I was thinking about the issue of 'play overuse' and 'limited playbooking', and I've come up with an idea for a possible solution. It's a 2 part process:

1) There is a maximum limit of plays for our playbooks, but no minimum. I think there should be a minimum amount of plays chosen. Maybe something like a minimum of 30 offensive plays and 20 or 25 defensive plays. This has been suggested before, but has been shot down because there are ways around it, like GM's loading up on play in play types they don't use. But the minimum limit will be used in conjunction with Part 2:

2) There should be a limit to the amount of times a play can be used in a game. Nothing too drastic, maybe 7 times for an offensive play and 10 for defensive plays. When a play reaches its limit, another play of the same type would be picked. If there is no plays in the type to pick from, a random play would be chosen.

It's not perfect, but it will promote GM's using a variety of plays, not relying on the same few. There would be more personality to the teams, strategies and games.

This issue has to be resolved, for the good of the game. In one of my leagues, one team is 13-0 and the average score of his games are 44-6. He's called the same 8 defensive plays in every game, and has devestated his opponents. It's a new league, we just had the allocation draft, there are no dominant rosters yet, he's winning simply because he only calls the best possible plays. And it sucks losing to the same few plays over and over and over. It's lazy, unrealistic and shows no respect to one's opponent.

IRL, you have to mix it up to win, it should be the same in MFN.

i agree, i just played that owner in a playoff game and when i scouted him i laughed at his play usage. While i agree it may be harder in a new league there are ways to counter his rules. I slammed him 64-17 because i used his limited plays to my advantage. While i'm not sure i agree with your ideas on limiting how many times you can call plays i do think there needs to be a solution. In my opinion there needs to be more plays that work and will beat these defensive plays. I think JDB is working on it though since this topic has been posted about so many times.

I like this idea. Right now in MFN-1 we are testing penalizing overusing a play, but I'm not a huge fan of that (and not thrilled with how it's working). This keeps the control in your hand as a GM and gives you a much more reasonable penalty for attempting to use the same play over and again.

I'd love to hear any arguments against this idea.

It's more realistic if you can call plays to counter blitzes rather than have your guys lay down or turn into snails on defense if you called a play too many times. Base defenses and coverage defenses need to work better so people will be more inclined to call them. Maybe running backs or tightened with high intelligence can stay home to block if they see blitz or at least chip the blitz r on their way out to their route. The same concepts that work in real football should be tested rather than a inorganic slow down mode that allows the offense to take it to the house every time the overuse penalty is in effect. Maybe the qb can adjust the blocking. Or even the center. This would make people really want smart players at those positions

In my opinion...

There needs to be more plays available to choose from.

We should be able to select as many plays from our playbooks as we'd like, not limited to 40/30 for some reason.

The impact of "play knowledge" should be reduced very significantly, or at least make the ability to learn plays much, much, much quicker. There is no reason it should take 2 seasons to learn any play.

The limit on calling a play a certain number of times should not be specific to a single play on defense, but a play type.
For example, my last game in MFN-1 I called 51 plays on defense.
23 different plays were called.
Only 1 play was called 5 times.
The rest were all 4 or less.
EVERY SINGLE PLAY WAS A BLITZ!
The worst part is that my team WON the game. Let me repeat, my team called NOTHING but blitzes all game long and still won the game. This should not happen.


This is KILLING this game for me, and many others as well. The most frustrating part is that eliminating it ASAP doesn't seem to be a high priority at all.

This is more important than QB accuracy, OL blocking, zone coverage, DL pressure, broken tackles, new stats, etc.

The only thing that comes close in importance is banning users like LYTREQ.

This is a high priority, but I'm trying to balance it with lower-hanging fruit so I don't go completely silent for 3 months while this is all I'm working on. It's not a trivial problem to solve...

Does 3 months working on this only mean about 6-12 months doing it with everything else?

It all depends on how long it takes to find a solution, and how compatible other things I'm working on are with what I'm doing in this one. Normally I have several branches of development running at the same time because small tweaks still take a couple of days to run tests to see what their impact is. If I only focused on this issue, it may take 3 months to find the answer. Or, I may find an answer tomorrow. My only point is that this is not as simple of an issue as some others I'm trying to knock out in MFN-1 - and those issues will ultimately have an impact on the blitz overuse as well.

Not to mention a great deal of development time has been lost hunting down and dealing with the latest run of multis... I do believe I'm doing better than just a simple game of whack-a-mole, though, but will not disclose what I'm doing so as not to reveal it to him (them).

Keep up the good work!!!

I have been reading many posts about play overuse and although I am on the side of using many different plays, I can understand why some would use limited plays if they felt they could get an advantage.

I wanted to throw out an idea for a possible solution. I think the "scouting aspect" of the game could be tinkered with a bit so over time a team would not have such an advantage by using the same play.

For example, when you scout a team during midweek, you get 10 plays to choose from both offense and defense. What if there was a weight put on these plays? Say you know a team is going to use a particular play, and instead of scouting 10 plays, you choose a lesser number and could have that 1 play be a bigger focus for practice, allowing your team to learn it faster. This could especially help teams within a division that see that rival two times/season.