I appreciate your comments, Zoot - and I'm in agreement with you about what you're saying. I too want this to be the kind of a game where you pick your focus, build your team around that focus, and not having the game dictate that one focus is better than another. I have really enjoyed having the feedback from different players who are trying to choose different focuses. No worries about the tone, and I apologize as well if my responses ever seem defensive. It's tough to get tone communicated through text.

Been thinking about the passing game over the last 24 hours, I have some ideas to make it better. I think the foundation of the issue is that the defense doesn't have enough of an impact on the passing game. There have been other comments from other players to this end as well. I'm going to spend some time really working on getting it better, and pushing some ideas into MFN-1 hopefully by the time the regular season starts. I'm doing some test simming now already with some ideas.

I kind of wonder if there is enough weight placed on passer accuracy. In one of my leagues, I probably have the best qb in the league he has a 96 passer rating, has perfect score on accuracy. I have a couple ok wr around him so I lean heavily on the pass. My qb has had 269 passing attempts. If you look at the passing stats in my league there is a player with a qb rating of 49 who is one of the top passers in the league. His accuracy score is at 43 as a qb, and he has completed 71 percent of his passes, he has had 348 attempts.

Another thing I have noticed, I don't think I have seen defending players be in proper position running along side a WR in man coverage or make any kind of attempt to swat at or deflect a ball. Could be just my experience with a poor d, but I have not seen other teams deflect ***** in coverage, and I think that can be a big part of defending against the pass.

I would suggest that making the defenders actually play the ball and react to the pass, as well as taking away the unrealistic scramble-passes would probably drop the completion rate down. I dont think the passing game should incur an arbitrary penalty, since just removing most of the unrealistic plays would drop completion way down.

There should never be a single completion on a lob ball into triple coverage, thats a couple of completions removed right there. Lob ***** into double coverage should be way, way less effective. Also, like people already said, the scrambling throws to the opposite side of the field while running should either not happen or happen only for dumb qb's and result in incompletions.

I subscribe to the thinking that, if you strive for realism, most of these problems take care of themselves. Giving a, arbitrary penalty on throwing a lot is not realistic. Taking away the unrealistic throws and giving DB's better chance to defend a pass would do exactly the same thing.

Just my 2c. Still thinking about whether to purchase more time with the game. I really understand how hard building something like this game is, but i'd love to see a goal of realistic play instead of bandaid fixes to get realistic stats.

I totally agree with this statement. And I agree with (and am currently improving) the DB's influence on pass defense. I had hoped to have something ready to start testing in MFN-1 by the season start but didn't make it, might have it in place by week 2.

As for a penalty on too many passes, technically that would be attributed to fatigue of the QB - if a QB throws 80 passes in a game, for example, his 80th pass should be significantly less accurate than his first. But I agree, and that's been my goal from the beginning, to not use tricks to try to get the result that would be realistic but instead make changes that human players would actually do. Any trickery can always be brought back to something realistic.

FWIW, in my testing with the DB changes I'm getting a really nice completion percentage range of low 50's at the bottom of a season to high 60's at the top. At the same time I'm also improving the DB's ability to intercept the passes. I'm running some more sims today and hopefully will deploy these latest changes to MFN-1 before week 2.