Oh I remember another criticism of the allpass: that it's a cap workaround/exploit, and I'd like to voice my support for Tzach's position that any focused way of building a team is a cap workaround. The cap is there to make it purposefully difficult for teams to spend everywhere, so everyone but the AI is using a their version of workaround. Would it be an exploit for me to spend all my money on D-line while spending close to league minimum on LBs? I think most people see that as normal cap management.

PLUS: my army of 0 Runblock, 50ovr passblocking maniacs gets paid annoyingly well thank you very much. Starters want starter money. RB though, yeah I don't pay those guys anything.

and another thing: no one's mentioned yet Tzach's latest IHOF season was obviously in some small part due to divine intervention on dice rolls. Don't deny the holy spirit's role in this.

I love this thread. I'm glad to have your all-pass offense in the IHOF. Even though we're buddies I'm going to try to destroy you every chance I get.

To the haters: I bet american football looks a lot more like tzach's brand in 70 years. Suspend a little disbelief. You must be a joy to watch a sci-fi movie with.

People are way too happy about letting the AI do their game planning. News flash (no wait, I'm just stating the obvious): the AI just randomly draws up a defensive game plan when you hit recommend.
As such, to be able to compete with avid game planners, you have to put some effort in it (and then make sure you actually keep using the right game plans :rant: ), it should and will make a difference.
So if people want another patch, it should be an attempt to fix the AI for actually doing a decent job of suggesting game plans for those (I suspect this applies to the majority of FOF players) who don't want to (or have the time to) micromanage game plans, especially on defense. I mean, when you have shiny big red bars on defense, you fully expect that defense to play like a top5 defense and not see a stacked defense rank bottom3 in total yards allowed.

That and please have player contract demands in SP and MP be based on the same logic. I'm all for having a tough cap in MP, but at least give the (human FOF) player a chance to actually offer contracts that will reasonably be considered, or give some feedback why a contract that was taken into consideration was turned down and especially not have them turn down contracts that are by all measures better than their own demands.
*ducks*

Kudos to Dawgfan for stepping up and slapping a league wide ban on the all pass gameplan in the TFL. I doubt there would even be an 8.3 passing adjustment if commissioners did this a couple of months ago. Easily sorted.

Yup. It's a hobby. It's supposed to be fun. Hilariously, there are a handful of incredibly small-minded and self-centered folks who can't handle anyone having a way of having fun that differs from theirs.



"HE IZ ENJOYING DIS FAKE FOOTBALL GAME DIFFERENT FROM ME. THAT CANNOT BE ALLOWED. HE MUST BE STOPPED!!!1" :lol::lol::lol::lol:

Dola:


I remember some dude in a league I was in even said about something else, in all seriousness, "I know it's not against the rules, but there's a right way to play the game and a wrong way to play the game."



Sgt. Hulka with the big toe has good advice for those folks:

Not everyone wants to turn a game in to a competition to see who can find the flaws and loopholes in the game to increase the chances of winning. Same as in the NFL, some wouldn't considering deflating footballs to get ahead. I guess we should all stick to our sides of the fence and play with like minded people. I would rather walk away, or lose if I had to resort to finding weakness in the engine to get ahead.

I play FOF because its the closest thing you're going to get to the real thing and this 100% pass attack is completely unrealistic. The QB wouldnt make it out of the season alive and the WR's legs would be falling off. FOF's D gameplanning also isn't elaborate enough to compete with these types of offenses.

I'm all for nerfing that type of gameplan but 8.3 patch hurts everyone in the process. How to fix the issue is up for discussion; I certainly dont have the answer, but imo it is certainly an issue that needs to be addressed. Im glad Jim thinks so as well even if I disagree with how he's beginning the implementation of a "fix" w/ 8.3. I think Hammer has a good argument in that its a "familiars" issue.

Yes. And why don't they in FOF? Probably because your injury setting is unrealistically low. As has been pointed out, if you play with an unrealistic injury setting, you should expect some unrealistic things to happen. If you want realism, turn up injuries to somewhere in the 300s. Otherwise, the "realism" argument falls completely flat. What we're seeing is people wanting to play with unrealistic injuries but not accepting the consequences of doing so. Passing efficiency doesn't really decrease with over-usage. Both 538 and Football Outsiders (among others) have shown that. I recall reading a study at one of those two showing that even "overusing" play action (something like 10-15 times per game) doesn't reduce its effectiveness.

