jdavidbakr wrote:
Each offensive play was run against each defensive play 10 times with everything being reset and as many neutral inputs as possible (so, neutral defensive play calling, fixed experience and fatigue values, all attributes equally set at 90, etc). There were only 11 plays that had an overall average of less than 2 yards, but all plays had some combination of defensive plays that resulted in both a large average gains as well as consistent losses.
My idea of pushing you the ability to audible into a play that is naturally an effective counter to a play the other team is overusing is based on the fact that no matter how good your team is, there are some plays that will not succeed against certain other plays, period, but there are some plays that can beat those plays that are being overused.
Ah, sorry... I misread the first post as saying each position was set to 90 overall, not 90 to all attributes across the board.
That still leaves the question as to whether this was with bleeding edge or the current game engine, unless I missed that somewhere too. If it's bleeding edge, everything I'm saying here can be ignored, 'cause I don't know how significant the changes have been.
Also, you're saying that each defensive play had offensive plays that averaged large gains... but of course they did. With an n of 10, there's no way that won't happen, especially with how frequently passing plays 'work' no matter the circumstances (every game you'll see at least a few examples of a back shoulder throw completed 30 yards down field into triple coverage while being sacked). It also only takes one busted run in an n of 10 with the rest getting stuffed behind the line to end with a large positive, and if you're testing 60+ running plays, naturally a handful of them will likely bust one (or two). I know it increases the test time ridiculously, but I think we need a sample of 100
minimum to establish any kind of average for a given pair of plays.
I think with that kind of simming done, you'll see that the effectiveness of most rushing plays goes down considerably against a certain subset of defenses (not coincidentally the ones being run by the majority of teams currently). Zone will be largely ineffective against most plays, and most importantly won't be any better at defeating those plays that may 'break' those aforementioned certain subset of defenses, meaning those will still be the best to play in any given circumstance. Maybe I'm wrong in my predictions, but I do think that 10 is not close to sufficient to telling us anything particularly useful about
individual match-ups, and would be misleading to use in terms of telling users what should 'beat' a certain play.