cheapest comes in at over $1.4B. Yes, thats a "B". No way it should cost that much in 1970 dollars. The Superdome, completed in 1975, only cost $134M.

Submitting ticket prices. Same as above. The prices as set on universe creation are a bit outlandish. Example, one team in 1970 had their upper deck seats going for $166 with the rest crawling up the scale to a ridiculous $390k for a luxury box. Hell, same team showed a family of 4 would pay over $2100 to attend a game. Again, not representative of the leagues current year, 1970 going into 1971.

Yes. Same way you edited the csv files to change the NFL names … you just need to find the league structure you want to use in the default teams csv and change the cities/nicknames to what you want, then create a universe and use default data with that structure.

I was actually curious about that. Are the team colours used in differing places in the game, and if so where ?

I had always just assumed those colors were only there to dictate how the default logos would be colored.

The only other place I've seen the colors, unfortunately, is to color in which tab you're on.

where do you actually play in a game? I've only seen where I can simulate the game. Been looking for the button and can't for the life of me find it.

I'll quote my previous reply.

td catches on Offense season summary screen

Does it throw anyone else off that "good" ratings in FOF are shades of red? That runs pretty counterintuitive to other games (namely OOTP), but in general in ratings/games red = bad, but here someone rated 90 and up is all red?

Has anyone found a way to edit the names of the prospects in the draft?

Maybe it doesn't bother anyone else, but to piggyback my own comment....

The colors aren't even consistent within the game. For example QB/WR chemistry ... green is good/positive chemistry, red is bad/negative chemistry.

Which is the way it logically makes sense to be.

Yet for player ratings it's the flipped... red is "great/excellent" or "positive" ratings ... Green is for mid-range values ...

Then combine ratings seem to be on a different color scale as well .. the best-rated guys seem to be somewhere in a yellow to orange scale color ...but then there's also green, blue and white on the way down ...

Maybe I'm missing something and I stand to have this better explained to me.

But to my mind for a game where quickly seeing things at a glance is important, being able to quickly correlate "good" and "bad" ratings with their appropriate colors in all aspects of the game seems important.

I think it would be great to see red = "bad", then up from yellows, greens and blues as things get "good".

I suspect that there's sort of a "muscle memory" sort of thing at work here. It probably has to do with the fact that the ratings color scheme has worked that way for, I think, over 20 years (probably FOF4) I remember when combines were first given colors...probably in FOF2K4, maybe FOF2K7. People squawked about red being "good" then...but having done it that way for 15-20 years, you don't hear complaints about it any more because a lot of folks are just used to it.
To give another example of this sort of "gaming muscle memory," I've angered a number of players/agents in FOF9 because the "Yes" and "No" buttons switched sides when confirming an offer to a free agent. I just reflexively click on the button to the left to confirm, because that's what I've done forever...even though it's clearly marked as "No." :p

Good perspective from someone who has been around the game a lot longer than I, thanks.

I genuinely questioned if it was a bug at first, since the color schemes in the game not matching each other, and red = good are two things that both don't seem super logical. But I suppose I'll adapt.

It would be a nice compromise if this was somehow editable or customizable, but I presume not.

I must admit the red/green issue has always and continues to annoy me. In the past I modded that file in FOF8 to make me happy. Still in the end I realize that I just have to get over it.

Does similar file exist in FOF9 that I could adjust ?

No it's not in the artwork folder. :(

Is there a screen in FOF9 that shows the roster limit for each position? It was very helpful for me in FOF8, but I can't seem to find it in the new game, and I don't know the roster limit for each position without a guide.

I wrote Jim an email touching on some of the color inconsistencies. Not combine scores, mind you, I figured he did it the way he did it in purpose (and red was always good there, for whatever reason).

One is on the active/inactive screen where inactive players names are green but the button to turn them inactive is a red X and green O for active.

Depth Charts - Active

I'm just glad to hear I'm not alone! And if 'it's always been that way' is the only compelling reason why they don't match and red = good in some places, maybe there could be a change (or at least ability to mod it again) in the future. Perhaps I'll also send an email on this item.