Buhbooh wrote:Jimboslice wrote:This happens with a lot of 3rd string QB's. They can't seem to complete anything, going 0 for 30 can't be how it was intended. How would they ever be on a roster being unable to complete a pass?
Agreed. It’s astounding that the response has been that this is by design, for a football simulation. The previous reason given holds no water, as you can prevent other players being converted to QB by simply not giving them high passing abilities/ratings. This has made me not want to play the game.
It's this sort of thing which has always stopped me being able to really enjoy the game. I want, really more than anything, a robust football GM/coaching game, where I can integrate both a college and pro career, and DDSPF and DDSCF come so close to realising that, but the game engine just does too many odd things for me.
This specific example may not seem important, but it's representative of the kind of checks and balances which the game engine doesn't seem to be incorporating at times. For this specific case, Kendal Hinton (a WR) started at QB a couple of seasons ago and managed to complete a pass: https://www.pro-football-reference.com/ ... ll_passing. Sure, he had an awful game, but he's not a 3rd string QB, and still performed better than 0/30. A 3rd string QB in real life of course would perform much better than this. Heck, I'd fancy my chances of completing 1 pass of 30.
This plays out further in seeing some wacky high receiving yards in some of my saves from previous years, where half the league's WR1s were achieving 1500+ yard seasons. It's like the results aren't really/consistently pinned to their real-life ranges/bins. I understand that this game isn't being sold as an 'NFL simulator', but it's this kind of occasional wackiness that just gives me less faith in my sims. I'd be less critical if the issues were other GMs AI, because I'd have confidence that this would get better over time. But the game engine doing weird things just checks me out.
The other thing that's been on my mind for a while (apologies for dumping everything in one post - it probably belongs somewhere else) is how the player attributes don't differentiate players and their play styles very well. e.g. for most players, speed seems to be the key characteristic in what makes them successful or not. In real life, a cornerback will have a range of strengths and weaknesses to their game. They may be better in man to man coverage than zone. They may be short, but have a high jump height. They may have stone hands. They may be better at bump and run type play... Are they good at blitzing? etc.
In this game it feels like if they're fast and can tackle then you've got a great player. In real life a player like Jason McCourty is going to succeed in play-calls where he's in man to man coverage, rather than zone. That's his strength. He isn't just 'fast' with "good personality traits".
This is true of all positions in the game. Some QBs are better at short routes, play-action or throwing screens. Some throw bullets which can result in lower INTs but a higher drop %. Some QBs make quicker reads and can spread the ball around more. In this game it feels like arm+accuracy = good and that's about it. It makes game planning less satisfying, because you're not really doing so around your team's strengths.
I don't like to make direct comparisons to other competitors, but the FOF series was great at capturing these nuances, and it really makes your players seem alive and adds much more strategy to everything.
There was a post about increasing immersion that I saw, for me, it's adding all of these nuances to the player ratings that would help me to start buying into what I'm playing. So much of what is in this game is great. The interface is amazing vs. anything we've had before in this genre, the sandbox mode is great, but the actual guts just lose me each time I give this game another try.
