League Forums

If you haven't played with it yet, don't forget about the new game plan rules in the game planning area! You can dial in and be very specific about the play calling much more than you could before. Pre-season is a great time to play with it and get the feel for it before the games count!

This is what I found in my first attempt at using it.

Down, Distance and Location of the field are great. Custom location and distance to go was an excellent idea. Quarter was a bit of a problem because I wanted a game-long rule for every down, so I had to add each quarter and OT and each down individually. An "all game" option would be nice.

Time I found a bit confusing at first, but I figured it was time remaining in the quarter, and if I chose 15:00 - 0:00 and every quarter, that would amount to a game-long rule (right?). Score I wasn't sure if it was symmetrical: is it there a difference between "down by 3 to up by 3" and "up to 3 to down by 3". I expect not, but I thought I'd ask.

Finally, I would have preferred the defaults for play and formation be 0 instead of 100. The rules I wanted are about very specific things I wanted done (rather than things I wanted to avoid), which means I had to turn down almost every bar instead of simply raising the bar I wanted.

Something funny happened with the Decisions section as well. When I edited a 4th down rule, all the bars were different. I think they were taken from my general gameplan options? If so, I think that's great, actually, it's something I was going to request, but I would have liked to know to expect it. I can't remember if that happened because I decided not to edit the defaults after all because it seemed like too much work, or if it changed the bars I set (I think I did drop some bars to zero).

Two-point rules seem too complex to build at this point, but fortunately that's something the game handles pretty well. I'd love a "Save as" button so we can create an additional rule starting from the template of an existing rule. That would be very nice and it would help streamline difficult rules like two-point situations.

Overall, an exciting addition to the league, good job!.

Thanks for the feedback! Good ideas on the quarters; you are correct on the times, and the "down by 3 to up by 3" and "up by 3 to down by 3" are identical situations. (It will normalize it to the same side when you save it).

The defaults being what you have in your gameplan is a good idea except that because of the nature of the rules it won't know which gameplan data to use if you have multiple situations or a field location range that spans multiple quadrants ... but making them default to 0 instead of 100 is a good idea.

You can save the rule and then re-load it and it will add the rule to the end as a duplicate, and then you can edit the rule from there.

Thanks again!

Save and reload, got it! I see what you mean about loading the defaults, but when I built a single-down rule it did load the defaults, only it happened after I saved it and I only realized it when I opened to edit it. It might be a good idea to add a note for the users about that, so they won't think they'll have to build their play-call selections anew (and in fact, if they did it would be overwritten with the defaults?).

Oh, I know what happened. It normalizes the items to sum to 100 when you save it, I'll bet that's what you saw - because it shouldn't be pulling from your defaults in any case, it doesn't even look at them.

Oh, ok. That must be it.