My defense does nothing

antitwisted said:

Honestly yeah, except I would add to that that you want guys who aren't too weak in zone or man, and can at least reasonably do both in addition to speed, and I'd say play recognition is a nice added bonus. But you don't have to break the bank for all this because it either works or it doesn't.

can Woodson get FS as a secondary position? I know people play him there. He's one of my favorite mut players ever but think i need to sell Sean Taylor and put someone more balanced there. Even tho i ran an all out blitz earlier and left him man to man and he ended up staying with the receiver and picking the ball off with 55 man coverage.No clue how that happened

SportsPerson94 said:

can Woodson get FS as a secondary position? I know people play him there. He's one of my favorite mut players ever but think i need to sell Sean Taylor and put someone more balanced there. Even tho i ran an all out blitz earlier and left him man to man and he ended up staying with the receiver and picking the ball off with 55 man coverage.No clue how that happened

I'm not sure because I don't have him. He's still just a little above my price range. But you can get the criteria I mentioned and it doesn't have to be for a lot of coins, and it at least gives the added bonus of being deceptive if you got nothing else. I personally don't really care much about press coverage because I find it sketchy as hell, but others make it work better than I do so I dunno. I would personally avoid it for now though.

antitwisted said:

I'm not sure because I don't have him. He's still just a little above my price range. But you can get the criteria I mentioned and it doesn't have to be for a lot of coins, and it at least gives the added bonus of being deceptive if you got nothing else. I personally don't really care much about press coverage because I find it sketchy as hell, but others make it work better than I do so I dunno. I would personally avoid it for now though.

Yea i never press but i might just do what you mentioned and go with more balance so at least when i do match, my guys won't get torched. I think my corners are fine with Ramsey, Primetime and Pat Pete even tho i'm hearing good things about Peters lately. Might have to check him out

SportsPerson94 said:

Yea i never press but i might just do what you mentioned and go with more balance so at least when i do match, my guys won't get torched. I think my corners are fine with Ramsey, Primetime and Pat Pete even tho i'm hearing good things about Peters lately. Might have to check him out

I like the idea of being able to confuse opponents so I could do man, zone, or something in between - which is exactly zone match. And they don't know if I'm blitzing or not. Balance is what it's about, comrade. Keep your balance and they will not.

antitwisted said:

Yes you do. I personally love Ed Reed and Pinnock and don't really care about Taylor or Krause because of the increased cost with weaker man coverage. Blount could be another option as well I think. You could probably try those options out without making big commitments on your coin stash. Do note, the man coverage threshold is 80 before 90 is the highest tier threshold, whereas zone has thresholds at 80, 85, 90. I think speed is a little more important though. But a guy like Krause or Taylor, yeah..they're gonna get burned with that garbage man. Teo is a bit of a problem for me at times but his job isn't always necessarily to stay manned up either, and I really need him as some run support.

Appreciate the knowledge man. Gotta keep testing stuff out. Match definitell requires a certain high threshold MCV/ZCV/AWR/PRC combination  but not exactly sure what the is. Guys like Ed reed certainly fit the bill and he is probably a top 5 secondary guy as far as play rec and versatility go. I ran match most of last year and am just now seeing it play decent this year.

Well, I'm done with this game. I have dropped thousands of dollars into it and I have all the best players money can buy and they all play like they're completely retarded. I've dropped 4 divisions because my defense can't  do diddly poo.  Myles Garrett still only has 1 recorded sack. Block sheds? Forget about it. I went out in 3-4 bear, 46 formations, 4-4, and no matter what they can run it down my throat if they want. Bonus points if they are spamming rpo, because you just can't get enough guys covering the pass and linebackers won't jump to make a play on the pass when you do jump the pass. The only success I had was running man coverage, and even that was extremely  iffy. It's annoying that people not spamming meta YouTube defenses are punished more than the ones spamming it.

antitwisted said:

I'll do my best, as a general newb who has dabbled in this. Basically it comes out in zone, but when someone enters the zone, they are SUPPOSED TO man up on them. Note the play "cover 3 match" out of the dollar 3-2 and how the zone is more like light pink, similar to cover 3 seam, and dissimilar to the dark purple of cover 3 sky? The lighter colored zones are match potential plays. So call cover 3 seam, not cover 3 sky. Shading into hard or cloud flats will do strange, random things to it, so avoid it for now.

Anyway, let's say you call cover 4 quarters or palms, with match coverage on, and they go 4 verticals. Great, the blue guys are gonna stay with them...or, they're SUPPOSED TO...notice my emphasis here, as there is always the caveat that EAs code will play inconsistent. Match coverage is no exception whatsoever. They will get burned by screwing this up sometimes. That might sound bad and kinda lame, but it's no different than any other coverage I can afford as an NMS anyways.

Things that cancel out match coverage:

- Setting zone drops to anything but default

-  seemingly shading up or down

- Manning someone up in the same coverage (I plan to test this further but I believe it)

- most important to be aware of, if they come out in a 4x1 formation like empty bunch quads. In other words, anything with 4 non OLs lined up on one side of the QB. 

Now, also, not all types of zones are to man up the whole way. This is why match is a bit more advanced and tricky in real life - it takes thorough understanding of the system and communication to make sure nobody screws up. The seam flat for example, largely chucks the receiver before letting the guys in other zones man up and remains there. But there may be exceptions that pull him off (I think - further testing required on my end to fully verify the behavior). But they don't always 100% stay there because there was a time last night I got off of a drag route expecting the flat to pick him up only to find him wide open because it wasn't even there. 

