I spent a ton of time today watching alpha film (it's my vacation, I'll do whatever I want thank you). Here are the things that y'all should be paying attention to in beta games:
1) Slant routes. Oh, my the slant route. Specifically, watch M2M defenses with no secondary help (i.e. Secondary in Man). These are destroying teams in alpha code.
On one hand, I don't really care if you strand your CBs on an island with an elite receiver and then watch that receiver do what he do. On the other hand, there appears to be an obvious bug in how CBs engage with these routes.
Watch these and see if you see the same issues that I see.
2) Blitz 2 defenses with man secondary getting eaten up by the pass. I've noticed that blitz 2 defenses are losing big time. Part of this is because of #1 above, but it's not just the slant route destroying them.
Again, part of me doesn't care. It just means that teams will have to be more selective or creative with their blitz calling. It may be worth trying out some of those 3 Deep Man / 3 Deep Zone blitzes to see if you can effectively get pressure on the QB and not give up a bazillion yards.
If you can get pressure and the zone players don't look terribly stupid, great! That will give folks an option. I'm afraid that NEITHER the blitzes NOR the zones will work.
3) DL pressure, or rather, lack of DL pressure. DL play is UNDERwhelming right now. I'm not sure what is causing it. I have suggested to JDB to make AC more important in determining DL pass rushing position, but right now, there are VERY FEW pressures on the QBs and QBs are shredding defenses accordingly.
Part of this is good. This means that QBs are getting the ball out when they should be.
Part of it is bad. It means that versions (years) of nerfing DL to balance out passing need to be slowly unraveled to figure out an appropriate balance now that QBs make decisions like they should.
4) Lack of knockdowns. These completely went away. I think it's associated with the coverage bug, but I haven't been able to track down why there are no knockdowns anymore.
That's really about it. Those four things are what I think need to be solved for this to be releasable.
Last edited at 12/28/2018 9:55 pm