EVO or DEVO?
My jury is still out on the evo-lutionary new upgrade system. I really preferred the straight forward approach of M26, plug in a token you buy with season tickets, compare your newly upgraded player to current starters, move on.
EVO seems to add multiple levels of obfuscation to the process... yes there's a hub conveniently located in the Store area, but this only shows players you've added EVO upgrades to (I guess that's logical) but I had Cole Kmet from the Unreal Moments set and wow, what is this, you can "earn" currency to upgrade him and he's not one of those wimpy only-goes-to-82 players, he'll go all the way to 86 if you get 7200 passing yards with him in the line-up. This I approve of (up to a point see below)... Well, I got the yards and upgraded him all the way to 86 and holy Chicago Bears, his Speed at 86 is... 79?!? So, this cool concept just laid a big, rotten egg -- 86 Kmet remains TE3 behind 85 NJoku (another TE that was upgraded but had some great stats) and 82 Martellius Bennet ( a place holder I was figuring to drop to TE3). This whole EVO process that was hidden away from the EVO Hub wasn't worth the effort, now I know why devs hid this so well. Sigh.
Season 1 players are another area that uses a modified Evo upgrade system and they (also) don't show up in the hub, you have to manually go the sort by Season 1 and buy tokens from the REAL store and then integrate the tokens for each player, all 5 S1 players can be upgraded 5 times each, but, but, there aren't enough tokens on the vendor to do all 5. Another SIGH. I have several starters from Season 1 players, fortunately, they don't suffer from lame stats like Cole Kmet, but they routinely get beaten in pass coverage (FS and SS, and the Mike isn't even Mike1). Madden 26 was so much easier and less confusing and less obfuscated that this mess. SIGH again.
Below from above ^ so many of they players that are upgraded by EVO tokens in the hub are just meh. Most can only be upgraded to 82 (I understand limiting the mass, wholesale upgrading a team, but I have sever players I used the "EARN" area to get SP to upgraded only to find out they're already capped out at 82 and , again, another waste of time and effort. I put the Captains EVO on WR Devonta Smith and one whole evo path is restricted because I upgraded one of the others, desperately trying to get some SPEED for the receiver -- once again DEVs hate allowing you get get fast players on the field, apparently, now I have a slow captain that can't get open to save his life. Again, the Madden 26 system of earning Captain upgrade tokens and plugging them into a set of 5 or so potential captains was streamlined and easy to understand, and if you weren't happy with a Captains player, pull out the token and put it in other captain... From what I think I read in the Evo Hub, if you pull out EVO tokens, you lose progress.... Recurring theme of the day SIGH.
To paraphrase one of my favorite 80s punk/new wave bands... this is DEVO - D-E-V-O (not EVO)
