Agreed on most everything.
Long bombs are too easy. The one major cause of incompletions is that there are way too many dropped passes.
Running is much better now. Hitting the proper holes is important. Cutbacks against the LBs are more realistic. They need better control on the bounce-out runs. They tend to go for -5 or +20 every time.
Defense is much better now. Calling the right defense and mixing up coverages is key. You can't anymore find the one blitz that works and line it up. However, corner blitzes are too easy to rack up sacks with.
80% of the penalties it calls are flagrant face masks. I can't figure that out. Almost never calls pass interference, and I haven't yet had a single illegal contact / illegal use of the hands penalty.
The crowd noise thing has not caused a single false start, missed audible or delay of game in 1.5 seasons.
I already registered my "impact player" grievance in an earlier entry on an earlier post.
The biggest improvement is that I always found in past games that a team would just get insanely hot, undefeatably hot, and they got rid of that. Up 40-7 in 3rd quarter, suddenly I'd have 3 straight passes not just intercepted but intercepted and returned for TDs. And if I ran the ball, I'd be at high risk of fumbling. That hasn't happened yet (for or against me).
I also agree with a lot of what you said, but at the same time I think sliders help. Recruiting still seems too easy but there is still a bit of a challenege especially if you turn off recruiting assistance.
I think if you adjust sliders things get a bit better.
I've mostly been simming games with the UConn Huskies (playing with ND gets old) but in the few games I've played, I've seen some similar results. A bunch of thoughts...
a) You have to mix things up on defense. If I'm constantly playing bump & run, eventually my mediocre corners will get burned. It's a must to mix it up with zone, and to sometimes show press but play zone (just not a 3-deep where your corner has one of the deep zones) - more 2-deep stuff like the Dolphins.
b) One of the keys to the passing game is recognizing the zone drops and changing the routes via "hot routes" although it's not a typical blitz-hot read situation. If you have two guys on one side of the formation, and you know they're in zone, bring a third guy over in motion and layer their routes to attack the pressure points of their zones. The curl pattern is underrated.
3) As you say, punt returns are too easy. In the first year of my UConn sim, I played a D1AA team thinking I'd pick up the easy win (the Snyder method). I won, but the game took nearly an hour (6 min quarters) because every time they punted, I could run it back for a TD. After four of them, I gave up and just dove. (By the way, how do you fair catch?)
To fair catch you have to switch to the punt returner with circle and then hit triangle (or XBOX appropriate controls).
Bumping it to Heisman has fixed a lot of issues for me, but I've only played one game on it. Still... the outcome seemed very realistic to me.
The first time I played Iowa, Tate was killing me with long bombs. He probably hit ten of them in the first quarter alone and I was getting killed 35-10. This was also in my first day playing the game, and I had the difficulty level at only varsity. I noticed that if the receiver is single covered, he will probably catch that long bomb about 85% of the time, so I started playing two deep zones every now and then, mainly on passing downs. Now the reciever has a much harder time catching it with his man covering him, and a safety there. I haven't gotten to Heisman yet, but this seems to work at All-American level too.
Another thing that I found interesting, is the computer's offense actually sets up your defense. There have been times where I was getting torched on passing plays so I'd be adjusting my defense to try and compensate, only to find the computer would then start torching me on running plays. That seemed pretty realistic.
On annoyance I have, even though this is probably true to real life, is how teams quit. You can be in a really good game, like that Iowa game I described above (eventually got the score to within 10 points by halftime, recieved the kick to start the second and had a 4 point lead after two possessions), but as soon as my team gets some momentum and opens up a lead the computer seems to quit. That game ended up being something like 68-35. They never scored again, plus they went from stopping me regularly to exchanging their defense with the Bay City school of the blind's defense.
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