Anyway, with 52% passing rating against 78% defense rating defending the pass, he should be 3 and out most of the time, having a lot less than 35 min time of possession and not finishing the game with only 4 punts and no turnovers.....

You beat him by 30, scoring at least 2 TDs per quarter until the 4th. You also sacked the QB 10 times. The game was never in doubt for your side.

Edited to look up the Guate Wolves stats. He's top 10 passing in Dragons and top 40 passing in RZA across all official games.

Please do a complete homework, before you make him a legend.

He barely logs in. He is passing a ridiculous percentage of his snaps. His long passing attempts are after sacks. He plays lots of players out of position. He does everything what he can to be blown out.

Imo this is a prime example, that (some) skills do not (yet) matter enough in this game. defensive pressure apparently has not enough impact on the quality of a pass.

He has a good QB und 2 good WR, but a horrible OL. Just 3 OL players dressed for the game, the rest of the OL were P, WR, QB, CB, etc
The complete OL just made 9 succesfull block attempts all game (as a Unit) so the QB had a DL in his face all game.
No way a QB would be able to complete 62% of his passes when under this kind of pressure

Just for the record my opponent from the game in the OP sent me a private message saying that he doesn't understand how his team beat mine.

For those saying it's a tactical problem can you please explain this.

My O ran against his 335 D 7 times for 31 yards or 4.4yds per rush.
His O ran against my 335 D 16 times for 90 yards or 5.6yds per rush.

My O rushing rating is 11.5pts superior to his D rushing rating.
My D rushing rating is 12.5pts superior to his O rushing rating.

So I had much superior players on the field, running against 335 and they got fewer yards than his inferior players running against my 335

This is a perfect level to aim for in my opinion, turnovers happen, they change games.

But (isn't there always a 'but'), the effectiveness of Int Returns and Fumble Returns should probably be the next tweak, as right now far too many get taken straight back for TDs. We rarely see very short returns either.

I didn't review your entire game, but from glancing at the stats pages, his RBs got a lot more carries than yours did. I had been using mostly a SG4 offense this season, and my team stopped running the ball effectively, averaging only about 1 ypc against 3-3-5. And I had one of the better running offenses in SD 1.1 last season and have the entire team returning from last season. So I tested some things in scrimmages and I find that if most of the carries go to the FBs, my ypc suffered. Then I switched to a larger variety of formations that featured more carries by my RBs and very few by my FBs, and my ypc improved dramatically. Small sample size, but the results were staggering.

Master is here, precious. I really hope you can show me where exactly I said that if your opponent is passing almost 100% you need to go for the 4-4-3 defense. I'd only advice it if it's 50/50 or 60/40 between run and pass, but that's another discussion.

Now I'm not claiming Xenos had a fantastic defense and I'm not claiming he's wrong about players' skills maybe not being decisive enough, but it's pretty easy to see why Xenos actually had a shot to win this match. So, if you want to really get into this, I'm happy to oblige.

Below a short analysis, but if you think that's not enough and you want an in-detail explanation of every play I'll be more than happy to give it.

To make things easy let's say 4-4-3 and 5-5-3 is good call against the run, bad call against the pass and 3-4-4, 3-3-5 and 3-1-7 is bad call against the run, good call against the pass.

Lyon ran the ball 21 times. Xenos made 7 good calls against the run, 14 bad. Those good calls made for 1 yard lost, his bad calls gave up 4,07yds average

Lyon passed the ball 65 times, Xenos made 6 bad calls averaging 5,83 yards and 59 good calls averaging 3,93yards and 4 INT's.

Xenos on the other hand, ran the ball 38 times. Lyon made 11 good calls averaging 0,54 yds and 27 bad calls averaging 6,03yds.

Xenos passed the ball 42 times agains which lyon made 14 bad calls resulting in 5,64 yards and 28 good calls averaging 4,66 yards and 1 INT.

So what happened here?
Xenos' defense made a good call 76,7% of the time. Lyon's defense made a good call 49% of the time, and when all was said and done the total difference in yardage was still very minimal (40 yards).

Xenos's boys did put up big numbers and maybe the RNG did him a few favours here and there, but on the other hand Lyon's INT's were well deserved, throwing 7 passes on 7-10 yardage from the Goalline O against a 3-4-4 formation all to the outside,should have a high chance of being intercepted. Throwing 24 shotgun passes (20 of those 2WR) vs 2 runs in the 4th quarter, all against 3-3-5 and all to the outside, should have a high chance of being intercepted. If you pair that with an opponents defense calling a good defensive play 27% more than you, it should be possible that your massively skilled players get their asses handed to them.

Now there is no way that Xenos wins this game every time with these playbooks up against eachother and I think there is very little chance that he would win if Lyon calls a better defense, but if we're going to throw a fit everytime a better team loses, while having worse playcalling, than we don't really want a a good simulation game.

There are cases to make about the yardage Xenos' less skilled players have put up, for example there's a big difference in the bad call average of the run, but that can be somewhat explained by Lyon's bad call being worse (higher % of 3-3-5's opposed to 3-4-4's).

