Front Office Football Seven

[Solecismic]

The new version of the professional football simulation is now ready for sale. Please visit http://www.solecismic.com.

For those of you who are new to the series or want to give it a whirl first, the trial lasts for up to three days.

Thanks for all your support over the last 15+ years. Hopefully I'm not done yet.

[Subby]

Paid and installed. Woohoo!

[Ben E Lou]

Woohoo!

Originally Posted by Solecismic.com

New Features for Front Office Football Seven

The new version of Front Office Football includes dozens of new features, designed to enhance your simulation experience. The new game features the following:

• Staff Members. You now have a five-man staff, consisting of a head coach, an offensive coordinator, a defensive coordinator, an assistant coach and a strength coordinator. Staff members are responsible for scouting as well as player development. Offensive and defensive coordinators call plays. Strength coordinators help your team avoid injuries. Each staff member, aside from the strength coordinators, specializes in work with one position group.
• Staff Draft. At the beginning of the year, you have the opportunity to sign any staff member who is entering the final year of his contract. After the resigning period, there's a five-round staff draft. The draft order is based on the previous year's franchise financial performance. The first round is for head coaches. You have the opportunity to skip your pick, keeping the current coach in place, or you can promote a staff member on your own team, poach an assistant from another team or select someone entirely without experience.
• Staff Names. At the beginning of a new career, you have the option of using familiar coach names for your universe.
• Game Film. During the season, you'll have the opportunity to view the Film Room, which contains breakdowns of every game played during the current year. Run and pass selection is broken down by down and distance and personnel packages, as are defensive play choices.
• New Contract Formats. Contracts are now limited to five seasons, and incentives are gone. Rookies are automatically signed, as the new league formats make a rookie's contract structure very specific. Rookies cost less, so you'll be able to spend more money on veterans.
• HTMLHelp. Front Office Football Seven uses a more modern help interface, based on HTML. This is now a native Windows 8 application, and will run on Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7 as well.
• Draft History. All players who either played a down in the league or were drafted into the league will have a complete playing history. A new screen showing each round of every draft will give you the opportunity to quickly locate any player based solely on draft position and year.
• Player File Generator. The Player File Generator allows you to take a .csv file and create a player file compatible with Front Office Football Seven.
• Multi-Player FTP Support. Most mutli-player commissioner and team owner functions are now automated through FTP. As a team owner, just open up the game, select Import Game Files, and the game downloads all the most recent game files and reloads the game in the current stage. As a commissioner, imports and exports will run much more smoothly.
• Multi-Player Stage Editor. The editor will allow team owners to view all the actions they've taken while constructing their current stage file. They can delete actions without having to start over.
• Data Export. At any time, you can select the Export Data command, and Front Office Football Seven will generate a set of .csv files that includes player information, game information and a wealth of statistical data. While this data is in fairly raw form, enterprising spreadsheet and web site aficionados will be able to create far more impressive and extensive web sites than the game creates.
• Amateur/Staff Draft Imports. Using the data from the exported .csv files, commissioners will be able to hold drafts off-line, and easily create a file that contains all the draft data. This data can then be imported directly into the game, saving the commissioner hours of making each selection by hand.
• Ratings Tracking. An option allowing ratings tracking within Front Office Football Seven. Twice a season (before training camp and prior to week three of the exhibition season), a clearing-house consisting of all player ratings will be created. These can be accessed from player records, or through exported data. Player development has been changed significantly in Front Office Football Seven, so these stages are the crucial points for player development within the game.
• Extensive AI Improvements: Roster building was a focus of development. Many features within the game were rebuilt, including the attendance model and player scouting.
• The Quarterback Coterie: A new screen showing the yearly performance of all league quarterbacks, normalized for each season they've been in the league. This will enable you to compare quarterbacks both on career performance and by how they performed at every level of experience.
• Yearly Calendar. A screen that shows the league's calendar every year. This will help players understand what stage they're in and what needs to be done at any time during the year.
• Long-Snappers. The Long Snapper is now a dedicated secondary position. Each team must have one.
• Internal Structural Changes. While this was the most time-consuming new feature other than replacing everything to do with scouts and coaches, it's not something you'll necessarily notice. But from a development perspective, it was necessary and very helpful. The game is much more stable and modular. New features can be added much more quickly. The game runs faster, which means some of the new AI algorithms can handle a lot more analysis. This makes future development possible as well. This is a risky development item since this and the AI upgrades took up months of development time, and they won't be immediately obvious to those who have played the game in the past. But I'm confident these developments will greatly enhance the long-term value of your gaming experience.
• There's a lot that's new with Front Office Football Seven. Download the Game and please feel welcome to try it out for a short time before deciding whether to make a purchase.

