Will CPU teams finally use the Injured Reserve list to free up a roster spot when a player goes down for the year?

Josh: They will use a roster spot, but if they are maxed out at 55 players on the roster, it won’t matter. Until we expand rosters so that teams can exceed 55 players, this will be an issue. Even if you have 25 injured players on the roster, the system can only support a total of 55, injured or not. So if the team has room, they’ll free up a roster spot.

Community Questions:

Many wanted me to ask about the two-minute offense AI. In the past, the CPU has really struggled with this portion of clock management. Has this been addressed at all?

Ian: Fixing many issues across CPU play calling was definitely a focus this year. First, we wanted to make the CPU smarter about when it should kick a game winning field goal vs. trying to run one more play (especially in cases where it doesn’t have any timeouts). In the past, the CPU may have tried to run a play and spike the ball in field goal range with 9 or 10 seconds on the clock and cost himself a chance at a game winning field goal. Likewise, if the CPU has timeouts available, it’ll try to run the clock down before kicking the game winner. We’ve also added some AI for the CPU ball carrier to try and run out of bounds to save time instead of just running up the field obliviously. There were also a few miscellaneous problems we tried to fix like the predictable timeouts at 1:01 every game, and more along those lines.

A daring Carolina faithful gets his picture taken with his head in the giant Panther statue (Bank of America Stadium)

Will the QB sneak be an automatic 3-5 yard gain this year? If not, how do you go about fixing something like that?

Ian: Not anymore! We introduced the new sneak animation that can be “steered” by you – this ensures that you don’t just take off running right when you get the snap. One key note though, this is only ‘active’ against 5+ down linemen fronts. If the defense comes out in a 4 man front or fewer against it, the QB will choose to run with it. We did this because it looked dumb when the QB would just fall to the ground with no defenders around. One thing to keep in mind though is that the QB is immediately exposed to hard hits and a risk of injury or fumbling (we juice all those chances up to emulate the increase in aggressiveness defenders get when they see a QB running in the open field). Anyway, against a goal line defense now, you can really only expect the sneak to gain 1-2 yards at the absolute maximum, with an obvious risk of not getting anything at all. You can see the new animation in action at the 7:40 mark in this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fqJrdp8MqUI .