League Forums

As we are halfway thru the draft, thought I would re-post this and see if there was anymore input, thoughts, comments, suggestions, etc. Nothing will be "set in stone", other than the INTENT of this league, which is to offer a couple of different things vs the other MFN leagues. The FCS teams is one, obviously. The other is to develop rules and protocol to increase variety and variability of the play selection and useage, as opposed to half or few of the plays being active and overuse. Here is the copy/paste of the original subject thread......

Rules and method of play, we are attempting to create more variability in both play selection and use, and game outcome. You have all played in leagues together, you were selected to play in this league based on your experience and adherence to league rules. Im hoping that, as league admin, I dont have to intercede on infractions and disputes, there will be mistakes both intentional and unintentional. If you notice anything outside of how we are trying to play, like play overuse, and it affects your game outcome, pm the player that had the overuse and let them know. You can let me know by PM or by comment in the GG Thread.

Keep in mind, this is a cooperative effort, so feel free to get you input and opinions considered as we move forward.

1. You must have all 40 offensive and 30 defensive plays active.

2, Offense Gameplan .... you can set the sliders for play type (outside/inside run, short/med/long pass) anyway you want. Personnel - for the personnel that you have active plays, set evenly. You may not have plays for all the different personnel groups, like 5wr, for example. The idea is to avoid play overuse by having an imbalance on the personnel sliders.

3. Defensive Gameplan .... set your slider for secondary and linebackers either evenly or to max/min limits, 30 high, 10 low.. Will have to see how this goes, and may have to adjust defensive gameplan parameters as we go.

4. Rules ... this is going to take a while to get settled. Some use a lot of rules, some dont use any. The primary intent is to prevent repetitive plays. If you use rules, and a play gets used more than 5 times in a game, then you need to look at adjusting it.

This is YOUR league, all the owner/managers have played MFN for 2 or more years. If you have any ideas/suggestions that might help improve the game play that we can institute outside of JDB's programming (if and when), please put them "on the table". Hope your draft is going well, another 20 picks to go, 2 rounds. all the best, GdB

How about we have a minimum of 2 plays selected from each offensive and defensive formation?

Good idea, however there might be a problem with the amount of plays for each formation. Some formations have only very few plays, e.g. Possession Offense has only 3 plays for Empty 4 Wide.

Yeah perhaps broaden it to formation type like 0,1,2,3,4,5 wr and 3-4/4-3 nickel, dime, quarter, goal line. If someone only has long passes or blitzes in a formation their season is pretty much over no matter how good they are otherwise. I do realize this is to stop the same formation blitz exploit in which if you only have plays from one formation overuse won't trigger.

One thing we dont want to have happen is the offense being over-penalized for play diversity. We all know long pass plays are a liability atm. So, that is a big consideration abd challenge in what we are trying to do with this league and get more variety & variability.

Im not concerned about formation and personnel anywhere near as much as having long pass plays or not. I dont think there will be a rule or proxy for requiring long pass plays to be included in your active 40. Until JDB is able to fix that particular problem and we get a new game version, I dont think anyone should be ruled into having to have long pass plays included in their mix.

Main thing is to get a good variety of play selection, without it killing the offense or defense, and some new looks in the play action that we watch. And not to have it provide an unfair advantage or exploit in the process. We will be feeling our way along on this, everyone with a team is involved in the development of our rules and protocals. Of course, some wont have an opinion and comment/input, but hopefully we will keep improving the rules/protocols and get where we want it to go and become the best league to play in MFN.

I will call those ‘oh my gawd’ plays lol

I'd love to see some weight and/or position limits. I don't mind seeing a RB convert to ol as weight is more crucial than speed at blocking but I definitely don't want to see all cb on D for example for a speed boost. Or wr/RB at te/fb. It's college ball so I don't mind if they can't make weight due to limit but I'd rather not see the weight intentionally kept low. Intentional exploits bug me.

Perhaps something like heavier player can play down like dt can play everything if you want but players can't play up, db must play db, lb must play lb or db, de must play de, lb,db. Dt can play any.
Wr must play wr. RB can play RB or wr, etc.

I feel this reflects the college game where guys are growing into frames and changing positions without being intentionally exploitive.

The primary position exploits to date are WR at RB, WR/RB at TE, CB at DL, WR at DB, TE on KO returner. Each team should have a FB1 who is a FB, you can back up with TE.

I have no problem with converting a player, and I dont want the job of monitoring teams for player exploits. If there is an obvious situation with position exploit, from the stats, I will ask the owner to correct it. If not corrected, then we have a problem.

Play selection, 2 plays minimum from each of the offensive formations with the exception of the 1RB/4WR set, you only need one play from that, as there are only 6 plays total.

Defense, I dont like secondary zone coverage, but am open to what would help improve the variety, one of the goals in this league. Secondary has 10 different selections, Im thinking of a minimum 1 from each, 2 from each would be 20 total out of 30, thats a little too far for me, but open for discussion. LB has 5.