NHL Team@KidShowtime1867
To compete at a competitive level, especially when you start break the top 100 on the leaderboards, you need to play the game and meta, not your typical structured play NHL hockey -- If you play positionally sound with an AI player on the ice, the other humans will exploit them literally doing nothing to defend and yes, get those guaranteed glitchy cheese goals. The dev's intention is apprently to make a fun sport really lame and unfun to play -Whether you're a sim guy or not, the competitive community as a whole clearly doesn't want to play that way.
All I'm asking for is a new strategy or ability to tell them to f off and not bother with trying to "cover" me. I don't like to have to babysit the AI and crystal ball how they want to calculate what I'm doing at every moment when I'm a little preoccupied with how a guy with 4,000+ goals is setting up for his bread and butter. Besides, I've already shown how overboard they go with trying to cover defensemen along the boards - they are literally trying to correct what they think are my mistakes when they are actually their own.
I want the AI to play positionally perfect too. I need them to stop dumping the puck on a powerplay. I crave for them to stop waiting for me to cross the blue line before passing.
Defenders don't have nearly as many tools as offense does and that is the main issue I bring up every single year. The controls are slow and the offense has so much more flexibility. I don't want everyone to just have 99 stick check and defensive awareness to compensate; I definitely crave some real skill gap. On an AI you can definitely force a goal on a cross crease or slap from the circle beyond what is normal in a real game of hockey - why else do you see people go for what is already a high % shot and duck back out to the sides to get their set play going? I'd take 95% "guarantee" over an 85% chance any day.
All it takes is one moment of zigging instead of zagging and a team can force the ai goalie to shift into the wrong spot and it works 100% of the time - learning that isn't necessarily a skill, its exploitation that needs addressing -- Instead of focusing on the left right left of the carrier, maybe the goalie should have noticed the other guy setting up for the reception for the last 15 seconds.
As for the puck going under sticks - I've shown multiple videos spanning multiple years how the playable surface and ice don't actually align. Full block animation down, stick and glove on the ice, the puck can still clip underneath and that is total BS which hasn't even been looked into - i'm not talking about saucing over it. I've shown multiple screenshots of goalies sprawled out, literally hovering an inch above the ice - these should never have been issues in the first place.
I'm not talking about a random stutter step reaction - I'm talking about doing self passes and deking at very specific times to freeze the AI in place or deke around the net to initiate "ok the human has now reach exactly 12.7374 inches behind the left side of the net so I should now look away and skate to this exact spot" calculation that you can pass through for easy shots. These situations are exactly why I, the human, am "out of position" because these turkeys are too stupid to realize they are playing right into the other team's hands.
If something is "clearly an issue" then FIX IT. It's 3v3 like wth - those cause penaltie shots which in turn cause pretty much guaranteed goals. That is gameBREAKING. That is not something the devs should be proud to present to anyone. They even claimed to fix it only for even more penalties to occur...
@TTZ_Dipsy wrote:
I want the AI to play positionally perfect too. I need them to stop dumping the puck on a powerplay. I crave for them to stop waiting for me to cross the blue line before passing.
These frustrate me to no end as well. I play EASHL 5s, though our LD only plays occasionally, so often time we have an AI defender. I try to be realistic, its going to be impossible for them to make AI that--while using the same ruleset as a human player--can read the play as effectively. However, there are definitely some mind bogglingly bad habits that should have been smoothed out of the game ages ago. Some go back a few years:
