Clubs AI Needs Improving, Archetypes Require Too Much XP, No Presets

Hello,

I have purchased every FIFA title since its inception back in 1993 so I have some experience with this game. I was happy to receive a Beta code so I could do some testing.

The passing, interceptions, and tackling is much better, and the gameplay does seem to be somewhat faster so all of those are indeed better than FC 25.

There are items that could be much better such as the AI in pro clubs. We don't require them to be world beaters but there are parts that need to be drastically improved. Passes from bots take far too long and they will often give the ball away or simply ignore the request from a pass. This is crucial to snappy build up play and must be addressed. The AI defending is very poor and they cannot seem to read the simplest passes or dribbling from the opposition and the AI Goalkeeping is abysmal. I play on a Clubs team with one human buddy and the AI has gotten progressively worse for the past few years to a point where the game is almost unplayable and you do not stand a chance against even a team with 3 or 4 human players. (We won Div 1 in 2022 as a two human team, and in EA FC 25, we couldn't even get past Div 3).

The shooting from inside the box seems a little overpowered and as long as you aim correctly, the ball seems to go in. It should require at least a little skill to score a goal so toning that down a little would be good.

Having only one Archetype to work through is a little limiting and not have the 5 presets that we have had recently makes it more difficult to have the ability to play somewhere else on the pitch as you have to restart with a different archetype and allocate your XP all over again Having the 5 presets at least gave you the option to choose for game in your club. Archetypes also require too much XP to level up to a fairly unreasonable level and so reducing the amount required to level up a little would make the grind a little less frustrating.

So many of us hoped that there would be a way to rejoin the game if your player got kicked from the game due to servers or a minor loss of internet but it looks like that won't be happening once again. 

Also, the 5 Division system is back which was terrible in FC 25. We felt like we would only actually play teams from our Division during the playoff week and every other week, we would get the sweaties who could magically seem to control their bots while ours sucked constantly, like they had an invisible 'any' even though we selected not to play 'any's. If matchmaking on regular weeks is not based on the Division that you are in, then what's the point? You should only play against teams from your Division instead of Skill-Based or otherwise. We shouldn't expect to play teams that have played 200 games that season that have an 75% win ration when we are in Division 4 because those teams are clearning in either Division 1 or Elite.

I do hope that the developers can tweak the game to resolve some of these issues but my faith in EA in recent times has dwindled away to a point where the game is nothing short of frustrating to play when it should be fun.

Thanks for reading, apologies for all the negativity, it's a game I have always loved and just want some joy out of it again like it last had in the 2010s. Hopefully the servers will be better this time around, and games will count when the match is over with too. We had far too many lost connection errors on the EA server side in FC 25.

Mark