League Forums

1. Full selection of 40 offense and 30 defense plays, all active. At least 2 plays from each offense personnel, other than Goaline, and 1 play from 1rb4wr. 2 plays minimum from all ten secondary coverages, exception is one play from 4 deep man & zone.

2. Set your offense personnel to even for all personnel other than GL, set GL to zero

3. Set your Secondary and LB sliders to even, other than Blitz 2+, set at 1 or 2.

You can still use GL offense and defense, just use a rule to limit their use to when teams normally use those formations, like 3rd or 4th down, 0-1 yards to go.

any concerns, questions, suggestions, thoughts..... post it or pm me or others in the league. Compliance and cooperation is important to get play diversity into the game. There are going to be plays that are not as good as others, and you can change plays and try others, as long as you are getting good diversity and not using a single play more than 5 or more times a game.

If this takes effect I will likely need several reminders and a tutorial to set everything correctly.

No worries, the first season doing this will take adjustment, as we learned in the FCS first season. The first thing is easy, select a full 40 off & 30 def plays. In that selection, there are 10 total offense personnel. You should have at least 1 play from each, preferably 2. On defense, you have 5 personnel, you should get an even number of plays from each of the 30 total, with the exception of GL personnel, you only need 1 or 2 of those. Normal and Nickel will have the most, half of the total defensive plays. We are still figuring out how to get more use of the 4 & 5 wr plays along with the 3 & 4 deep coverages, instead of once or twice per game. That will require moving the sliders to a higher level. Scouting will be very important, if and when you notice your opponents play selection and/or use being out of balance, you need to let them know. You may also want to load a previous gameplan to counter non-compliance. You should not have to be at a disadvantage in a game vs a team that is using a limited selection or use of plays that have better averages. Its a cooperative effort, you will be able to do a lot of adjustment in the pre-season.

If you have a moment, you can see what we were doing in the FCS league, in the season thread. There were a few of us who posted their play count results. Best that we could get was about 25 out of the 30 defense plays and 35 out of 40 offensive plays used in a game. Defense had the advantage in the first season, but... that was also following an allocation draft, so a lot of younger players with less play familiarity. Also, defense was dominated by the use of Normal with 1 or 2 Blitz, some more than others. We had a rule for the first few games that restricted the "auto" use of the Nickel vs the 3wr personnel. That did not work. Its better to balance the use of 3wr vs the other offense personnel to increase the variety of calls. https://fcs.myfootballnow.com/forums/1/71?page=23

Still working on doing this req. I have a lot of rules setup from my previous stint with MFN and I am loathe to burn my playbooks down to the ground. Is it really as vanilla as just picking the plays and creating even weights on all the plays?

That is the challenge. The game is so broken right now that you only need 12-15 good offensive plays and 3-5 defensive plays to have a winning season.
But we want to find the diversity and still be successful... 30+ plays offensive and 20+ plays defensive, no play more than 5 times and good use of 4/5WR.
The original requirement was at least 2 plays per formation (offensive and defensive) excluding 1RB/4WR. In addition, Goal Line Formation plays (off/def) only when they are really appropriate, i.e. very short distance and possibly very close to the end zone

Im hopeful that the issue will be addressed and fixed in the next version or subsequently. Similar to what happens when and if you have more than 53 players on the roster, the AI mgr kicks in and makes the cut(s) for you, and they are usually not ones you would have selected. The AI mgr also activates when your salary cap is out of order. The same thing could be done with play selection and use, with the AI coach selecting plays with a limit of use of 5 or 6 per game and the sliders all pre-set and evenly set. In the meantime, what we are doing with the play selection and use rules is the only way to get use of more plays other than the very few that have a consistent advantage and higher avg per play for offense or lower avg per play for defense.