Re: Best Tuners for Difficulty (but fair)

There's some slider sets on OperationSports that could probably help you out here, but I don't think you're going to find a "quick fix" to this issue. As someone who is still on NHL 20 and am using a completely overhauled customer roster along with sliders to fully grab every ounce of fun and realism out of the game, I can safely say that after two years of my project, I am to the point where my tweaks are only fine-tuning at this point...but like I said, 2 years to get what I believe is a pretty good grasp on how sliders work with each other and what they actually do on the ice. 

I also will add that the reason I still play 20 is that the AI fundamentally changed in 21. NHL 21 was the year that the AI were relegated to nothing more than passive cones to combat the "skill zone" complaints from the streamers and competitive 1v1 scene who couldn't quite grasp the concept of passing to create time and space. This new vision of AI has continued to be the standard for "in-zone" play and I suspect is why you are able to have such great success playing the CPU with even the most difficult of sliders. It's because there's a lack of pressure and any real threat of losing the puck. You can glide around, go behind the net and watch the AI quickly lose all sense of assignments which is compounded by their total lack of desire to attack the puck, and you start seeing backdoor opportunities and slot opportunities galore, right? If this sounds familiar because I'm almost positive it does, please continue reading to save yourself some headaches.

I actually completed a fully custom league project with 24-teams (480 players + rinks, jerseys, you name it) on NHL 22, went to great lengths to "fix" this game via sliders, and after wasting a good year of my life, came to the realization that the offline gameplay was fundamentally flawed due to the passive nature of the AI. Now, this wasn't the first time I've made a league like this, I had been making them since NHL 18 but without the CAP part, I just used NHL rosters back then so this was my first "go all-in" effort that I willing gave up because of the gameplay (probably over 600+ hours of work) because it was just missing something that I felt I had in previous titles. So I went back and tested NHL 18 just to make sure TPS wasn't the answer and it was very obvious after five minutes that TPS was not the answer...good riddance lol...So I try 20 because it was the most recent "old gen only" title and BAM. 30 seconds in I realize exactly what I was missing...it was PRESSURE. The AI actually pressure to a fault in this game! It's incredible the amount of double teams in the zone! Now granted, that comes with poor commits and a lack of ability to pick and assignment and stay with them, but there's pressure! And with pressure comes difficulty. And with this difficulty, I can actually alter the success rates of shooting and passing to get it to a spot where I have dynamic outcomes to the game because there's the foundation of pressure there that organically takes time and space away from me. 

If you are looking for an offline hockey fix, I really think you should try 20 and see how you like it. It's night and day to me as an offline player who likes to try and squeeze every ounce of hockey I can out of this game. The AI actually center-drive on 3-on-2's, the goalies have much more "human" reaction times with their limbs, touch passing is miles better in 20 than in any game after, it really is what I believe to be the best "total package" hockey video game ever released.

Now, quick feedback on the settings you've shown here based on my experience with said sliders:

1. AE at 10/10 is going to make the game play super weird imo. It's hard to explain what's happening here, but know that according to Ben Ross who was a dev on this series in the past, the most "true to ratings" setting here is 5/10. Moving towards 10 starts amplifying spreads in attributes while moving towards 0 starts minimizing spreads in attributes. I've had the most success balancing the game at 5/10 here and getting more granular with other settings and global attributes changes.

2. AI Learning - this is a "catch 22" slider because the AI will essentially start "cheating" to your tendencies and seeing as you're a competent player, you'll naturally exploit their cheating with another obvious gap in their defense. In NHL 20, I make sure this is at 0/6 so that the AI don't compromise their intended structure by erroneously cheating on a play they think is coming

3. CPU Strat Adjustment is also probably going to lead to you running away with games as once you go up 1-0, CPU will be more aggressive and start giving up more odd-man rushes due to their desire to push for a tie. Again, how I play is that I control 1/2 game with each team and I set this slider to 0/6. That way I know the AI are playing with the best strategies all game imo, and I can manually address them at the end of games if need be.

4. In general, you're going to want to really dive into the passing, puck control, shooting, checking sliders to fine tune the gameplay. I find most of these settings to be comically arcadey and easy even on "full sim" default settings. This takes a lot of time and effort to get to the right spot, but it's so worth it in the end.

5. Like point 4, you're probably going to want to invest in some roster editing. It's not fun, but the results are. For example, all of my players have 36/100 acceleration and agility because those two aspects of the skating engine in NHL 20 are way too high, that even sliders can't fix. So, I made all skaters the minimum there to help further tweak my game. all skaters also have 99/99 hand-eye to ensure there's the most puck pickoffs and disruptions possible whe using saucer passes as those are way too easy to exploit the AI with if used often. So instead of limiting my usage of RB, I made the game harder via attributes combined with 100/100 pick interception slider.