Back to Slow - Fantasy Teams Expose Flaws - KBLover's Blog

KBLover's Blog

Back to Slow - Fantasy Teams Expose Flaws

Posted on November 9, 2009 at 12:40 PM.

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Well, Very Slow was doing...something...to the sliders. Or maybe it was just magnifying the flaws that I was having. Not to mention using a fantasy draft team REALLY exposed the flaws. It seems the Ravens are just insane on the front 7 defense, so getting them to be less insane was making my young, but talented fantasy draft team get destroyed on the run.

Also, I saw too much stupidity going on now with the fantasy rosters. Both my and the AI players just standing around as guys run past them, players being like "OMG, he's running with teh ball1!1!!1" and reacting like way too late. Way too many broken tackles by HBs and no defense at all.

So I went back to slow, put the speed treshold to 50 and worked on getting some defense to be played.

The result of that is the game just seems to play faster. Almost like I had gone to normal. In fact, I had to look a couple times, just to make sure it wasn't on normal! But it was still on slow. Interesting. Tom Brady (CPU) was getting knocked around a bit and made some hurried throws. Pat White (my QB) was horribly inaccurate (JaMarcus Russell bad) and the young line I had was being ripped apart on pass protection often. Man coverage was pretty solid without feeling cheap and sometimes it would get beat. Zones worked, if you got good pressure. Many times I would see someone reach up and bat the ball down if the QB zipped it in too flatly on a deep pass. When WR caught the ball in space, more effort to come up and hit him.

The run game was much more realistic, but I had to jack up the run reaction time to get guys to actually flow to the ball on run plays, especially outside runs. Also makes calling outside run blitzes more worth the risk. Whenever there was the occassional back breaking free, there would be more than just a couple guys chasing.

Another thing is that play fakes actually worked better since guys would bite more often with the higher reactions, but if they didn't get too far out of position, they'd be right back on the QBs tail, so the QB can't waste time or has to hope to find someone open (or that they weren't bringing 6 and the line couldn't hold up).

So finally there was some defense being played. I played a half and the score was 3-3. Lots of punts, 3-and-outs happened. Yards were effort. AI caused three fumbles in a quarter (which lead me upping fumbling for both sides). One was a hit from behind on Pat White. One was Harvin trying to spin out of a tackle and the ball slipped out, and the other was a questionable strip of Beanie Wells. His knee was down but the challenge failed for some reason.

So I have to see if the defense still plays well without getting so many turnovers, but it was nice to actually see defense at work. If anything, it might be too good now, but that might be an easier angle to work from than the offense being too good since this game seems geared to generating offense and big plays.