Obviously, we aren't going to be able to work in all the suggestions to make everyone happy. That would be impossible in some cases where different people want different things. So we will have to make some decisions, but that will be later down the road. I have had a little time to digest the suggestions and think about a few things and I can tell you where I think we are headed. I've mostly only been able to concentrate on offense and will require some time to think about defense later. This by no means is the absolute final decision, but probably worth mentioning.
So how I see offensive playbook settings changing:
- Depth Charts: Basic Depth Charts would be as they are now, possibly just having one WR chart. Advanced Depth Charts would allow you set subset of the Basic Depth Charts, like Blocking TE or Deep WR. We'd have to come up with a list later. Could you name your own Depth Charts? Possibly, but it depends on how much we want to be able to copy between your teams if you have multiple teams.
- Play List. For each play, pick a formation. Should have more options than we have now, like with 3 WRs you could have them split or trips and such. Somehow (one of the things yet to be determined) define what each player is doing. Ideally, you could set one or two routes for receivers and conditions for running them. It's possible to start this out that we end up with just a grab bag of standard plays you could use, like you might see on a video game. For these plays, you could select which Depth Chart would be used to select the player. With all this in mind, if we went all out on it, you might have an option to set your TE to pass block and set him to pull from the Blocking TE depth chart, or you could set him to certain routes and set him to Receiving TE depth chart. We'd have to see how creative we can get on those settings after I've spent some time on the engine.
- Game Plans. Just as we have now, you would select plays that could be used for each down and distance, but the difference is you would be selecting plays from your Plays List and that determines formation and how the play is run. We will add a percentage weighted value on the play so you could have higher chance to pick one play over another. Instead of setting Style and Tendency here, that would be dictated by your play you select. A play with more deep routes would be more Aggressive than one with more short routes.
Other aspects of this that need more thought:
- Passing Distribution: We can set passing distribution, like setting target check list. Not sure if this would be on the play in the Play List or when you select it in the Game Plan. When we work out what conditions we could key off of, it would be cool if we could customize plays based on conditions. For instance, use a different passing distribution when your QB recognizes the blitz, or change to a rushing play when you see certain coverage.
- Play Customizations: Conditional settings for plays as mentioned above. Do we need a way to distinguish between a play being called on 1st down and that same play being called on 4th? How do we handle considerations for location on the field?
- Overall Play Style: Conditional settings for game plans. We currently have the Winning/Losing settings and that may be continued, but I'd like to examine other ways of handling this. I would definitely like to see ways of setting your desired style of play and maybe we have a few preset selections, like Passing and Running, which just say I want to pass more than rush and such. Then we could modify the random selection of the play to make sure overall your team plays like you want. We could even have selections to start heavy on passing and move to rushing and varieties like that. Of course, there needs to be some defensive complements to those settings and some reason to make those changes or else they'd be kind of empty settings. It's possible that instead of switching to whole new Game Plans for game conditions, that you would adjust your Play Style based on conditions and maintain your Game Plan and Play List.
All of these changes hinge on the idea that we can change the engine to break down the plays more. I wouldn't put settings in the game that have no effect in the engine. Reworking how the engine simulates each play is key. It will need to break down the play a lot more and the status of each player will need to be determined to accomplish this. The idea would be that this will help in evaluating match ups between teams during each play and provide a better assessment on how each of your players are playing. How long it takes to work on the engine will determine how crazy we go with the game setting changes. It should also help with mismatched games and if a lower rated team does actually beat a higher rated team, we should at least be able to show what contributed to the results.
What won't be worked on in this update:
- Recruiting and Ratings. I won't really have time to work on updating recruiting or player ratings and development. I will work on the engine with the idea of allowing these to be changed in a future update. I'd really like to see us change the rating system to something a little more specific to positions and specific parts of the game. I'd also like to see us turn recruiting into something a little more fun, but that's a huge discussion we'd have to have and I'm not even spending time on that.
- Schedules. I won't be spending time on schedules, both world schedules and game schedules. At most, it's possible we reduce the amount of time during recruiting, but I don't want to just yank that without thoroughly thinking about the consequences.
- Everything else. Anything I haven't mentioned will not be worked on.
I really, really want to spend all the time I can on improving the engine. Working on the engine goes hand-in-hand with the game plans, so those will be worked on as well. It's possible something else gets worked on, but I don't want to promise anything other than the engine and game plan changes until I know we have time.