Alright Boyz, Here We Go!!!! (FOF2K7 Thoughts...)
 

It's out ... downloading now!

W00T!

34% down, 66 to go

I get a "page not found" error. It took my money, but I can't get a download.

Wah!

Real names included in release version. Will be exciting for many, I know, and HAS to help Solecismic Software, which is good for us as a whole.

Downloaded and installing!

Woot!

Im getting the same message too...page not found...that mean the server too busy?

Installing... W00T!

Got it and paid for it. :)

I downloaded the actual game from Jim's website.

going straight for the draft!

Thanks for the tip. Downloading now.

I'm sure the traffic will be a bitch for a while ... I'm uploading my exe download as mirror at my site and will post the link shortly unless Jim expresses a concern or has a problem with that.

No. They have the wrong URL. The right link is on my order page and in the email you should receive from ViaTech with your license information.

I waited an hour or so for ViaTech to update that, then decided to go ahead and open the page figuring people would get that information from here.

http://www.solecismic.com/orders/index.php

Got it. I always forget how you spell Buccaneers despite the guy on here.

There's a thread stickied up top with two download locations. The first is the location at Jim's site. The second is the very fast mirror we used three years ago.

stage 1 of FA is JUST for renegotiations now guys. FYI

Installed and it's running my preference draft with a random new player file now.

probably won't even save this, I just want to play around a bit.

paid for and attacking
HAPPY FESTIVUS EVERYONE!

I think it's FOFtivus. Festivus uses a metal pole, FOFtivus uses goalposts. Festivus has the "airing of grievances", FOFtivus has "due to past injustices". They both feature feats of strength, however.

:D

another FYI...you interview during the "draft preview" stage

Just went to ESPN, and then saw this post. Thanks, I could not spell the name right either :D

Happy FOFTIVUS EVERYONE!

Wow Greta's House of Football seemed pretty messed up to me, she ranked the top 10 QBs, they all showed as Dhani Jones playing for Philly, but when you clicked on that name it showed Tom Brady playing for the Patriots. Unless the whole thing is just there as a little joke?

Just made the purchase...what team is everyone playing?

Works fine in my game. I love her hair.

the computer is definately trading draft picks like mad (in a good way)

Here's another mirror for anybody having download troubles:

http://www.mattderrick.com/fof/Front...otball2007.exe

Should be pretty fast ... it was about a 3 minute download on my test.

Nope. Greta's definately broken. Listing 10 of one player and then you click the player card and you get 10 of a different player.

I was pretty impressed when it offered a 7th round pick for a player I had, I rejected it, then shortly after it bumped up its offer to a 5th round pick for the same player.

Uh-oh. That was working fine in development mode. Looks like I'll need to patch after all. I hate that some things that are working for months fail when you switch to release mode - I always miss something.

Greta's working fine for me.

e.g. 10 different quarterbacks and each one has their respective player card

greta is working for me!
she counts good but no evil laugh like the Count at Sesame st.

Ok it's time to select the Buzzsaw and see if I can turn this team around. I can only I hope I do not hold any press conferences looking into the bathroom mirrow while shouting, "They are who we thought they were!" :D

Wish me luck

Greta worked fine in my fictional league. Tried again with default rosters, and it didn't work.

I didn't see this mentioned in the demo thread, but I FREAKING love that free agents are color coded indicating who may have an affinity for your team and who would pose a conflict. Brilliant!

I'm having fun and taking my team in season rebuilding the Chiefs. I'm currently buying Tre' Stallings a one-way bus ticket back to the sticks.

I decided to start with the Dolphins. I always like picking a team that doesn't have a new franchise QB. That certainly applies to the Dolphins.

CHIEFS go 15-1 and lose to INDY again AFC CHAMPIONSHIP GAME
gawd i hate indy....
1 small problem CHIEFS only give up 199points for the season!
WOW!

ALL KINDS OF AMAZING FEATURES:
ANOTHER FOF-ESTIVUS MIRACLE!

I'm not so sure about Greta. Can someone make a different pic for her? Like...more sexy?

I think Greta might be Mrs. JIM

I am wondering if Owens and Vanderjahtthaht shouldn't both be red flags.

Too bad Jim couldn't of made it so player photos could of been added:(

I might be mistaken but of the recent text sims in the last 5 years haven't all of them had that function in there? except like FBCB?

Worked fine for me too.

Running through a draft, I see a QB down near the bottom of the screen. He's not rated high, but there seems to a total drought on QBs in the draft. (There a several stud players, including 2 CBs that are over 7 in Adjst. I believe the QB was around 5.8 or 5.9). Still, Washington takes the QB with the 2nd pick in the draft (#1 was one of the stud CBs). #3 was the 2nd stud CB. Why didn't Washington take a stud CB? Because Washington has 2 quality CBs....and they very badly need a QB.

I'd say the draft AI has been tweaked a bit.

Greta has worked perfectly for me in both fictional and real rosters. ***shrug***

I concur with Troy, both fictional and real rosters, Greta works fine.

That's the kind of stuff I like to hear. :)

It might be late, I might be tired. But I cannot for the life of me, find where to turn off saving all box scores and logs, except for my team. Wasn't this in global commands at one time?

