Had enough!

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@KlariskraysNHL wrote:

@Limp_KidzKitYou see it all comes down to goaltending. More unpredictability from them results in more anger from users wondering why their goalie let in a shot that their goalie saved every time. Programming goes only so far and learning how the AI works is going to happen and thus the meta is formed. Now I am sure they could make the AI completely godlike if they wanted but then that isn't the human making the difference in the game it's the AI doing the work for you.  There was one year the AI was too good and they had to nerf it because people relied on them cause their scoring and such was tooo good.  I also remember the spiderman goalie year where they were godlike and people hated that.  You're asking for more RNG when it's one of the things people hate the most. Because at the end of the day people will see the RNG that went against them more than the RNG that went their way.

Scoring goals aka offense will always trump defense because to the average person defense is boring in a video game.

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This is a really hard rebuttal to respond to, I gotta be honest. I feel like my previous post has been completely misrepresented as simply "asking for more RNG" to which you're saying "that is dumb and should never happen" which I feel is omitting about 99% of my previous post.

"You see it all comes down to goaltending. More unpredictability from them results in more anger from users wondering why their goalie let in a shot that their goalie saved every time."

• This point completely ignores all of the defensive buffs I asked for in my previous post. It's not remotely a reflection of my position.
• This comment ignores that I specifically asked for more lethality on HIGH DANGER shots. That is 100% NOT simply asking for "more RNG."
• Where is this energy about unpredictability when it comes to defense? The competitive community keeps pretending they want more skill in the game but they want less pass interceptions, they want DSS to not be used because good players are too good with it, they want back skating to be slower than a nursing home 100m mud race, they want F1 car skating speed with the agility of a figure skater and do not want to be held accountable whatsoever for trying to make escapes and turns at full speed, they want checking to be harder, incidental contact to be non-existent so they can skate out of the bad spots they put themselves into due to their poor vision, they want AI defense to be hotel bellman that welcome you in with open arms, they want predictable goals so they don't have to do any sort of thinking or threat prioritization when playing the game, they want to make 300 mph backhand passes to receivers who should be completely out of the puck carrier's vision, they want 100% success rates in picking up pucks no matter where, when, how, body position, they want to be able to click a button to pass because they don't have the required vision to preload multiple touch passes to make a tic tac toe play, they want automated passing aim because they dont have the required skill to aim their passes consistently, and all of these things make playing defense a complete crapshoot of an experience. The offense and their near unlimited ability to do anything they please make this game so unpredictably predictable that defense for at least the last 2 releases have simply decided to back up, feather their body slightly, and hope they get an RNG puck interception because it's quite literally the only reliable mechanic left since we nerfed DSS into oblivion and added reverse checking so now anyone can "twitch skill" their way out of the nearly impossible scenario of being "stuck" in a bad spot as a puck carrier.
• To summarize, defense is played by passively backing up and hoping you get a puck interception. So goalies is where we draw the line? We want goalies to be predictable because it'd be frustrating if they weren't, but defense should just be an unpredictable RNG experience because that's super fun? Is that what you're saying?
  
  • 85% of my last post talked about how to provide numerous additional tools and ways to make defense more predictable and outcomes much more controllable and in the hands of users. So you don't agree with that approach? The competitive community does not agree with more skill? They like RNG? I thought they didn't? Which one is it?

"Programming goes only so far and learning how the AI works is going to happen and thus the meta is formed. Now I am sure they could make the AI completely godlike if they wanted but then that isn't the human making the difference in the game it's the AI doing the work for you.  There was one year the AI was too good and they had to nerf it because people relied on them cause their scoring and such was tooo good." 