[jbergey22]

Solecismic Software: Home of Front Office Football

[Subby]

The great thing about this version (so far) is that it feels really familiar. Not a huge learning curve. As you move through a season, though, you see so many improvements all over the game.

[Subby]

My first only real complaint is the readability of that new calendar. I love the addition, but I simply cannot read anything beyond the yellow font with that grass background. The red font might as well be invisible. I think you might be better off with a more solid background.

Minor quibble, but it does stand out.

[Subby]

Definitely love this change:

[therockfrog]

Darn it, and I was just about to sleep....off to buy and check it out. Just bought a new 18" tablet/computer that I take downstairs while watching football...now I know what I'm going to be doing with the tablet/computer this Sunday...with a wireless mouse of course...CONGRATS!

[Karim]

Purchased as a Christmas present to myself. Awesome! Thanks, Jim!

[chinaski]

Woo! Downloading now.

[Subby]

These are the kind of small, albeit meaningful, changes to the interface:

[Danny]

Wow. Will give it a try at least

[Sporkimata]

Woot!

[yabanci]

Congrats, Jim. This is outstanding.

[therockfrog]

You have to change the red font color on the calendar...I can barely read any of that...kind of weird that does not get changed before release.

[Julio Riddols]

Its like walking into the house you've owned for years, but the furniture is new and some new gadgets have been installed.

[GeneralMakaveli]

Well I simulated 4 season just to look at season ending stats and Ive had 4 2000 yard rushers, one each year. The first year had Foster setting the single season record with 2227.

[therockfrog]

I"d better run Marshawn Lynch to death!

[Subby]

4-12 season one with stud QB-WR-WR-TE-RB. This is promising. Or I just suck.

[Ben E Lou]

Originally Posted by Subby

This is promising. Or I just suck.

Why not both?

[Danny]

Was hoping the game would remember the windows you had open and where

[CheesHd09]

Exam procrastination just got a lot easier lol

[MalcPow]

Originally Posted by Danny

Was hoping the game would remember the windows you had open and where

Definitely remembers the where for me.

[Danny]

yeah you're right, just not that they were open. I really still don't understand why Jim doesn't get someone to do some interface / graphics stuff for the game. They'd probably do it for free or really cheap. The left calendar and top icons are just awful

[MalcPow]

Originally Posted by therockfrog

You have to change the red font color on the calendar...I can barely read any of that...kind of weird that does not get changed before release.

I think it's intended that the current stage is far more readable and "pops" with the yellow color on the calendar so people know where they are in the flow of the season.

[Danny]

Originally Posted by MalcPow

I think it's intended that the current stage is far more readable and "pops" with the yellow color on the calendar so people know where they are in the flow of the season.

Probably is, still bad design

[pughead]

Got my copy. Xmas present to myself! Agree with another poster. Calendar font is terrible. How can we change this because I'm having trouble seeing it! I'm thrilled about this. Thanks very much for this new release, Jim!!!

[Olsson]

Just got up and is now heading for work... Can't wait to get back home tonight!!

[MalcPow]

Forgot to post that this is freaking awesome and likely to make me an even more unwilling attendee at the wife's work holiday party this weekend.

Congrats, Jim.

[Julio Riddols]

The player development is so much more unpredictable and fun to see. Gotta throw a lot of what you think you know out the window.

[chinaski]

Anyone else getting a virus alert when tying to run? AVG says Front Office Football Seven.exe is a virus (Win32/Heur)

[BighouseBrock]

holy crap, for laughs i decided to try and load a game plan form fof2007, i expected to get some kind of error message. nope, took it. and it looks like my gp, very nice!

[Ben E Lou]

Good tight ends are on the field wayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy more in this version. Season 1 of my dynasty, Grnk was out there for 581 pass plays (96-1301-12) and Witten for 613 (90-1106-6). You'd never see AI teams use their Tight Ends that much. Looks like Rexy is adjusting the formation usage screens now.

