**TLDR**
Some UI and eye candy changes were made, yaaaay, but core issues remain untouched making the gameplay crap. Training and ranking systems have been reworked with some welcomed changes but not necessarily improved the game overall to be fair. Matchmaking is still messy. Gameplay still suffers from the same bugs, logic flaws, cheaters and lag. The event, star passes, and LVL pass thing pacing is unbalanced, and rewards continue to feel underwhelming. For a major update, very little has actually changed. All talk, no walk.
**** now the full feedback***
The obvious elephants in the room (not all of them, just the annoying ones)
* LVL first 50 levels usually get completed within a week, the rest of the month we get a dribble of nothing.
* Passing is still inaccurate, with barely any improvement
* Players panic and go out of position for no reason
* Referee logic looks unchanged
* VSA still has graphical display issues when showing chance breakdowns
* Players don't retain their assigned numbers from the locker room
* Subs are still inaccessible during replays, and we’re still limited to 3 subs instead of 5
* Weekend Challenge is still on the extreme difficulty, and the rewards are worse — the 105-rated card is worth just 5 shards now, which feels like a slap in the face to the player base. You want to keep it hard, fine but give people a worthy reward, 5 shards is a joke.
* Latency display doesn’t reflect the actual experience. Some matches show high ping but play smoothly, others show low ping, but players are warping all over the place
* VSA now shows lag to the local server, even though it’s a human vs AI match using the opponent’s squad and the winner is determined by comparing scores after 90 seconds. Makes no sense why there’s lag at all
* H2H is all over the place (latency vs gameplay-wise)
* Manager Mode still offers little value since there’s not much you can actually do
* Probabilities lower than in lotto/casino, lol
* Ads remain broken or unreliable when it comes to giving rewards, and there are more of them to watch
* You can earn enough event currency in the first week to finish the month’s content, which throws pacing out the window
* Star Pass can be completed in a week, leaving you with 20+ days of filler training cards and XP
* Cheating is still heavily present
* We still can't remove half-joined players in LVL
To answer your questions:
**Team Badges**
Too early to tell. There seems to be some logic behind it, but we’ll need to see how it plays out long-term and what impact it actually has on gameplay and the market. Looks to be a positive change, but it also may backfire. Time will tell
**New Rank Up Items / Rank Up Currency System**
Not having to gold rank players to train them to level 30 is definitely a good change. However, removing the ability to rank up with duplicate cards takes away flexibility. The cost of ranking up is pretty much the same whether you're training a top-tier card, a random small club player, or just trying to level someone with green cards. So far, this feels like it brings more negatives than positives.
**Training Levels (Separated from Ranks)**
Again, skipping gold rank for level 30 is nice, but training costs have gone up overall because we can’t use dupes anymore to green-rank players for training.
**Matchmaking Lobby**
Being able to see the other team’s kit helps avoid kit clashes, which is useful. But there’s something odd going on with how lineups are selected, and the game keeps randomly changing squad numbers for no reason. Especially seen in VSA, where the chance distribution is out of whack
**New Formations - Seven new formations like 4-2-1-3, 4-1-3-2, and 3-4-2-1 were added across H2H, VSA and Manager Mode.
That sounds great in theory but means very little while matchmaking is still in its current state. We continue to get matched with players from across the world even outside the top tiers. I have said it many times before. Until players reach the highest levels there is no reason to face someone across the globe. Both sides will lag and at that level of competition there is no real need for global matchmaking. This is not about bringing back strict regions but about keeping matchmaking as regional as possible at least up to level 20 or 30 in Championship.
One positive change is that CF, LWB and RWB positions no longer appear to be penalised OOP since the positions were removed. However, cards with an OVR above 105 still receive a -2 OVR penalty when red or gold trained. That is due to the 99% logic rather than any actual OOP penalty (it should be -1 or -2 for base to purple). It feels unfair considering we have had four major OVR increases since this first became a problem.
I didn’t play the beta myself, but several people in my league did, and most of their feedback is that gameplay now isn't what they had in Beta. Overall, nice PR, but what gameplay updates? Haha
2c
Community Manager
