Stop nerfing my players to simulate difficulty
When a user is playing back-to-back-to-back VSA matches or back-to-back-to-back weekly Ultimate Challenge matches it’s really easy to detect subtle differences in squad performance between matches and, thus, it’s blatantly obvious (and highly annoying) that one of the strategies EA uses to simulate difficulty is to slow the user’s players. I just played two VSA matches where this couldn’t have been more apparent — one against an opponent with equal OVR and the next with a higher OVR and in the latter match my players were slower to react to my inputs and generally felt like they were swimming through molasses. This isn’t fun, and I would argue it’s not fair.
I fully expect a higher OVR (or, in challenges, a higher starred) opponent to enjoy a speed and skill advantage over me. I’d also expect the AI to exhibit better tactical intelligence and decision-making. But it’s NOT OK (or necessary) to nerf my players as a short-cut! All users have labored and/or paid to assemble our squads and we have a right to enjoy their full capabilities in EVERY match. Full stop. Those of us who play daily grow accustomed to our players’ attributes and it’s not only frustrating but anti-competitive to have those attributes subtly altered simply because EA can’t be bothered to find a better way to simulate difficulty.
Everyone who’s played this game for any length of time knows that EA has chronically underinvested in the game engine. Watch one Manager Mode match and you see how poor the underlying AI is. So I have little doubt that simulating difficulty is a nightmare for the dev team. All evidence suggests that they can’t simply turn a knob that allows them to smoothly scale difficulty up and down. But while I can appreciate that it’s not a simple problem, as a customer I don’t have ANY sympathy for a multi-million dollar corporation that can’t (or won’t) solve a problem as fundamental as this and, instead, engages in constant workarounds that degrade the user experience. It’s simply unacceptable and it’s one of maybe a half-dozen reasons why I’d never recommend this game to a friend in its current state.
The imperative here is simple — if EA wants users to spend more money then they need to improve the value proposition! Why would I pay $30, $40, $50 for a player if I KNOW that EA is going to selectively nerf his attributes (even before he gets the “grand nerf” when they introduce the next tranche of higher OVR cards)? It’s a short-sighted business model and EA’s insistence on pursuing it only breeds frustration, distrust and resentment from users like me.