No sooner do I say that, I astart a new career and she blows up, just like the people here are saying. Oh well.

Off to do some drafting. Just going to fast sim through some seasons tonight.

Odd - in my second year, when Greta announces the best run blockers, I get the same guy listed 10 times. This is the non-fiction database, and Greta seemed to work fine the first year.

Returned home from work, and FOF2007 has now been purchased by me. But why was Front Office Football taped before a live studio audience? :D

Yeah, it used to be a global option. Doesn't seem like it's there anymore. Maybe the game requires the box scores and game logs be saved now for every game.

ok 1st year draft: No trades in the LOG: but it looks like this?

sweet, teams that are tied in record from the previous year rotate their draft order, just like real life. thats awesome!

Spending some time with the draft to make sure it's good to go. I think either Jim spent a lot of his time with the draft AI or he made a few tweaks that apparently made all of the difference in the world.

So far teams are for the most part drafting who they are "supposed" to take, but there are occasional surprises as well.

For instance, Dallas could use a QB and there's a 6.5 Adjst QB there to take. Their QB situation isn't bad, Romo has potential (45). Instead of taking the QB though, they end up taking a SS. At first this looked dumb (Roy Williams!), but then I saw they have no FS. I'll edit this post later to confirm if Dallas does move their drafted SS to FS (the drafted SS is 66/83 scouted).

EDIT: Well, they didn't officially switch him to FS, but both the rookie and Roy Williams were 16/16 on GP/GS so I guess one of them was playing FS.

So there is the occasional surprise (that is rational). So far, so good.

EDIT: Oakland who is in complete dire need of a QB pass on the 6.5 QB and take a DE instead. Haha. So realistic! :D (In all seriousness, the DE is an incredible stud, potential of 97). The QB ended up going 6th to Tampa Bay. So far I've yet to see the top QB in the draft, even if he's not all that good, slip out of the first round. 3 more QBs went in round 1, rated as low as 5.7 Adjst while there are still several players at other positions who are Adjst over 6.

I think all game logs are now kept; the only option is how much information you want to keep with the logs, i.e. exclude formation info. I'm assuming this maybe related to some of the new stat tracking.

Just wanted to say that I'm downloading this bad boy now. I just couldn't resist. I hope the wife doesn't kill me, this plus Railrods in less that two weeks.

It's early, but the SP Trade AI seems much tougher to me (playing on the highest difficulty level.) Cleveland just drove a hard bargain for their 64/64 rated 7th year RG even though he was in the last year of his contract. I had to eventually give a 1st rounder and a 2nd rounder in the following year to get him.

Into another draft and saw my first Matt Millen pick.

Tampa Bay has RB Williams, rated 70/79. They have the first pick in the draft, and take an RB. He was Adjst 7.9, one of two players rated over a 7, the second being an OT rated 7.4. Now, it's entirely possible this was a "Reggie Bush" moment too. I mean, the player is Adjst 1 whole rating point more than the third player in the draft. Maybe it was a too good to pass up player? I checked Willims' stats, and he's only rushed for around 750 yards in each of his first two years. Is Williams just not producing enough and they are giving up on him (going to try and trade him?)

We'll see....


A weird trade. Buffalo traded to San Fran their 1st round pick (2008) and their 1st round pick for 2010 for SF's 1st round pick (2008). They traded away a pick 2 years from now to move up 10 spots. Just seems weird to trade that pick (the 2010 1st round pick).

something's buggy with this game. i have arizona at 11-1 in 2009!


LOL

It's happen. The Bills traded a second and next year's first rounder to the Cowboys to move up and grab Losman. What was the trade giving the Bills, and what were the positions of the pick?

Okay is it just me or do you guys miss the friendly little confines of the old box scores as opposed to the (to me at least) unfriendly jump into your web browser to see the box score? This should really be an option.

Could of used his wife...:D

http://www.solecismic.com/sole/index.php

I just noticed that he has the Dallas team moving into a new stadium in 2009. Nice touch!

I'm actually seeing quite a few pick-for-picks trades that involve draft picks for 2 years ahead.

wow, way too many good players under 4 years experience being cut after the draft.

Ditto.

...or maybe after the draft you can negotiate with any other teams restricted free agents?

dola, thats what it is. thats a big change!

This has probably been mentioned somewhere...but has anyone had an issue on the "Team Summary" page wherein "Drops" and "TDs" are incorrectly listed as the other?

Yes. Leinart threw 4 TDs his first game, and I have four drops and two TDs listed on that screen.

I haven't seen it mentioned, but when a player retires the honor box gives a list of his standings in the all-time and team record books. That's a neat little feature, I like that alot.

dola

Whoops, I just realized it does this for every player, but it's nice the retirees get it too :)

Does anyone else feel that some of the buttons were uncessarily switched around?

Like the stuff on the top bar, instead of being left to right, it's now right to left.

Free agency use to have all the roster, recommend ect at the top, and the skip stages and salary cap at the bottom... Now it's kind of liberally just spread some on top some on bottom.


Not so much an issue, I'll just have to readjust I guess.

