I Formation Twin WR Hard Slants

This play was ran 13 times in one of my leagues by the same team in the same game. On the 13 play, the warning for play overuse showed up.

Can I safely assume I can run plays 10 times a game without a penalty for overuse?

It's not a set number of times, it depends on your opponent's scouting and their familiarity with the plays. It's also not a set cutoff, it is a gradual slope as they get better at defending it. The play-by-play note is triggered when you have used a play multiple times and your opponent had a significant amount of success against it, and is used more as a metric to help you identify overuse of a play as opposed to being the actual cause of the result.

Thanks for the answer. Any plans to change that? It would seem if players aren't going to open up the playbook on their own, a little nudge in the form of actual play overuse penalties might help?

The more you use a play the better your opponent will be against it, it's already there to discourage play overuse. The rate at which that happens depends on your scouting and the players' intelligence. So yes, it's there to prevent play overuse, but the factors that determine the rate at which it becomes significant vary from situation to situation.

Okay, thanks a bunch. Go back to work before I ask you everything. =)

The problem with the play overuse slope and making it more punitive is that not every playbook has all of the plays. That means it's particularly difficult to build a playbook with 40 effective plays (unless you're really, really good at data analysis).

Even if you can construct a playbook with 40 plays, the play matrix WILL CREATE overuse scenarios because it DOES NOT call plays with EQUAL weight. I basically have my short and medium passes to be called equally. What happens is one play will get called 5-8 times and others plays 0. That means THE AI PLAY CALLING puts me into overuse that is no fault of my own.

The way to fix this is simple. Have a weighting mechanism so that as a play is called it is less like to be called again until all plays of that distance or type are called as adjusted by the play matrix (so if I only want to call the 311 sets 1 out of 100 times adjust the weight by 1/100). That would mean teams would cycle through their entire playbook every game.

This would be a good foundation for how it should work. In theory, If running the hitch play then sent that play to the bottom of the 212 short pass script, and to the bottom of the short pass script in general.. it could then be modified by play familiarity, giving a boost to run that play your team is "more familiar with/better at", before another similar play in the script was ran. Obviously, it would then be weighted again making it even less likely etc. Under this sort of degenerative script, the game mechanics could easily limit unfamiliar plays to 2-3 attempts while allowing modifications with "familiarity" that could enable the play to be ran as many as 5-6 times for a play your whole team can run blind folded etc.