Dola:


Here's just one of the studies to which I am referring:


For A Passing League, The NFL Still Doesn’t Pass Enough | FiveThirtyEight

I dont think the realism argument falls flat at all, as long as the expectations are realistic. People have jobs/life and we're stuck to a single simulation in MP to sign replacements for injured players(if players even get midweeks). Its asinine to expect that kind of commitment from players and commish's and its an ovr bad business model for a sim game. But I argue its not out of the question to curb these one dimensional offenses.



I think you make a good point with pass efficiency not dropping off with over usage but "over usage" is far from "all of the damn time" lol. At some point the law of diminishing returns will play its role and thats where I think the "familiars" argument holds weight and why its featured in the game.


If familiars isn't the answer, maybe expanding the defensive mechanics in the game could be a solution. Making defenses multiple; exotic blitz's, alignments, coverage's; whatever... As of now, going up against a 100% pass attack, we're helpless on the defensive side of the ball.



Also, whatever argument you have for PA here is irrelevant. There are no NFL teams implementing a 100% pass attack. If there is literally no threat of run AT ALL, do you think a LB is still going to bite?

100% There are a number of points in this thread that are debatable depending on your perspective, but this key point certainly isn't.


Another thing that we haven't really touched on yet is the positional game balance. One of the worse thing about FOF for a long, long time has been how over powered Wide Receivers are. 8.3 has been very positive in that light, it has given them a yank back on their chain. They are still probably over powered, but it moves them in the right direction.

We did have a chat over the 8.3 patch in a recent RZB podcast. Kicks in around 9.30 in, either side is league specific stuff that probably won't be of interest unless you play in the league.

[V5] ProBoards - Free Forums & Free Message Boards

Apologies for the quality, Wi-Fi was a little off in the stream.

I understand there are differences of opinion, and valid points on both sides of the argument. But rather than getting caught up in trying to win a debate and stand up for our mates, it would be great if we could come out of this accepting of some solid points on both sides. We all want the best game possible at the end of the day.

8.3 moving away from 2020 NFL stats is absolutely valid IMO, but if you want to go that route I don't see how you can dismiss the stats the 1% are producing because they are even more away from the 2020 NFL than 8.3 is.

After seeing the results of the 8.3 patches in FOF leagues I believe the patch has set the passing back a bit more than mentioned. It appears to have widened the gap between the haves and the have nots, those with well above avg WR are still going to be head and shoulders above the pack while those with slightly above WR's are going to see their numbers decrease quite a bit. I have heard grumblings of several GM's possibly leaving MP league due to the patch. While the intent of the patch was to nueter the all passing attack, it has gone beyond that IMO. I think a knee jerk reaction was done b/c a few GM's complained, now the teams with the much better WR's are clearly at a much larger advantage. Teams with a slightly above avg set of WR are going to find it hard to be successful. While above avg DB's are a must now, above avg WR's are still king, so don't believe that above avg WR's aren't king anymore, in my test they still are.

so 300 you believe is a realistic setting for Injuries?

I think Ben has been there for a pretty long time, this is not a new development.

400 -- see my post on page 1 of this thread. 400 will get you close to the number of players on IR per season, plus enough injured players per week

400 Okay, I'm going try that single player.
Thanks!

It's new for me that's why I asked him.

put the combine correlation to 0?

Sorry, wasn't trying to be snarky... was trying to separate out "new stuff arising from this patch" (which is basically the name of the thread) and "other stuff relevant to making the game arguably more realistic." This conversation has gotten tricky to follow in that respect.

So...I'll try again: I think the people here who have followed injury levels closely have observed for a long time that settings like 100 end up with far fewer injuries than a typical NFL season. That's not new, that's a long-standing observation. Whether it's good or bad is left as an exercise for the gamer, but at least it's an adjustable setting.

Just trying to help.

LOL..yes I agree 100 probablay would.

I'm trying too see if a setting of 400 works in getting realistic stats and injuries in 8.3 from you guys expereience in single player.