On top of that there's the fact that Xenos used a very diverse playbook: Using all formations, almost all of them used for pass and run plays, showing a heavy diversity between inner and outer passes and runs. Lyon on the other hand... 1 pass from the flexbone, 1 from wishbone, 9 passes goalline o (7 of those on 7-10yds) 19 4WR and 35 2WR and all passes to the outside. I don't think any of us know when and how the lopsided tactics exactly come into play and I have no idea if that had an influence here, or it's just a slight tweak that happened in the INT % of the shotgun or anythin else, but I personally was hoping this was the kind of playbook that was going to get the biggest downside under the new engine. I'll be monitoring this closely as this is something we know very little about.

Now I'm not at all claiming to have all the answers on how to play this game, I honest to god still have no idea how good or bad my playbook is compared to all others, but I did put quite some effort into better understanding the mechanics behind everything and how formations interact. And Holly I know you did too, so I'm really puzzled as to why you can't see there 's statiscally nothing that extraordinary going on in this game. The only oddity I found was Xenos' Pro set pass did very well against the 3-3-5, but that's 4 plays. Before I have at least a couple of 10000 plays to compare to the previous engine I'll refrain from making statements on what exactly changed under the new engine.

I encourage everyone to add to this discussion, but like I asked a couple of weeks ago, know why you're posting. Right now almost everything I see is people posting the result of a single match where something didn't go there way. Try to gather actual data to prove your point! Want to prove dime is broken: compare 1000 dime plays between all different teams with one another and see if it still holds up. Want to prove skills don't matter: find the percentage of matches were the much stronger team lost against a much weaker team while both having comparable playbooks (this is a hard one, I know), but without a significant amount of data a lot of these claims are useless and because it's an unreliable claim, and Pete can't change anything based on a 1 or a couple of games.

We're all playing a game that's influenced by RNG and loads of variables we can't even track. Did you ever play a game of poker? There you can actually track every % and still you'll feel gutted when you lose to that 2% river chance, but it's statiscally bound to happen, just as much as you'll have the thrill of hoping for that river card, when you need it. Keep that in mind when you find an oddity and expand on it, until you can actually make a difference. That way you're actually helping Pete improve the game instead of just starting another aimless discussion.

TL;DR: There have been changes, want to help discover them, gather significant data and help make your point valid.

Can someone explain this one to me please?

Game

My team was again vastly superior to my opponents 80.7% vs 61%

I ran the ball 44 times and fumbled 4 times.
He ran the ball 46 times and fumbled once.

I got a thumbs up, ran and pass from 7 different formations including for example 9 runs from Flexbone facing his 335 and I only got 28 yards (3.1 yards per carry)

Why is my offense fumbling so much and not able to get more than 3.1yds per carry versus a vastly inferior team playing pass defense?

Dude, really? Pure coincidence. Maybe you think there is some big conspiracy against your team, but I'm pretty sure the game itself isn't rigged against you. Flexbone averaged around 4 yards per carry against the 3-3-5 in the previous engine. Want to go count in how many games you averaged more than that last season? Take a look at your game against Fargo last year, then you averaged 7,5 against a 3-4-4 defense, how broken is that? Didn't hear you then? In that same game you threw an immensely overpowered 9,5yds average from the goalline O against a 3-3-5! Where was your sense of righteousness after that game?

Here's how basically any game that has random number generation works: you throw a shitload of variables together to make a calculation. Depending on certain factors you will have X chance on a number of outcomes for example, in this case: superoffense of the eagles against useless bunch of defenders of the opponent in a 3-3-5 formation:

5% chance of a fumble
5% chance of a tackle for loss
10% chance of no gain
10% chance of 1yd gain
10% chance of 2 yd gain
...
...
...

until you reach 100% (percentages displayed above most likely not to be correct)

If you count all that together between every game played in RZA you'll average around 4 yds per run from the flexbone against the 3-3-5. You'll average slightly higher when you're better, slighly lower when you're worse. But that doesn't mean it should never happen that you do worse in a game where you're the better team. That's how football works in real life as well.

Now watch out for mistakes in how to look at that, it's not because you fumbled in play 1 that you'll have less chance to fumble in play 2. That chance will be exactly the same. It's like you have 1/6 chance to throw a six with a dice, and after you've thrown one 6, the chance to throw another six with your next dice is still 1/6.

I'll give you a real life NFL example: in 2010 Deangelo Hall had 4 INT's in 1 game (tying the record), but that season he only had 6 total as the Redskins had a losing season. Matter of fact, his whole career he's been averaging 4 INT's per season. Some seasons 2, some seasons 6, but 4 average.

The QB in that game was Jay Cutler, throwing the 4 INT's. Now he throws 16 per season on average, as he did that season (they won the division that season with 11-5), but he's had seasons throwing as many as 26 in one season, and he's had seasons he threw as little as 11 in one season.

What you're doing here is saying that while both of them have pretty normal numbers throughout all games in their career, the game is obviously broken because we can show that game where the threw 4 INT's to the same player, in a season where the Bears were obviously better than the Redskins. So either Deangelo has 4 INT's in every game, or at least he should have 4 or more in every game he plays against a lesser opponent since that day! That just doesn't make sense, and it's one of reasons people watch football in general. On any given sunday...

It happens in this game, it happens in real life, you really shoud try to understand why averages sometimes don't go your way... and maybe you're right and the game is rigged against you, but then you'll have to do a lot better than: "see this one game where..."

i was liking this guy until he said the Bears were better than the Redskins.....