Hey everyone,



I’m opening this thread to gather feedback and ideas on what areas of the game engine should be our main focus going forward. Think of this as a collaborative discussion where we can surface pain points, wish lists, and opportunities for improvement — but let’s keep the conversation productive and centered on defining clear priorities.



I’ve also assembled a steering committee that will be reviewing this thread and helping distill everyone’s input into a concrete list of priorities to guide upcoming development.



A few quick notes to keep things constructive:

• Feel free to share what’s most important to you and why.



• If you disagree with someone’s view, focus on the idea, not the person.



• Try to keep posts actionable — specific examples or use cases help a lot.

Thanks for being part of this process — your insight really helps shape the direction of the engine.

Wahooo, we are getting there. Thanks JDB.

For me, and probably most, the most glaring issue is the Long passing game. I don't think you need anyone to harp on about it, but let's just say "it's broke".

Passing works if you stick to the same dozen or so short calls and another handful of medium plays (if you have the blocking and speedy targets), but 3/4 of the playbooks are useless against the most common base defenses, especially all the long play calls. I’m not sure if it’s the speed or skill ratings like bump and run that are the root cause or if it’s programmed handicaps on pass blocking and catching longer throws that’s the issue, but both probably need addressed. Familiarity/scouting is also “broken” and could be partially to blame, it should be completely revamped or eliminated in some cases due to how ineffective any user input actually is.

Player generation. The draft has far too many useless players even if they were to boom. Creates a large cliff for roster options.

Secondary to that, have busts still be capable of development season over season, even if at a marginal scale associated with volatility. Have it based on TC and at the position they are identified as.

Secondary to the secondary, have position coaches strongly influence the above noted growth. Coaches mean little to nothing currently but it’d be great to put emphasis on that portion of running a team.

Make contracts more dynamic based on how owners sign or value players. The value rating system dictating demands belies the idea people can set their own weights which generally better align to the engine and preference.

On the ultra macro level, the main thing that I would like to see is consistency in a player's attributes actually driving his performance. A few interesting tid-bits just from my current players:



https://german-nfl-league.myfootballnow.com/player/12348



Copeland has been my CB2 since day 1. As an undeveloped rookie, he was a dominant shutdown corner (45% catch allowed). After developing his attributes and gaining experience, in year 2 he was pretty mediocre (55.8% catch allowed). Another year of development, he is essentially at his best as far as attributes, and he becomes a complete liability to our defense (63.1% catch allowed). This is an absolutely egregious embarrassment for the game.



https://german-nfl-league.myfootballnow.com/player/10576



I was incredibly excited to get my hands on Campos, as I've always found it very difficult to sign a QB with truly elite talent. All is going great, until we get to the postseason and he just completely chokes and collapses, and I knew right away I was dealing with a dreaded postseason dud. He is head and shoulders above every other QB in team history for the regular season, and dead last by a mile in postseason. It is clear that on the back end somewhere, there is a setting that he will not perform in the playoffs. We've all had these guys, and it is crushing.



Also, everybody is familiar with players of the two opposing types:

The guy with the mediocre attributes who mysteriously puts up the stats of an absolute stud throughout his career, and...

The guy with the elite attributes who is just a complete dud who can never perform.



If you are going to quantify attributes for the players, it should always correlate strongly to how they actually perform, otherwise, what, really, is the point of any of this?

My biggest gripe with player generation is how many prospects are created with attributes that are useless for the position they are spawned as. Slow wr and Db with blocking skills instead of ball or coverage skills, and linemen who are weak, can’t block, or for some odd reason generated with good coverage ratings but crappy tackling/run stuffing. This issue will be considerably exaggerated if the new UI restricts depth charts or changing positions to prevent these “projects” from developing into something more useful for their abilities.

And the regression rate is too high as well. Others have pointed out that 2/3 to 3/4 of first round picks “bust”. I understand that they shouldn’t all boom, but over 50 percent just isn’t sustainable or fair to those that need to rebuild through the draft and it completely destroys the value of trading those picks. Granted any competitive league is disregarding default player ratings and poaching for speed and those mismatched players that are generated out of “best fit” positions, but the only players that “boom” are the fringe talents that don’t deserve a depth slot on a competitive team. the entire draft is almost pointless when only 5 truly great players come out of it, (and somehow they are on playoff contenders already)

Here is a list of other things just from the top of my head:

1. Most plays (offensive and defensive) have been rendered useless somewhere along the way with some game engine change.

2. Spamming WR2 slants (with the right QB and WR2) is often a lethal offense, and there is very little to nothing the defense can do to slow it down.

3. QB's severely overuse TE's and RB checkdowns, and it can be very difficult to get them to throw to WR's.

4. Blowouts used to be a real thing. Somewhere along the way, some sort of "anti-blowout" or "parity-forcing" code was introduced. If you get too far ahead too quickly in a game, the sim completely and entirely nerfs your entire team for the rest of the game. This then leads to a tough game, and occasionally a loss, to an AI team that doesn't even belong on the same field. Just let the blowouts happen.

5. The secondary is WAY too fast in recognizing the ball was thrown and changing direction. I can't tell you how many times I've seen a CB covering a go route come back and knock down a dump off to the RB at the line of scrimmage. Complete nonsense.

6. Somewhat conversely, the defender covering a RB in the flat often simply runs straight past him into the backfield giving the offense an easy huge gain on the dump off when the RB gets behind him.

7. Games where a team completely and utterly dominates statistically and then loses happen at an insanely high rate. I think this is related to the "anti-blowout" or "parity-forcing" code mentioned earlier.

I'm sure there are so many more things I could come up with, but these are some of the biggest I can think of right now.

The easy fix for this is to just continue allowing the same position switches as before, while restricting out of position players to fix the abuses that ruin the experience. It could be fixed by changing player generation, but that is a much heavier lift. What is clear is that there is a massive problem, we can't keep both the current player generation and the position switch restrictions.