Match potential plays:

Cover 2/Tampa 2/cover 2 blitz with soft squats

Cover 6/9

Cover 3 seam

Cover 4 quarters or palms

Anything else you would expect with corresponding colors, such as fire zone out of the 46 normal

Man, Thank you for sharing this breakdown. I won 4 champs games in a row just from running match coverage for most of the game. It might not sound like much but that's a huge deal for me.

Breakluna said:

Man, Thank you for sharing this breakdown. I won 4 champs games in a row just from running match coverage for most of the game. It might not sound like much but that's a huge deal for me.

Not a problem. I was wrong about tampa 2/cover 2 though, as it doesn't seem to match up after all. So I think any cloud or hard flat might cancel out of match. Soft squat seemingly does stay in match however, but I'll have to test that further to make sure. I believe it does. Also, yeah, been winning in champs more with match coverage myself. I like match coverage a lot, as one might infer by now.

StoicMartyr said:

Well, I'm done with this game. I have dropped thousands of dollars into it and I have all the best players money can buy and they all play like they're completely retarded. I've dropped 4 divisions because my defense can't  do diddly poo.  Myles Garrett still only has 1 recorded sack. Block sheds? Forget about it. I went out in 3-4 bear, 46 formations, 4-4, and no matter what they can run it down my throat if they want. Bonus points if they are spamming rpo, because you just can't get enough guys covering the pass and linebackers won't jump to make a play on the pass when you do jump the pass. The only success I had was running man coverage, and even that was extremely  iffy. It's annoying that people not spamming meta YouTube defenses are punished more than the ones spamming it.

I'm sorry to hear this.. honestly it seems to me there might come a point that a team can be too stacked to the point it somehow seems to have the opposite effect. Maybe the DDA doom switch or some glitch in the coding that it's like "I got it! No I got it!" because two cards are within proximity to make a play and then nobody gets it. I dunno what it is but I definitely don't get the impression that cards always play true to their stats/attributes. Maybe try scaling back the ovr of your team a bit, keeping the more important stuff and sacrificing the rest? Such as say, MCV on your CBs. But I get it, the game can be frustrating and grindy. Sooner or later I'll probably find myself having similar contemplations as you when the BS keeps inevitably stacking against me. Sometimes it just goes that way.

antitwisted said:

Not a problem. I was wrong about tampa 2/cover 2 though, as it doesn't seem to match up after all. So I think any cloud or hard flat might cancel out of match. Soft squat seemingly does stay in match however, but I'll have to test that further to make sure. I believe it does. Also, yeah, been winning in champs more with match coverage myself. I like match coverage a lot, as one might infer by now.

Good to know about the cover 2 stuff. Probably a dumb question but does match coverage still work if you use base align? I would assume it does because it wasn't listed in your things that break it but I wanted to double check. I just came out in default alignment because I didn't want to break anything. 

I'll definitely be sticking with it and seeing if I can learn more about it. It was nice that I could count on my defense.

Breakluna said:

Good to know about the cover 2 stuff. Probably a dumb question but does match coverage still work if you use base align? I would assume it does because it wasn't listed in your things that break it but I wanted to double check. I just came out in default alignment because I didn't want to break anything. 

I'll definitely be sticking with it and seeing if I can learn more about it. It was nice that I could count on my defense.

I believe it would but I don't actually use base align and find it pretty overrated. I much prefer default, and in some ways feel I can be more deceiving or convey less information that way anyways. Not to mention base can be misaligned against things like bunch formations, which lord knows half of madden players are gonna use the entire game.

antitwisted said:

I believe it would but I don't actually use base align and find it pretty overrated. I much prefer default, and in some ways feel I can be more deceiving or convey less information that way anyways. Not to mention base can be misaligned against things like bunch formations, which lord knows half of madden players are gonna use the entire game.

Got it. I might mess around with base align in practice mode and against the cpu to see if I like how it plays but you make a great point about misalignment.

Again I can't thank you enough sharing your knowledge of match coverage. It's a small sample size but I enjoy how it's been playing for me. This is one of the most impactful gameplay tips I've seen on here

Breakluna said:

Got it. I might mess around with base align in practice mode and against the cpu to see if I like how it plays but you make a great point about misalignment.

Again I can't thank you enough sharing your knowledge of match coverage. It's a small sample size but I enjoy how it's been playing for me. This is one of the most impactful gameplay tips I've seen on here

I plan to mess with a lot of things, kinda wishing I did my own thread on all this now, but I could always do that another time when I got more homework to bring to the table. Glad it's helpful for people around here, didn't think it was uncommon knowledge as much as it apparently is. I do owe some credit to some tips I found on youtube about how to enable match and what to avoid when trying to do it, such as the zone drop thing and zone types in play calls. I branched off from there and here we are...haven't been at it for long.. haven't actually even played since M18, so I got a long way to go to git gud.

antitwisted said:

I plan to mess with a lot of things, kinda wishing I did my own thread on all this now, but I could always do that another time when I got more homework to bring to the table. Glad it's helpful for people around here, didn't think it was uncommon knowledge as much as it apparently is. I do owe some credit to some tips I found on youtube about how to enable match and what to avoid when trying to do it, such as the zone drop thing and zone types in play calls. I branched off from there and here we are...haven't been at it for long.. haven't actually even played since M18, so I got a long way to go to git gud.

I'm not surprised more people don't know about it. I don't think any of the in game tutorials cover it in good detail. And you have to go into coaching adjustments to even enable it. So you'd only really know about how it works if you have real footbal knowledge or you actively go looking for it.

I'd definitely look forward to reading a thread on match defense. Who knows if you have enough success with it you could even make an ebook and make money off it.