5) Write 800 words or more on something that interests you. It could be related to statistics, to a league issue you take seriously, or a niche part of history that doesn’t fit neatly into either of the above categories. This must be directly related to the league, so don’t wax 800 words about your team’s Werewolf server. Be warned that freedom comes with risk, and this category will be judged especially stringently for anyone trying to spew complete nonsense.
I gotta say guys first of all I really like this new format. This gives me a great opportunity to draw on some of the knowledge and experiences I have stored up from 3 years in this league. So let's get down to brass tacks and talk about some interesting aspects of league history. Today we're going to be talking about eras. I know it's kind of a weird and broad category but stay with me.
Now I'm not going to break down eras officially and call this the air raid era and this the steel curtain era or anything like that. Rather I'm going to discuss certain trends we saw during different periods of the league and what sim settings or changes were the cause of these starting or ending. So here we go.
Early in the NSFL around seasons 1 through 3 was a very busy time for front 7 players. Because of the lack of bot OL and not enough active players to fill the role almost all teams were starting 3 or 4 50 TPE offensive linemen. This wasn't a huge deal in season 1 as all players were trash at that time, but by the time season 2 and 3 rolled around the active defensive linemen were absolutely dominating these weak offensive lines. We saw records in sacks that we may never see broken again. Further compounding this issue was that teams passed the ball a lot since rushing wasn't very effective. A very good RB maybe got 3.4 yards per carry.
It was around this time, maybe season 2-4 where we started doing custom modifications to the playcalling. First thing we did was make it so your playcalling settings were accurate. Before when you put a 50 for run/pass it really had so much noise in it that you might as well put a 70 or a 30 because the sim was just going to do whatever it wanted. Our solution was to limit the range of what you could put in there but allow us to really control the frequency, because that makes sense. Next we learned about the corner blitz problem and implemented some custom playbooks to remove those from the game. It was this experience that then led to us modifying the Spread playbook to have more designed QB runs so that a mobile QB had more than 3 rushes per game (the default).
Come season 4 we saw a big change with the introduction of bot offensive line. This had two main effects. First all offensive lines got better, duh. Second we saw a lot of active offensive line move to other positions for their team so there was a huge influx of talent. This ended up being an era of fuck it chuck it football. Seeing teams going 70 pass or more was common. We eventually tuned this down around season 7 by increasing sliders for rushing and dropping them for passing.
Another big thing happened around Season 7 or 8 with the change to the playcalling for blitzes. Previously we were looking at Nickel 75 as the dominating defensive playcall. The SLB in Nickel 75 was getting a ton of sacks and we were seeing the effects negatively on defensive ends who were losing a lot of production to LBs. A nerf to bring this down to 35% blitz was made to keep this in line. It's still the dominant playbook but at least now defensive ends can compete for sacks too.
More changes that happened around these period was a major overhaul of archetypes. We worked on a few different goals with buffing some and nerfing others but one of the main goals was to noormalize weights for OL and DL. As it stood there was really no sense in picking some of the smaller faster builds because the weight disadvantage made no sense. So we made them all weigh the same which removed a lot of the flavor from the game but did allow people to choose more archetypes and not be concerned about it hurting their performance. We did more changes with all archetypes including QB and CB and so on and so forth. In hindsight we could have done better work and made fewer archetypes with more unique features between them, but we didn't. Maybe next time.
So now what, where do we go from here? It's interesting how far we've come but I do think it's time that we look to pick up where we left off and do some basic modifications. I think DL weights need to be explored more to offset the amount of human OL we have these days, they have a harder competition and need the balance restored. Secondly I think it's time we boosted passing yard sliders just a touch, not a ton but one or two notches. We're getting to the point where 4k yards passing isn't happening even with the 16 game season, we're running the ball a ton. Also our passer ratings are very low and a higher Y/A will improve that a lot. Again it's just a small tweak but it's needed.
I gotta say guys first of all I really like this new format. This gives me a great opportunity to draw on some of the knowledge and experiences I have stored up from 3 years in this league. So let's get down to brass tacks and talk about some interesting aspects of league history. Today we're going to be talking about eras. I know it's kind of a weird and broad category but stay with me.
Now I'm not going to break down eras officially and call this the air raid era and this the steel curtain era or anything like that. Rather I'm going to discuss certain trends we saw during different periods of the league and what sim settings or changes were the cause of these starting or ending. So here we go.
Early in the NSFL around seasons 1 through 3 was a very busy time for front 7 players. Because of the lack of bot OL and not enough active players to fill the role almost all teams were starting 3 or 4 50 TPE offensive linemen. This wasn't a huge deal in season 1 as all players were trash at that time, but by the time season 2 and 3 rolled around the active defensive linemen were absolutely dominating these weak offensive lines. We saw records in sacks that we may never see broken again. Further compounding this issue was that teams passed the ball a lot since rushing wasn't very effective. A very good RB maybe got 3.4 yards per carry.
It was around this time, maybe season 2-4 where we started doing custom modifications to the playcalling. First thing we did was make it so your playcalling settings were accurate. Before when you put a 50 for run/pass it really had so much noise in it that you might as well put a 70 or a 30 because the sim was just going to do whatever it wanted. Our solution was to limit the range of what you could put in there but allow us to really control the frequency, because that makes sense. Next we learned about the corner blitz problem and implemented some custom playbooks to remove those from the game. It was this experience that then led to us modifying the Spread playbook to have more designed QB runs so that a mobile QB had more than 3 rushes per game (the default).
Come season 4 we saw a big change with the introduction of bot offensive line. This had two main effects. First all offensive lines got better, duh. Second we saw a lot of active offensive line move to other positions for their team so there was a huge influx of talent. This ended up being an era of fuck it chuck it football. Seeing teams going 70 pass or more was common. We eventually tuned this down around season 7 by increasing sliders for rushing and dropping them for passing.
Another big thing happened around Season 7 or 8 with the change to the playcalling for blitzes. Previously we were looking at Nickel 75 as the dominating defensive playcall. The SLB in Nickel 75 was getting a ton of sacks and we were seeing the effects negatively on defensive ends who were losing a lot of production to LBs. A nerf to bring this down to 35% blitz was made to keep this in line. It's still the dominant playbook but at least now defensive ends can compete for sacks too.
More changes that happened around these period was a major overhaul of archetypes. We worked on a few different goals with buffing some and nerfing others but one of the main goals was to noormalize weights for OL and DL. As it stood there was really no sense in picking some of the smaller faster builds because the weight disadvantage made no sense. So we made them all weigh the same which removed a lot of the flavor from the game but did allow people to choose more archetypes and not be concerned about it hurting their performance. We did more changes with all archetypes including QB and CB and so on and so forth. In hindsight we could have done better work and made fewer archetypes with more unique features between them, but we didn't. Maybe next time.
So now what, where do we go from here? It's interesting how far we've come but I do think it's time that we look to pick up where we left off and do some basic modifications. I think DL weights need to be explored more to offset the amount of human OL we have these days, they have a harder competition and need the balance restored. Secondly I think it's time we boosted passing yard sliders just a touch, not a ton but one or two notches. We're getting to the point where 4k yards passing isn't happening even with the 16 game season, we're running the ball a ton. Also our passer ratings are very low and a higher Y/A will improve that a lot. Again it's just a small tweak but it's needed.
Hank Winchester (S25 - Current) - Scrub
Angus Winchester (S1-S12) - 4x Ultimus Champ - #2 Career Sacks - Hall of Fame
Cooter Bigsby (S14-S23) - S23 Ultimus Champ - #4 Career Yards - #4 Career TDs - 2x MVP - Hall of Fame