Franchise Wish List/Changes Needed

Much of this was addressed last year when everyone was complaining that they couldn't control coaching strategies.  You aren't the coach.  It isn't realistic for the GM to tell a coach how to do their job - I mean the coach hires the GM, right?  It's just unrealistic.

But seriously: whether it's the devs or it's the execs - EA is not interested in making offline modes enticing.  They took away coaching changes and they took away a beloved camera angle and they made it so that you cannot have Gretzky on historical teams by making retired numbers mandatory in order to get you to try HUT.  If they get you playing HUT because you can't stand franchise mode they will make 10x as much off of you each year.  They want you buying microtransactions.  If they give you a good offline mode, you might choose to keep playing that old version of the game, but HUT is online so if all the players move on to NHL 25, you have to buy a new game and buy new microtransactions to make your ideal team again and be at all competitive.  They aren't interested in making a good offline game, they are interested in nudging people off slowly so as to maximize the number of people who choose to move over to HUT.  Next year they will change a few other things to make the game less playable offline, so more try HUT to recoop the buried cost of buying the game and end up throwing good money after bad.

If you want to see EA do good you have to find a way to get someone to compete with them or win the lottery so that you can open up your own game studio to compete with them.  Then they'll throw some money behind offline modes to try to hold on to any income at all.  While they have a monopoly on NHL games they aren't going to change course.  This series has slowly degraded since 2K fell out of the market and then HUT was introduced.