NHL 25 Holiday Update Coming Nov 15th

How can they fix the game if they don't have resources? All the resources are going to this holiday update. You don't understand how hard it is to implement something back in that's worked the last 5 NHL games. It's super hard and super resource intensive. That's what the super talented dev team keeps telling us 

Can you point to data or anything relavant to point towards the community requesting the return of NHL arcade? Sure it was a fun mode a decade ago, but I HAVE to imagine that player base was even smaller then GM connected. Not to mention GM connected got about 2 years to grow, before it was scrapped when moving on to NHL 15. If you gave HUT a 2 year lifespan, it would have had a small community. And like the community has repeatedly relayed for over a decade. The primary reason gm connected failed was due to extremely slow and buggy simulation time frames.  I don't get how the other EA titles have implemented this in other games, but NHL fails to do so.  

The bottom line is "new" features should not be released until people who paid full price of the game can play it as expected. Matchmaking isn't a maybe, it's a don't do it and watch your WOC fanbases crumble. Eventually WOC will be the new GM connected that gets removed and we will hear the "small player base" excuse while ignoring the issues the plagued the mode 

How is matchmaking even a problem?  This isn't a "NEW" game.  This is just an updated version.  There is no way EA sports should be going backwards and not moving forward every year.  The game play is better this year, but you have completely messed up so many other parts of the game in doing so.  Match making should be your NUMBER ONE PRIORITY!

EA_Aljo wrote:

While GM Connected had a passionate fanbase, it was a small one.

But there's a very specific reason for that; the mode ran like molasses.

It had everything we ever wanted. Hell - it even had the ability to run a full team of 6v6 humans. That means you could play a league game against an opponent using all humans. It had an iOS app that allowed us to make trades, do free agency, schedule, etc.

It was ahead of its time but strangely enough, it was our first glimpse into server capacity issues that still seem to plague EA to this day. 

It annoys me greatly when official EA reps say things like 'GM connected had a small fan base' - seemingly pointing the finger at the customer for not caring enough about the mode.

But, the reality is that people loved the mode so much, the server-load was constantly at capacity. This meant only the most ardant users continued to use the mode while mostly everyone else became tired of the constant grind of simply navigating the interface.