Started a new game with a random player file and preference draft. FrFoot2007.exe was gobbling up 50% of my cpu during the draft! :D

Good news:

In the random player allocation draft, the best kickers didn't go until the 22nd round, at which point there was a run. Even though I had the preference set to null, I got the second best kicker in the league. Punters didn't go until round 23, at which point there was a similar run on them.

Great News

So how does the HTML output look?

Yeah, the recommend buttons are in different places which mess with my muscle-memory reflexes, but in a couple of years, I'm sure my muscle memory reflexes will sort itself out.

The full screen player cards are giving me a headache.

Does anyone have the HTML Output to view? Just curious as to what it looks like. I'm not on my own computer so I can't d/l the game and view just yet.

Yep, I noticed that too. I love it.

The Position Distribution screen really makes roster-filling much easier for speed simming. A great addition in my book.

Hey, the Grey Sheet is actually a kick ass way to see how the Top 75 free agents faired that year. And it's nice to see that after the first free agency period I went through that all 75 had a contract. So no huge ammounts of quality players collecting dust on the free agency pile. At least so far. I am definately enjoying what I'm seeing with the off-season.

Has anyone done a lot of interviewing before the draft? So far it doesn't seem to do a lot for me except give you a little bit more detail on their stats, but I haven't seen anyone, for example, that looks a whole lot better or worse after you interview them.

Move away from the ratings and look at their info to the left. Your scout will say things like "very overrated" "underrated" "as scouted" etc.

nice addition to the game. appreciated feature.

Started a from-scratch fictional league. First impressions.

• I haven't had enough time to truly flesh it out, but I think I'm going to LOVE the new talent distributions. Finally, there are truly standout guys. I've heard this is true for the default player file as well. Here's hoping this holds up throughout the future as draft classes come into the league. Check out the initialQB's in my league, for example:
• 
• I'm not liking the new savegame naming conventions, at least at first. I definitely want to do at LEAST two saves per year, to examine draft classes. In FOF2K4, I'd save "Atlanta 2006 Predraft" and "Atlanta 2006 Postdraft". Looks like I won't be able to do that
• It appears that Primelord's Change Tracker utility will work just fine for this version of the game! Woohoo!!!

More to come, I'm sure...

I hadn't checked out the save game situation but you're right, it's not pretty. And when you try to save as it says it needs 30 meg for every time you save a new game id? Ugh.

Well it's doable just a hassle, basically get ready for saving a bunch of times under new game ids with some kind of code - ATL06pre, ATL06pst, or whatever. For individual weeks you could do ATL06Ex1 or ATL07Rg3.

i guess there's gonna be a ton of running in that league, cuz outside of like 5 QB's on that list there's a ton of CRAP :D

What we don't know yet, and I am VERY curious to see, is how the 40-50 current rating guys will do. QB is the position I see where this is the most prevalent. I'm going to play on one machine, and run a league out about 10 years in the other, to see how this plays out in the long-term.

I noticed in just my one season of play last night using the default rosters that scoring was really low, approximately 17 points per game vs. 20 (which I think is league average). There were a lot of teams that scored < 200 points for the year. Anyone else seeing this?

Oh - one feature I love - the ability to right-click on a player in the depth chart and it brings up his ratings!

Skydog, I did a QB list for the real NFL game I'm working with, and the distribution was very similar, just FYI. Could be a good thing here.

I think the 40-50 guys will be ok. In my demo league Big Ben is only rated a 36 and at least in week 1 he played fine. 18/26 for 221 and a 108 rating vs. Miami. Now that rating could be scout error too.

I've started a quick sim for long-term looks, and here's what I've got so far:

2006: 16.6ppg
2007: 17.4ppg
2008: 17.4ppg

By the way, I really, really, really like that I can see those numbers on the one screen, by just changing the year. That is a HUGE addition for me, because I'm constantly looking at those numbers.

Is that overall league PPG? Where are you seeing that, that's convenient.

Maybe scoring is down the last few years? I could have sworn ~20 was league average.

Oh - and yet another COOL thing. The Superbowl winning QB and league championship MVP threw for 27 TDs and 13 Ints. My scout, who is rated as "average" rated him as a 35/35. Looking at his graph, this guy wouldn't have started in FOF2004.

I LOVE the fact ratings may not be the be-all end-all anymore. You actually have to play some guys to see if they're valuable or not. This will bring the exhibition season to an entirely new level, both in MP and SP.

Team Statistics, click the Scoring/Turnovers button. At the bottom is league average.

NFL2004: 21.48
NFL2005: 20.62
NFL2006: 20.44ppg (to date)

I know that offense tended to increase and level off after about 10 seasons in FOF2K4. I'm curious to see if this is true here as well.

I hope this doesn't mean that one or two teams dominate MP leagues, rather than 5-10. Though I will say that the number of talented QB's in those leagues might be a little high. I just hope the disparity between the top guy and some in the middle isn't that incredibly huge (or, that there are other routes to victory besides having a stud QB).

Yards per game on offense seems to be about 30 yards too low. I'm going to run my second fictional season on auto-pilot to see if it's consistent.