Greetings, MFN community! I have had several reports of certain plays in the playbook that are un-defendable. This is an unfortunate nature of the way the game is built - where each player has their own independent autonomous logic independent of what the plays may or may not be. I've decided that the best action to maintain parity in the leagues is to remove those plays from the playbooks. The plays in question at this time are the OLB Flat Zone and the FB Dive.

What does this mean for you? If you have been gameplanning normally (have had 40 offensive and 30 defensive plays in your active playbook) you will simply notice that these plays have been removed and will be able to replace them in your playbook if they were there. If you have worked to have the minimum number of allowed plays in your playbook, on the other hand, you may be at risk of the AI resetting your entire gameplan.

This change will take place within the next 24 hours. Please take a minute to ensure that you have a full selection of offensive and defensive plays in your gameplan before then, and ideally remove these plays if you have them.

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In other news, I apologize for not being on the forums lately - I've been hard at work under the hood with improvements to the user interface which I hope to release soon. I have felt for a long time that the user experience as you navigate the website has been extremely sub par - it's had little design updates since the initial launch - and is especially difficult on mobile devices. I've made that my top priority before returning to work on the game engine itself; it's just been a beast of a project, as I'm sure you can imagine. So thank you for your patience as I've been trying to keep myself fully focused on this interface update.

And as always, thank you for playing MyFootballNow!

This is why I think the argument about applying overuse to all man-to-man plays is moot. Here's a density plot of the four most common normal defenses against the 113, 203, and 212 passing plays.

Criteria: Teams from USFL and NFL leagues that completed at least 50% of their passes against defenses NOT the Flat Zone. This filters out underperforming QBs against all the other defenses.

Note that the density for the Flat Zone is almost twice that of the others at ~0 yards. So the others are in parity but the FZ is not.



But, Seth, come on, you're surely skewing the data by looking at all passing plays.

Alright, here's just the short passes:



...and short passes with the 3-4 Cover 1 added.

It's easy to put overuse on all plays, however back when overuse was being beta tested we found that this caused offenses to become too strong near the end of games because in order to have enough balance in the playbook for various situations (short yardage or long yardage situations, for example) the bread and butter plays that should not need penalizing would break down.

Someone asked if long passes would come back with this change, and I said no. Here's why. Same density plot as above for long passes. Note how much more common a sack(negative yard plays) is compared to 5 yard passes or even incompletes.

Someone asked if long passes would come back with this change, and I said no. Here's why. Same density plot as above for long passes. Note how much more common a sack(negative yard plays) is compared to 5 yard passes or even incompletes.