I copied this from CUST 79 message board...

Re: Season 2033
By CooterBrown
8/26/2020 1:53 am
I am going to apologize for not offering any congratulations on the league championship. I find it terribly difficult to do when only ONE particular play is run for 99.9999% of the season. (A fact to where I am on the fence about leaving MFN altogether).
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I don't like seeing all of these I might be leaving posts, but I understand.

What is MyFootballNow?

MyFootballNow is a free web-based franchise football simulation game. You take on the role of owner/general manager for a team in the league and compete season after season with other people around the world.

You are responsible for signing and drafting players, hiring your coaching staff, managing your roster and depth chart, and assembling your game plan for each game. You can control a team in as little as a few minutes each day, or can spend lots of time digging into the stats, tweaking your game plan, or just exploring the depth of the game available. Games are simulated using an advanced game engine that makes thousands of decisions on each play, with players acting as “autonomous agents” which is a fancy way to say that each player makes decisions independently of anything other than what they are actually aware of.

A direct quote from JDB about MFN.

I can't speak for everyone but I joined this game to play a simulation of football where I was the GM and I played season after season. The expectation was the game would closely mimic the NFL in as many ways as possible.

The problem with the simulation is that many aspects of code fail to address the physical size of players in relation to speed. The result is highly competetive owners take shortcuts to win by turning RBs, FBs and TEs into WRs because they lose weight, gain speed and suffer little negative outcomes by playing a position way below the ideal weight for that position. These elite owners step every player down a position class on defense to improve speed because physical size doesn't factor into the code so DTs are DEs, DEs are LBs, LBs are DBs etc.

The result is teams have a dozen WRs and CBs on the roster and speed is king and every move is another step further away from real football and closer to a bizarre facsimile of football.

I created a new league to experiment with these concepts because I dont want to use these exploits in regular leagues. I dont use them because I dont know how, I don't use them because my expectations for MFN are to compete in a football sim with more of a traditional roster.

Just because you can do something doesn't mean you should do it. Where do we draw the line in finding ways to break the code instead of building an actual football roster where the size of a player matters just as much as his speed.

CBs and WRs starting as RBs.

Guys like Peterson, Morris, Richardson, Foster and Marshawn Lynch sit in the 215-225-pound range. This seems to be the ideal weight for a running back. But again, it's more about the distribution of the weight and the muscle-mass involved with the player than strictly just their weight.

None of that matters here, +90 speed and +85 avoid fumble means a 190 pound CB or WR can have success. Height and weight are ignored in the sim when the wear and tear on RBs is the single most important factor in the NFL when having a bell cow back.

CBs playing DE

Undersized edge rushers can dominant in MFN. In my No Holds Barred league, I had a 5' 11", 191 pound CB amass 29 sacks the last 2 games playing 71 and 80 plays at LDE.

Again, speed wins out because his size isn't factored into the code when matching up against +300 offensive linemen. In the NFL, a corner could blitz the edge on occasion and get a sack but if a CB ever lined up opposite a tackle every play...he would get destroyed!

What if I told you, on the offensive line only Speed, acceleration and strength were factors? Run and pass block plus size of the player doesnt matter at all. Would the switch to 5 200 pounders on the offensive line be OK? If it works so the running game opens up and the QB doesn't take any sacks....should we all do it?

This game was suppose to be a roster management sim where DEs played DE, RBs playing RB and TEs playing TE. JDB never took in to account all the ways his code could be manipulated by playing players out of position....WRs become interception machines because of pass catching? What does pass catching have to do with playing defense against a WR? WRs have no skills to cover someone, the technics are completely foreign to them but they find themselves in the position to make plays on the ball constantly.

Play selection on offense and defense was suppose to be a random selection based on the play matrix on both sides of the ball with randomly generated results...sure he added rules for managing the clock, when to punt, kick a FG or go for it on 4th down. Rules were even added to use certain defenses when leading or certain offenses when losing but JDB never wanted limited play selection on either side of the ball.

To sum up, its all a question of ethics!

Just because you can do something doesnt mean you should do something!

The punt block exploit is a good example.....when these were going off in the game, everyone understood how to do this but only a few actually did it. Why? Ethics!

In my leagues, when I PMed every owner and asked them to cease and dissist the punt block because it wasn't right or good for the league or game in general....most said OK but a few said they wouldn't stop until a rule was implemented because someone could do it to them. They freely acknowledged is was wrong but couldn't stop until a rule was made because they had to protect themselves.

Until my No Holds Barred league, I had never actively, knowingly used the punt block exploit but I lost a League Championship to someone who used it to protect themselves against anyone that might use it against them.

This is a game and its suppose to be fun. If you have to take shortcuts to win and use every little edge to gain an advantage based on parts of the game code that is clearly broken....God bless you!....but you have lost sight of why you even joined this simulation in the first place.

I would rather lose playing this game the way it was intended then win at all cost using exploits because my ego isnt tied to winning....its tied to how I go about playing the game

Couldn't agree more.

Cjfred68 writes a 1,095-word post.

jayusmc84 writes "couldn't agree more."

I wonder if he also once read The Brothers Karamazov, closed the cover, and said, "Yep, couldn't agree more."

