Why is this year's online play so wildly inconsistent?

Thats one wrong turn the ea nhl development took. To compensate for limited input available to control a hockey player, the game became a serie of dice rolls to decide of a lot of in game battle outcome. Problem is whoever has a better connection to the server will benefit from having their dice roll completed faster. The game looks more realistic and organic from a spectator viewpoint. On a competitive level it renders the win/lose kind of irrelevant, unless both parties have similar connection, which you can never tell. IMHO thats one of the main priority the dev should focus one, it's driving a lot of players away.

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@Homie45677654 wrote: Some games I can just straight line skate through 3 guys and maintain perfect control but other games nobody on our team can hold the puck against the most minor of contacts. Seems to happen with good or mid connection against good or bad opponents. We smoked a team of elites the other day because they quite simply couldn't hold the puck. When you win it doesn't feel like you did so because of skill. 

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This is pretty ridiculous. It's almost as if some of you see adversity as a slight against you by EA rather than an obstacle (playing against skilled opponents) that needs to be overcome. 

If "nobody on (your) team can hold the puck" then this means your opponent is really good at putting pressure on the puck carrier.

If you "smoked a team of elites because they couldn't hold the puck" - this means your team did an excellent job of pressuing the puck carrier. 

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@Homie45677654 wrote:

Not uncommon to put up 30+ shots with perfect cross creases gloved, millisecond reaction saves on deflected pucks, and cartoonish flying leg split saves. Then the next game we'll score 7 goals on soft floaters from unscreened point shots. What could POSSIBLY be the reason not to give both teams the same level of CPU goaltending? 

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The humans playing in front of them. 

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@Homie45677654 wrote:

• Vastly varying speed levels. It's hilarious watching my friend's 5'7 max speed winger build (with full momentum) not be able to break away from the 6'5 enforcer defenseman who was caught flat-footed. Again like the other complaints sometimes this works in my favor and I can just dance around the offensive zone and have zero concern because of how slow and delayed the opposition are. 

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It's almost as if fatigue plays a factor. 

@OFFENDED_DMAN Interesting. Where can I find more out about this? Has EA responded at all? *snip*

(CM: Edited to remove baity portion. Please keep our forum rules in mind when engaging on the forums)

@Homie45677654 

Claiming losses are based purely on a better connection and dice rolls is hugely exaggerated. The difference in skill is the main contributor. However, as with pretty much every game where attributes and some form of bonuses to them are involved, there will be some RNG. Basically, the higher the bonus, the smaller margin of error you have. For example, shots stand a far better chance of going in with better aim.

As far as connections go, in most cases you're going to be matched up with someone that has a similar connection. Unless you're in an area that doesn't have a server in that region. In that case, you're probably going to have a fair amount of lag that could make winning more challenging.

Would be a lot better if we could blacklist players/teams/locations so we ONLY get a good connection game (according to the game, at least).

So many times we would get matched with the same yellow bar team over and over and need to back out (which causes a bunch of other issues with the game and usually forces us to reset)

@TTZ_Dipsy 

I wouldn't mind being able to filter bad connections. We couldn't have a filter for specific teams or players though.

My club backs out on bad connections as well, but we haven't run into any issues. What's happening for your club?

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@Homie45677654 wrote:

@OFFENDED_DMANInteresting. Where can I find more out about this? Has EA responded at all? *snip*

(CM: Edited to remove baity portion. Please keep our forum rules in mind when engaging on the forums)

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Peoples have been posting in the technical issues sub-forum about that. Look for Fat-man lag, out of order packets. Game like Fifa and Rocket league appently has the same phenomena and they have larger community that looked into it, more than NHL: https://www.reddit.com/r/EASportsFC/comments/176715x/will_ea_ever_fix_fatman_lag/

It's a complex issue, but I can say it matches my experience with this game since NHL17. I happen to have been through a few ISP and saw the difference each time i've upgraded my service. Overall skating got way better. Eventho, my original ISP speed should have been plenty sufficient. Strangely, locked animations (like puck sweep, mid air puck grab etc.) plays out noticeably faster, which lead me to believe all actions happens quicker, hence puck battle/pick up disparity, but those would be harder to diagnose because of the many factors affecting the outcome.

For the ai you can notice the inconsistency in 1v1 versus, some games your ai can be constantly trailing the play looking out of place other times they just houding the opponent for you. Which lead me to believe something funny is happening with the net coding. 

For the RNG, it's very easy to look back and see what direction this game took since the first eashl iteration.

The coding of this game seems to have got out of hand, hence many bugs arent getting fixed this year, or just keep reappearing.

@kezz123 

There was a thread recently claiming Xbox players get a boost. There is no boost on either side. Connections can play a role, but most likely this is just confirmation bias.

We're not aware of any netcode issues. There is a lot more that goes into a connection than our servers and code that is out of our control. Your equipment, your ISP's equipment, the traffic in your area, the backbone of your ISP, how your ISP routes your connection, etc.