Didn't buy

Next year I will wait until the game is 50% off in Nov, if I even decide to play again. The quality control is, let alone the innovation or improvements, is abysmal. The game has been out for more than 2 months and I still have to lower the volume on the Dual Sense controller every time I start the game or get blasted with irritatingly loud goal music and effects in my face. The controller volume resets to 10/10 every time you close the game and open it again. The menus are slow and sloppy, which has been that way since NHL 15. 

My div 10 team gets matched with Div 1 teams constantly, so its impossible to get better at the game when you just get clapped by teams loaded with diamond, elite players every game. The skill gap in this game is brutal, and getting matched against elite players 8 out of 10 games is demoralizing and just ensures that mid to low skill people like me just go do something else that has a higher dopamine to time ratio. It seems like EA have just prioritized matching people to any game over matching people to games that are more competitive for their skill level. I don't even understand why there are divisions if it has no impact on the teams you play against. Teams with really poor morals will reset their team constantly to try and improve their chances of getting lower skilled opponents. There should be a cooldown for teams/players that disband/leave club. Club members should not be able to play in drop-ins, and if they do there should be no RP gain/penalty to them/opponent to make it less profitable. The whole RP farming is really killing this mode. All of this leads to a poor experience overall in EASHL.

I stopped playing HUT because of the HUT Champs reward structure burning an entire week of my time and I only got 6 wins, which meant I got basically nothing. I hadn't really played online up to that point and the experience was brutal. All the games were chasing down or setting up D2D one timers and I was bad at both. Last year you could win 6 games and still earn some collectibles that you could store up for a future future reward. This year it's win 10 games or better luck next time. This makes people who are unable to get 10 wins reliably just abstain from HUT Champs. Maybe that's what they wanted? If so, congrats. I won't be wasting a week of my time to qualify for Champs and then play 20 games. It was a substantial time investment for me with an extremely low ROI. Is it a skill issue? Mostly. I acknowledge that. There is not a single game in my library that wastes my time as much as HUT.  I choose to avoid the entire mode of HUT, because it's clear they only cater to 2 players in that mode, the people who play like bots, or the people who run up large credit card balances for digital content. I am neither of those people.

I didn't really leave the game, the game left me.