• Okay first of all, the AI have never been "too good" in the sense that they played hockey well. Their success rate with shooting was too high and their skating was too fast because as every slider maker ever knows, the AI have an insane acceleration advantage compared to humans. So early in the life cycle of the game you're referencing, they were dominating users because the default game speed was yet again an F1 race on ice and then the CPU had insane shot accuracy, plus they have an acceleration advantage against "even" rated humans, so the fact that the humans were underleveled only compounded this phenomenon. 
• The AI during the "skillzone" years worked for all of the reasons I just posted in my last paragraph. Again, why was #10 tried before #1-9? Skillzoning was the SYMPTOM. It was not the ISSUE.
• During those skillzone years, did the competitive scene try using the RT/R2 buttons? No. They just cried and spun and got hit by the heat-seeking AI. Why did they not pass? Because they have no vision as they don't know hockey, and also because the AI don't support the puck whatsoever...again this was covered in my previous post that was seemingly dismissed.
• Did my requests of "make the AI move in programmed pattern that would resemble real hockey" and "have the AI cover their weakside marks with some consistency" come across as "godlike" asks? I feel like having the AI run simple hockey concepts and staying next to their assignment vs staring into the weakside corner on the outside of their mark is not "godlike" you know? I'd argue these are closer to "expectations" in 2024 than "godlike" but that's just me.

"I also remember the spiderman goalie year where they were godlike and people hated that."

• Well that's been 23 and 24. They don't give up anything that isn't a pre-approved goal. It's extremely boring. Who likes the goalies right now? Nobody. Why? They give up pre-approved goals and random muffins that have no business going in. You know why the muffins hurt a ton? Because it's extremely hard to create your own luck in this game because everything is super predictable that setting up IRL good plays and shots provides you with almost zero reward... like not even simple rebounds, just goalies zipping around and flashing their limbs and eating pucks that would go in 9/10 times IRL.
• The "spiderman" years were frustrating because they'd make those saves by breaking all physical limitations of the human body, cutting save animations short, ignoring their current weight/momentum, to then warp into a dive animation that made zero sense and rob a well earned goal. Again, not anything close to what I've advocated for.
• People don't realize how good the goalies were in in NHL 19-22. With the right sliders/attributes, they play a very impressive and dynamic game. 23 and 24 have clearly fundamentally changed the approach to goaltending for the worse.

"You're asking for more RNG when it's one of the things people hate the most. Because at the end of the day people will see the RNG that went against them more than the RNG that went their way."

• Umm no, actually 99% of my post was asking for more reliable defensive tools and more supportive offensive AI to further the influence humans have on the outcome of games. The only additional "RNG" I asked for was for HIGH DANGER shots that aren't on some pre-approved pattern list for goals to have a better chance (so anything above their current 0.000001% chance) of going in.
• Again, if the AI can reliably mark their weakside assignments and play M2M hockey, then the team with the puck will have to use some creative passing, pick and rolls, high cycles, shots of pads to create chaos/puck races, dekes, skating, deception, etc to create time and space to get good shots off/create blown coverages. All 0% RNG elements. All user skill.
• If the game speed is lowered to "within the physical realm of the human body's limits' then tools like DSS can reliably be used to mirror sticks and shooting lanes...again, all covered in my previous post and all 100% manual, controllable tools that have 0% RNG associated with them.
• People only witnessing RNG against them is because the game is so predictable until it's not. It's extremely hard to "earn your luck" which is a very common hockey phrase. So yeah, when you're essentially playing a game that's as defined as chess and then their opponent slams down a monopoly battleship onto the board with unlimited power that makes winning nearly impossible for you, then yeah people tend to notice that a bit more lol.
  • This is exactly why we should be trying to ADD as much user skill and influence on results on BOTH SIDES of the puck as we can, and push the "RNG" towards the already RNG-heavy position on the ice. If you're a user and can look back and say "yeah, I should've poked here or stepped here, or I just missed my DSS and that's why they shot got off that resulted in a goal" that's much more enjoyable and acceptable gameloop then "I watched that guy spin in the corner 89 times and I feathered my LS while holding LT just like I do 600 other times during the game but the pass just got through for no reason" right? I'd like to think so, but again that's just me...someone who wants more skill in this game, not less.

"Scoring goals aka offense will always trump defense because to the average person defense is boring in a video game."

