Let's start an official why I hate 0.4.3 thread in beta chat. Because the hate is going to start as soon as folks really start playing it anyway.

0.4.3 is going to ridiculously limit my offense. I spent the last two calendar years (no joke - calendar years) fine tuning an legitimate pro-style offense that utilized 40 plays and executed efficiently. That offense is now dead because of the problems in 0.4.3, especially the RB passing problems.

So here's my current choices:

1) I could just quit. It's tempting. And most of the time when I diagnose problems my analysis gets ignored for months if not completely.

2) I can create a high exploitative offense that uses something like 12 plays because that's really all I need to exploit 0.4.3 and still run some semblance of my old offense that used 40 (and would have used more if I could have used more).

For now, I'm going with #2. That's right. 0.4.3 is going to turn me into the offensive game planner that I hate. Because playing 0.4.3 isn't about game planning anymore. It's about working around the bugs and nerfs in the code.

Man am I glad I am not in beta leagues anymore. Too little time to figure out whats wrong with the game all the time instead of actually playing it. It's not perfect by any means (And I'm sure I'll find instances where this version really pisses me off like the last version does) nor will I think it will be for a very long time.

I've already seen the many excruciating faults that this version has, but if enough people see the problem, there could be patches to fix the bugs that 0.4.3 has (like the RB passing which is my main concern)

I'm not one to judge so you do what you feel like you need to do. But if this game continues to irritate you to point out what you specifically hate about each and every version of a game that is still in early development, run by one person and negatively criticize the product flaws in a way that isn't necessarily helpful, then it might be better off to take a break from a game that infuriates you as much as it does.

Just my two cents :)

All I'm going to say is that the things I'm infuriated by are not design flaws or bugs. They were purposefully written into the code and are working _as intended_. Just remember that when you're watching your 0.4.3 games. The code base as released was considered finished.

No. The code base released was considered acceptable to address the issues it meant to address for now so we can move on to address other issues. When you see a "1.x" release you can say the code base was considered finished.

Bullshit. You made it this way, and it's only unfinished in the sense that it will never be finished.

No, no, no, no, no. This is the absolute wrong way to think about this.

Let's walk through this.

1) Most of the most active leagues are now private leagues.

2) People PAY REAL MONEY to create those private leagues.

3) Giving people an inferior product that they PAID REAL MONEY for is amateur, bush league nonsense.

The "this is beta only code" argument went out the window as soon as pay to create private leagues were implemented. Standard leagues are now production code.

4) The passing changes make the game worse, rather than improve it. The decision to move forward was made in spite of overwhelming evidence of your intentional bad decisions.

5) In addition to making money off token purchases, you are making money on ad revenue from our willingness to be here.

That's the most idiotic statement I've seen on this board since I've been here. You come off as a troll is this one.


And setherick, as far as real money is concerned, this is change between the couch cushions cheap compared to other sims. And other sims that aren't as good in their finished versions, not in beta as this one is. Heck even for the almighty OOTP series you pay good money each year just for a half arsed updated version. Talk about a racket. And if ya really want to see what it's like to pay real money to play a game give iRacing a try. It's pretty serious there.
So ya, I think you got a lil carried away there.

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.

Take that, Ray. Bested you again.

For the record, setherick provided ample constructive feedback in the beta forum.

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.