[Ben E Lou]

Originally Posted by GeneralMakaveli

Well I simulated 4 season just to look at season ending stats and Ive had 4 2000 yard rushers, one each year. The first year had Foster setting the single season record with 2227.

Looks like YMMV here. Foster led the league with 1527 yards in year one of my league, fwiw.

[Ben E Lou]

Originally Posted by Help File

Drafting Players

Would you draft a punter in the first round? It happened once, and Ray Guy went on to be fairly valuable for the Raider franchise. But in general, kickers and punters are not high draft picks. Currently (2013), there's one first-round kicker, one second-round kicker and two third-round punters playing professionally.
I wanted the computer-run franchises in Front Office Football to draft in a realistic manner. So the player valuations have to be reflected in how teams have drafted over the years. I found that quarterbacks, especially top-echelon quarterbacks, were valued more than anyone. They were followed by defensive linemen and halfbacks. Kickers, centers, guards and tight ends were the least valued.
When computer-run teams draft or trade players, they will value players similarly. Top-notch quarterbacks simply don't switch teams unless there's a very good reason.
Here's a chart I compiled showing the currently active players at each position by the level they were drafted. The first number shows how often a player from that position was drafted in the top three picks of the draft related to how many players there are from that position in the league. The second number shows that frequency for the entire first round. And the third number shows the correlation between perceived performance and round selected.
The difference in correlation between quarterbacks and offensive tackles, for example, is .40 versus .66. This means drafting a tackle in a higher round is much more reliable than drafting a quarterback. Yet teams keep using their top picks to draft quarterbacks. That underscores the importance of the quarterback position. You can't survive in the league without one, so even though it's harder to scout that position than any other, you keep trying.

Interesting...

[sidthelid]

Originally Posted by chinaski

Anyone else getting a virus alert when tying to run? AVG says Front Office Football Seven.exe is a virus (Win32/Heur)

Yep, virus as well. Smh

[sidthelid]

Originally Posted by chinaski

Anyone else getting a virus alert when tying to run? AVG says Front Office Football Seven.exe is a virus (Win32/Heur)

Yes, i get the same thing

[sidthelid]

AVG is saying (win32/heur) virus here as well!

[chinaski]

Originally Posted by sidthelid

AVG is saying (win32/heur) virus here as well!

Im thinking its a false positive from elicense, but I cant find confirmation.

[Julio Riddols]

Gotta be a false positive.

[sidthelid]

When i get home i am going take AVG off and out MS AV on and see if that does it (sorry for the 3 entries on my mobile and site us hanging)

[Erik Holland]

Anyone been able to edit the graphics yet? This is even worse than the last version.

Let me know if you are starting a multiplayer league guys!

[Yoda]

Ben is restarting WOOF and I am rebooting the GEFL (for historical players).

[Icy]

Congrats on the new release, downloading the trial now.

[bhlloy]

The AVG issue seems to be a false positive, but updating to the latest version didn't help (as their website suggests). I had to ignore the .exe specifically to get it to work.

[Ben E Lou]

I'm finding that free agents rarely (never?) sign before the stage that they're saying. They sometimes sign later. This could be really nice for MP.

[Ben E Lou]

Tons harder to get veteran free agents to go for the 3-year minsal deal.

[Ben E Lou]

Whoa. I had the most cap room and went significantly over requested offers and just got *creamed* in the early part of Free Agency by the AI on three high-value FAs. Looks like one (TE Jimmy Graham) was a loyalty thing and maybe play for winner. (He took less money to play for the Saints.) On the other two, I just plain got outbid. Maybe the AI teams may not be coloring between the lines on FAs as much as they did in previous versions?

[RedKingGold]

Hmm...new feature called "Combine Accuracy" provided in Game Options, default is 50.

Hmmmmmm......

[Ben E Lou]

OK. First FA1 period is over. I'm playing with the Raiders. I don't know if it's some combo of Loyalty and Wants Winner working against me playing with a horrid franchise, but for whatever reason, despite offering a decent bit more money, I lost out on *every* Free Agent I bid on whose original team also bid. I was successful in signing some nice-looking FAs, but all of them were not offered by their original teams. No idea yet if that's a trend, but it seems worth noting and watching.