• Well none of my suggestions really argued for more or less "offense" per se. They argued for more opportunities for user skill to influence the results of the game.
• The better at offense you are now, the even better you should be with my suggestions. You would have better puck support which would lead to more creative passing options. You'd have a screen more often that not allowing you to "setup" your mark with deceptive skating to get a shot off around a screen (that's skill), and you'd have more success in scoring from good areas on the ice if you can pass/deke your way there so again, more ways to score than ever before and you can get there via cycling and passing or by "twitch skilling" your way there. Either way, you should have more success.
• The better you are defense now, the even better you should be with my suggestions. If you were good with DSS before the extreme nerfs to the feature leaving it as a niche use case tool rather than an everyday hammer which a stick in hockey should be, well then you're going to be even better now as the gameloop is going to really make you not want to give up shots and you're actually going to play at a game speed that will allow you to use the feature more realistically than ever before. If you know how hockey positioning works, then you'll do great because your AI are playing M2M and you'll easily be able to recognize opportunities to contain and collapse puck carriers into bad spots. Oh and checking will be more reliable than ever since we turned up the incidental contact slider so your body positioning will be rewarded at at least 10x the rate than ever previously seen in an online game before.
• The entire point of my last post was that it doesn't have to be "offense trumps defense" to get a "fun" result. The more you introduce opportunities for skill on BOTH SIDES OF THE PUCK, the more the users are engaged and the more "events" lets call them, happen in any given game. Events are blocked shots, checks, DSS mirroring, deking, shots, passes, escape moves, etc those all need to happen much much more. I guarantee you a hockey game that requires much more skill and engagement could end 1-0 and be much more enjoyable than a 6-5 game of NHL24. I absolutely guarantee it. You know how I know? Because Rocket League exists.

@PlayoffError 

The dev team isn't exactly small. It's not FC size, but this isn't just a few people making the game every year. 

AI is incredibly complex. Trying to find a good balance of challenge and fun is always going to be tricky. They can't be too good and we of course want them to be competent. The team has received a ton of feedback from you all on AI behavior so I'm very hopeful we'll see improvements in the future.

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@PlayoffError wrote:
@Limp_KidzKitNice breakdown of the "skillzone" problem. On an abstract level, I've argued in the past that if the devs want players to be more aggressive defensively they need to make that style of play more rewarding, not just nerf and/or punish any other style of defence. But you're post lays out that idea with a lot more detail.

I suspect a big part of the reason the devs chose the solution to "skillzoning" that they did is because AI can be really hard to get right. I think if the devs could make the AI better at covering their marks on defence and being able to find open space on offence they would. This isn't a shot at the devs either. AI can be hard, they're a small team and we have no idea what kind of limitations they're working under when it comes to the games underlying framework. Making the AI significantly better may very well be an undertaking that requires more time and resources than the dev team has.

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Thanks! Yeah, I totally agree. You can't say "don't skillzone" then give offensive players the ability to do punch turns and escape moves at 100% speed without losing a step, all while continuing to nerf DSS and almost remove incidental contact from the game. We should be adding MORE skill to ALL SIDES OF THE PUCK but the competitive scene only looks at goals and if they're up, no worries game is so good bro, if they're down, nerf all routine defense features and tools into oblivion until the same 1-3 goals are being scored for 99% of the goals in 100% of the games and then wonder why the game got boring quickly.

DSS was such a good step. All we needed was acceleration nerfs to balance the tool but instead we decided to make the AI stand still and have DSS activation lose like 85% of your foot speed lol. There's not outside of the box thinking. There's no true root cause analysis of issues from the comp scene. Just "Were not scoring on our same two moves, make it so we score on our same two moves!"

"we don't have any time or space in 6's"

maybe it's because everyone is skating at 80 mphs?

" no it cant be that, its the DSS spamming!"

"Skillzoning is making scoring in HUT/VS impossible!"

Maybe it's because goalies only give up first shots from 1-2 predictable shots/'patterns and screens aren't effective making defense extremely easy for any semi-competitive player?

"no it can't be the predictability, its the skillzoning and the AI being able to move!"

sigh....