One time I turned in a book report, and all I said was great book, couldn't agree more. I got an A.

I don’t like having to create rule after rule to try to keep the game competitive for everyone. The simple solution is to have a league with only owners that believe in fair competition. It’s that simple, and hard to do.

Ive already started to bow out of leagues that have several pages of league created rules because of some owners.

Interesting, create a private league where the owners are accepted via their moral principles.

The Ethical Football League

When I first started playing, what I enjoyed the most was playing against the other owner, not the game engine, or some other kind of AI. The games were competitive and fun, not so much anymore when I know I can never win a championship with certain players in my leagues.

This is a simulation. Meaning, as close as you can get to the real deal. The engine/JDB cannot (and should not) predict that someone is going to play their CB on the front line of ST Block. It isn't where the player was intended to play. No real coach is going into a game with only 5 defenses called, because that is dumb, so why should JDB even have to consider that being done? You are supposed to be simulating football, not playing "Asteroids" with the **** code. When these situations become unbeatable, then you use it for advantage, that is exploiting.

I am in only one league, where there was no talk about the punt block exploit or the LB/DL exploit. Nobody used it, and they didn't have to be told not to. (well, one guy did use the LB thing, but he didn't know about the exploit).

We have some very intelligent owners who can pick codes apart, drop games into a database and come up with some kind of advantage. That is another problem I have, is that there is this thing called MFN-1. Not many, if any, of these very smart owners, who find these bugs, have a team in that league. That is where you are supposed to go put your CB on the line, your CB at RB, etc. to test crazy stuff, not in regular leagues where everyone is thought to be on the same level playing field. If you want to play like you are a computer, play in MFN-1 or no holds barred. Otherwise, play like a human and the way the game was intended.

I abstain from the vote.

(You can't double quote in this forum.) <<The problem with the simulation is that many aspects of code fail to address the physical size of players in relation to speed. The result is highly competetive owners take shortcuts to win by turning RBs, FBs and TEs into WRs because they lose weight, gain speed and suffer little negative outcomes by playing a position way below the ideal weight for that position.>>

The problem with simulation is that biomechanics are way off. As I have said elsewhere, SP is not the most important thing for dropping a player's weight: AC is. Since AC is still fixed on player weight and is not normalized.

You are always at a DISADVANTAGE if you play some positions at weight. For instance, your TE is 257# and all players that cover the TE are <= 241#. Do you know why TEs only catch 50-60% of their passes ever? It's because they are always covered by a player that will close the gap to the ball because of AC due to bad biomechanics. A 257# TE cannot break a route like Travis Kelce. It won't happen at 257# right now.

The reason in terms of coverage is more ridiculous. So ... let's talk about knockdowns. Know what causes these? It's the defenders' physical proximity to the offensive player. That means your faster player is going to get more knockdowns because they will be closer to the offensive player regardless of skill. So that 257# TE? Forget if you want to use him as a receiving threat. (I say this as a player that before 4.5 would routine get 70% catches and 1000 yards from a 257# TE ... and lose every game to people like Bryson that would play their TEs at WR regardless, but I digress.)

And this is just one interaction that doesn't make sense because of biomechanics and game mechanics.


As a person that can do both, nothing frustrates me more when people assume that I'm winning games simply because I'm playing the code or using a database to scout as opposed to watching games.

I've held off really going off on a particular rant here, but why not. I scout a lot of games. I scout every game in this league like it's a playoff game because this league is designed to be one of the more competitive leagues in MFN. The reason why a number of GMs in this game lose games is _not_ what their opponent is doing on offense or defense. The reason they lose games is because of what _they_ are doing on offense and defense.

Here's just a few things I've noticed:

On Offense

1) No run/pass balance at all.

2) No run/pass balance out of each set, which forces your opponent to make a decision how to defend you on key downs.

3) Too many runs out of GL sets and not enough runs out of spread sets. Balancing your runs out of all sets help generate more positive running yards.

4) Not enough variation on passing plays (too many Hitch plays, etc.) OR too many ineffective passing plays (plays that go primarily to RBs, for instance, without putting the RB in space).

5) Too many long passes and other passes that put your QB under pressure unnecessarily.

On Defense

1) Too many blitz plays called without enough blitz plays to not get hit with overuse. The base defenses are actually a lot better than most of the blitzes in most situations, and yet, owners more than often do not learn how to effectively use base defenses before launching on an all out blitz strategy that fails badly.

2) Refusing to use rules at all. Years ago, in one of the first guides I wrote, I went into why creating rules against the 113 and 203 sets on running downs was essential. It still is. People still don't do it.

3) Not thinking smartly about where to put their safeties or best cover players. The majority of 212 passes go to the WR2 (for homeruns) or the RB (for the grindy plays). I rarely see teams putting an LB in the lane or a safety over the top of the WR2. And then to make it worse they don't put their best cover guy on the WR2.

You know where you don't run into this problem? Roster-only, no rule writing, no game planning, only horrible AI coach play calling, and roster management. Occasionally, you run into out of position players but not as often as in these leagues. Games are closer, and its not the same people in the post season year after year. With that being said, I think my time in game planning has come to an end.