Welcome to the Big Leagues, Newbies!

Dev Diary, Features, News - By Brandon - May 6, 2010 - 9:42 am - Tweet

As a football fanatic, the Pro draft has always been a bit of a mixed bag. Despite all the off-season excitement it generates, my team’s selections tend to fill me with more angst and anger than anything else.

And though I had hopes to the contrary, this year’s pickapalooza proved to be no different. As I watched my beloved Bengals bungle yet another 1st round selection by passing on a guy many are calling the next Randy Moss and then pooching the 2nd round by surrendering a guy I think will be the next Sam Adams to a division rival, I tried to remind myself of something we’re currently focused on here at Quick Hit.

Running a football franchise is hard work, and it’s even more difficult when you’re dealing with new players. I say this because no matter how much you plot and plan for their arrival, ya just never know how these guys will fit in to your scheme.

While we can’t do much to help out the long suffering fans in ‘Nati get past Big Mike’s latest lapse, we’re currently engaged in an off-season effort to help make new coaches ease into the experience.

The first step? Allow me to introduce…

The Rookie Cup

The latest in our stable of Single-Player Challenges, the Rookie Cup is a 4-game series of custom-built games designed to take new Coaches through their first few games via a helping hand on the scoreboard.

Utilizing new Game Mode technology that allows us to tweak things like Starting Quarter, Score, Possession and more, we’ve stacked the deck in y’alls favor to help get you used to the coaching reins in those first few games.

Here’s a quick summary of how it all breaks down from the illustrious R. Kelley:

• Game 1 – The One-Quarter Freebie: In this first challenge you’ll take over coaching duties with a 10-point lead in the 4th Quarter of the game. Just hold on for the win!
• Game 2 – The Two-Quarter Crunch: Here you’ll have a 7-point lead at the half. All you have to do is keep the lead and win the game.
• Game 3 – The Three-Quarter Face-off: Now you’ll start with a slim 3-point lead in the 2nd Quarter and have to beat the Benchwarmers in three Quarters of gameplay!
• Game 4 – The Four-Quarter Fight: Now it’s the big time – play a full game against the Benchwarmers and capture the Rookie Cup!

And while it’s not exactly an earth-shattering event for all you Veteran Coaches out there, there is an upside to all this:

One of the driving forces behind the Rookie Cup was the aforementioned Game Mode tech, which we’re planning to use to create some killer new ways to experience QHF a bit later in the off-season.

For example, imagine a nail-biting Sudden Death mode that starts in OT…or maybe an expert-only Iron Man mode with much-requested 5-minute quarters? Or perhaps we’ll unleash a no-nonsense “No Huddle” mode with shorter quarters and a super-quick play clock…

The possibilities are endless, my friends, and we intend to explore them all!

Advancement Changes

Speaking of underlying implications, the addition of several new Challenges over the last few updates has led to some tweaks to the existing Coach Level curves that should spark some debate in the Forums.

The first change was to speed up the overall advancement curve for new coaches, making it much easier to climb the Coaching curve between levels 1-20. This should impact y’all out in a couple ways:

• Instant Level Ups: If you were close to a Level jump in the first 30 levels or so, chances are you’re already above the new caps. This means you’ll simply need to start a new game to update your status and get some quick CP!
• Level Playing Field: Since we’ve reduced the grind a bit, you can probably expect to see more folks in the 30s and 40s, which should help balance out the opponent pool a bit for more experienced Coaches.

The other big change is to the way we reward Coaching Points. We’ve had some big adjustments to CP awards with the introduction of Challenges, and have also received quite a few complaints from Coaches who regret big CP spends early in their careers.

To help balance things out and ease folks into managing their team, the following adjustments have been made:

• Gone are the initial 200 and 150 CP bonuses for new coaches.
• These have been replaced with smaller rewards and a CP bonus for completing the Rookie Cup.
• We then adjusted the base level award to 75 CP per level.
• To help offset this change, we added two bonus events at key leveling milestones: Every 5th Level, you’ll earn 2x for a total of 150 CP. Every 10th Level, we up the ante even more with 200 CP.

The change will definitely put a premium on level-to-level strategy, and we’re hoping it will also help new coaches make smarter choices, as their big CP boosts come into play after they’ve had a chance to get their feet wet.

For veteran coaches, those extra boosts on big milestones will give them more opportunities to make large changes to their teams. We’ve been pretty pleased with the impact there on internal tests, but we’d love to hear what you guys think. Be sure to let us know!

Store 2.0

Another big change in the economy department is a brand new look and feel for the Quick Hit Store. We’ve jazzed up the visuals, added a more user-friendly flow through the store, and added the ability to save account info for future purchases.

We’re hoping these changes make it a bit easier for y’all to snag CP and upgrade your teams, so be sure to give it a look! Gameplay

Speaking of upgrades, Dave and the gameplay team managed to incorporate a handful of tunes to help balance out the recent additions to the playbook, including addressing a host of balance issues submitted by Coaches in the Quick Hit community.

Here’s a list of the big-ticket items:

• Better Blocking: A host of changes were made to blocking logic, including tunes to selection logic, and enhanced vision and decreased chase and run distance for lead blockers and more. The changes should result in better blocking choices and less “whiffed” blocks across the boards.
• Rollout Revisions: We’ve also reduced the length of the rollouts so they don’t overrun the protection as much, which should reduce the sacks on these plays until we can take a pass at slide protection from the o-line.
• Man Coverage Adjustments: Man coverage also saw a pair of big fixes, including a bug in man coverage that caused defender wins (such as INTs and pass deflections) to not play when they were rolled, as well as a roll-back of some 1.7 changes that caused unwanted collision in coverage that gave DBs an unfair advantage.
• Handoff Speed Tweaks: Last but not least, Dave did another pass on increasing the speed of the handoffs across the board. We still don’t have them playing at the speed they need to be, but they’re fast enough to cut down on some of the excessive tackles before the ball is even handed off.

Quick Tip – Play Unlocking

As you can see, we’ve been pretty busy adjusting to the gameday impact of the expanded playbook. More importantly, we’ve noticed that many of y’all are still a bit fuzzy on how to add those play to your arsenal. This edition of Quick Tips will look at how to find and add new plays.

As we noted in the last Dev Diary, you can now unlock plays by increasing your Coach Level or defeating “bosses” in the Coaches’ Challenge. From there, you can access the play store from two spots:

Once you’ve arrived at the shop, you can use CP to add any unlocked play to your playbook.

• The “Store” tab in the top nav
• The “Get More Plays” button in the Playbook Manager

Once you’ve arrived at the shop, you can use CP to add any unlocked play to your playbook.

It’s that easy!

Figuring out how to game plan against this wealth of new strategic options…now that’s a bit more difficult.

The best way, of course is to practice against your fellow Coaches! If you think you’re ready to match wits with the rest of the community, head to the Lobby and look for a game. We hope you guys enjoy the update, and as always, best of luck out there!

Until Next Time,

Brandon Justice
Design Director, Quick Hit, Inc.