I believe my post fits in here.

you don't need to go down to 0, but certainly much lower than 50 to get rid of the usual combine thresholds. the issue is that the AI struggles to draft with low combine correlation. i play with 20 in SP.

more importantly, you need to restrict the scouting bar of your coaches to less than 70, or less than 50 if you really want an NFL-like draft experience. if you have been playing fof for some time, anything above 70 will give you too much certainty in the draft prospects compared to the NFL success rate.

the link below contains some interesting analysis using two metrics for percentage of busts as a function of draft position in the NFL. you will routinely find experienced FOF players drafting much better than that in MP leagues.
The chance of a bust in the NFL draft

this post below from jim is still relevant to 8.3, and some may not have seen it so i'll link it below. interesting discussion on combines.
The NFL Scouting Combine and Wide Receivers – Football Frontier

you can have a lot of fun looking at the combine scores and pre-draft evaluations of players in the nfl site. i came across NOS michael thomas the other day hehe.
NFL Events: Combine Player Profiles - Michael Thomas

the bottom line is that it's very difficult to recreate the NFL draft experience in a simulation and still make it fun and attractive to most people. fof does a good job for players that never heard of combine thresholds or static bars.

Thank you for this!

Dumb question: How do you do that?

you have to do this manually -- when you are at the staff draft stage, look at the scouting bar of a prospective coach and don't hire anyone that has a scouting bar above the threshold you decided on (let's say 50)

Okay cool!

Increasing injuries wouldn't solve the MP all passing problem. We would just see the all passing guys stack depth up at QB and WR. They could too, as no need to worry about RB and highly rated, expensive OL.

It seems like cranking up injuries would probably help quite a bit.

^^I fell into this category until I just stopped giving a fuck^^


If you can't beat them, join them. So I loaded up all of tzach and Ben's successful gamelogs and created all the plays that were successful.


However I stopped shy of putting the plays into the correct down and distance, etc, so I just hit "generate gameplan" and run a test until my test team got at least 10 WINs and the QB threw at least 2:1 TD/INT ratio with at least 550 pass attempts.


Then after all of that effort I find that the gameplan won't always work in MP as well due to many factors, etc. Which is why I do okay in some leagues and shit house in others.


ALSO...


I don't see the big deal with people venting about "realism" and wanting something that is as close to NFL as possible.
Those people (for which I am a member of, sort of) are no different to others who want in-season contract extensions, better DEF play and all the other "wish list" things out there that I'm fairly certain align more to the "NFL" way of doing things.

IMO, this was one of the worst decisions Jim has ever made as it really hampers making deals after the start of the season. I surely hope that he changes it back to the way it was prior to the change.

I know this much. I'll never play in a league with that injury setting. Far too many CEI in FOF and there is nothing more deflating to lose your stud player. Totally sucks the fun out the game IMO.

One of the things I've always appreciated about Ben's leagues and something I tried to emulate in the RZB was the lower injury setting. We started at 50 but bumped it to 75 and I still prefer the 50 setting.

I agree. I still believe it was a fix to the way the $$ were reported to us at the end of the season. Instead of fixing the incorrect $$ shown for new players, he made it so we couldn't re-sign folks.

The fix here IMO is make in-season renegotiations extensions only. Which also closely mirrors NFL deals. AND has the added benefit of keeping rookie deals a bargain for the full 4 years, where in game we get 3 (and then reneg in year 4)...compared to NFL which has the 5th year option for 1st rounders.

To be fair, the old system of extending players during or near the end of the system created a massive loophole in logic, where the player weighted "current year salary" as a very meaningful thing, but then he never actually saw that money if the extension came after the season had ended (except the last stage).

So, I'd partially agree that cutting off all mid-season extensions was going too far. But let's not claim it was perfect before this change - he made the change to target something that was not working well or wisely. (I just wish he had treated the symptoms, rather than going straight to amputation)

i agree with quik, but the one case that should have contracts allowed under the current game dynamics are trades in season. so one can trade for a player in the last yr of his contract.

but i presume this contract stuff is also in place to enforce a realistic game dynamics, since in the NFL players with 1-yr left on the contract are rarely traded or extended during the season. there's perhaps 15-20 extensions during the season, with 3-4 high profile transactions late in the season, such as marcus peters, whitney mercilus, devante parker, lane johnson, and shaq thomson last yr.

NFL Transactions | Spotrac

here's jim's blog post on the issue for those that haven't seen it.

Renegotiations in Front Office Football – Football Frontier

Exactly. And well stated.

There was a structural issue in place here undoubtedly. If you look at the exported data, you can see game doesn't have a place to store the old salary data that would have been required to properly calculate the cap hit of the two contracts (old and new,) so it was just doing the new one. I don't know how much it impacts other pieces of the game to add new data fields, but based on seeing the versions where new fields were added, I know it's a big deal. It may be that he felt he didn't have the time, when weighing it against other options.