Disclosed in some examples are methods, systems, devices, and machine-readable mediums which optimize one or more metrics of a communication system by intentionally changing symbols in a bitstream after encoding by an error correction coder, but prior to transmission. The symbols may be changed to meet a communication metric optimization goal, such as decreasing a high PAPR, reducing an error rate, reducing an average power level (to save battery), or altering some other communication metric. The symbol that is intentionally changed is then detected by the receiver as an error and corrected by the receiver utilizing the error correction coding.