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Here is the other feature I wanted to get into MFN-1 before the start of the season! On the defensive gameplan screen, there is a new section "Run/Pass" next to the linebacker's defense. On this view you can choose the percentage of the time you want your team to key on the run, key on the pass, or play a neutral defense.

"Neutral" would be no changes from what the default has been up to now.

"Run" means that your secondary plays closer to the LOS, and blitzers will run towards the running back. Secondary will play a little looser on the man-to-man coverage as they are watching the backfield. If there is a play action fake, the blitzers will always bite on the fake.

"Pass" means that your secondary plays deeper, blitzers will never bite on play action, and man-to-man coverage gets a small boost. A pass defense is not designed to stop dink-and-dunk plays, but is instead designed to stop the longer pass play.

On the game plan screen, you will see your opponent's tendencies for each situation spanning the current and previous season. If you rex this section of the game plan, the AI will never apply both run and pass in the same quadrant - although you are welcome to do so if you'd like.

In testing, calling a run defense vs. a run play results in about a 50% reduction of the average run, calling a pass defense vs. a run play results in about a 25% increase of the average run. Pass play numbers don't look that different but a good measure of that is probably because there are probably very few long pass plays being called by the AI in situations where a run defense is called. Anecdotally, the INT rate seems to go up with a pass defense, but I haven't run any numbers to validate that.

I'm still getting too many 1,000 yard rushers in my testing but wanted to go ahead and push this new option live here so we can get a feel for how it works with other strategies than the one the AI is applying.

Sounds exciting!

I just used it for the first time and it looks good, my only complaint is something I've mentioned before: it would be soooo much more intuitive if these all weights added to 100 -effectively making it a %. Then I would really know what I'm doing instead of just guessing.

A question: will the run/pass expectancy be reported in the play by play?

Yes, if a team keys on the run or pass, it will be displayed in the game log next to the play selected. I didn't put it into the play-by-play text for the game center just because I thought that would be too wordy there.

How would you like this to happen? Just have it sum to 100 if you navigate away and come back?

I was thinking that when you raised one bar, say from 0, the bar with 100 would go down proportionally. But now I see it's not that easy, as if you move the third bar, how would the others adjust? Maybe like you say, if you navigate away and the bars don't add up to 100, some algorithm would adjust them so that when you come back they do... I guess basically the same algorithm you have now, just translated to %.

Hope that makes sense.

By the way, I could put up with the wordiness to see run/pass defense in the game center. Just a simple "Pass/Run/Neutral Defense" before the rest of the play description would work great, I think.

I just pushed an update that does this - if you switch to another view and come back (you can change to the graphical view or change the situation, etc) it will adjust each value so that it sums to 100.