Beercloud wrote:
I think posting your dislikes on here can be a good thing as long as it's constructive as it usually is. As we all know, it's how development works. Now to be really constructive I'd love to see a yang thread to the ying one above to get a better picture of what you see. Combining those both could be beneficial.
The problem is that the yang to 0.4.3 -- the serious code updates to pass blocking and QB reads -- are seriously overshadowed by the nerfs to passing. Once you get a good season of this new code, you'll start to see what I mean.
Are you really going to care that your QB reads multiple receivers when he can't complete simple passes?
Are you really going to care that coverage is "better" when really the "fix" was that WRs are going to stop to catch most passes thrown 20 yards down the field?
Let's give this some more context. Before say April 1, 0.4.3 was developing along a pretty solid trajectory. It was nearly stable and almost everything looked good. Coverage DBs actually covered, and good route running WRs occasionally broke down the defense.
Then Ray discovered if you run an all long passing game you could exploit defenses.
What I think was happening is the same problem that has plagued all versions - and by the way will plague this version as well - DBs stopped covering WRs when a WR hit the end of a route (as in they completely lose where a WR goes). The WR stutter feature breaks routes in the same way so that WRs don't just get separation from DBs, the DB runs the other direction. In fact, stutter was so hilariously OP during the first iterations of it that defenders would literally run to the opposite side of the screen from where the man they were supposed to cover was.
And while I and others pointed this out. JDB was set to release 0.4.3 then anyway. Which probably would have been better than the product we got, but let's not get ahead of ourselves. The fact here is that there was a big glaring flaw in one of the new features that was supposed to differentiate 0.4.3 from 0.4.2.
The first attempt to fix this exploit was - and I'm still not sure why this ever made sense - to take away dive tackling by DBs when the WR caught the ball. This resulted in a more hilariously broken offense where the WR would catch the ball and the DB would just stand there and watch the WR run away. It's also the exact opposite of what people had been pointing out on the forums.
(To be clear, I'm still not convinced that Ray's exploit would have been effective in all scenarios, but he managed to put up 100+ on my team after JDB took away DB dive tackles, so I can't be sure if the code change to DBs that game broke my defense or Ray's offense broke my defense in that game. I know that the taking away dive tackles tanked my DBs who were slower than Ray's WRs, but had not given up big plays all season because they were 100 M2M/B&R types that I was using to test if they could actually slow down WRs, and they had until that game.)
So the next solution - the one we have now - simply reversed the logic above. Now WRs stop to catch a pass and wait to be tackled. This seems to happen most often when a WR is wide open. But since RBs are rarely ever covered, RBs also seem to stop after they catch a pass and wait to be tackled 5 yards behind the LOS.
None of this, of course, addresses the root problem with coverage, which is still a problem. And it -- TO BE ABSOLUTELY CLEAR -- was the one problem that kept 0.4.3 from being a huge improvement over 0.4.2. Instead, what was released is unstable, playable if you just want to look at the stats and not actually watch the games, and the response has either been ¯\_(?)_/¯ or "JDB is the best developer in the world".
The only positive right now is that Pass Med/Long exclusively out of the 122 offense is less effective now. But maybe not. I have never run the 122 plays enough to get enough play knowledge to see how effective it can be. It might actually be more effective. What I do know is that it's still more effective than running short passing offense that generates yards based on volume.
