There has to be a BETTER way to communicate with E.A staff than this!

We've been over this in DM's and public forum - I know you'll side with him as you claim you are buddies and that's fine, it doesn't change the fact it was said. Literally said the game was perfect and said maybe my team just sucked. I don't have the patience to sift through over a decade of posts on AHQ and Facebook to find the exact response so anyone is free not to believe me but I'll stay as sure as I've always been.

Red tape for EA staff responses - I've brought this up for years now spanning back to older forums; you know this.

Dude I couldn't care less about the struggle between authenticity and arcadeyness. It's a game at the end of the day and it needs to run and respond well (which it clearly does not). For example, just because Close Quarters is working as intended doesn't mean players shouldn't raise a brow and be mad when it's OP and abused like many other things in the game.
You can side with EA all you want but I'm here to say everyone should be fighting for change if they disagree with certain aspects of the current product - it's their right as a customer.

I AM LITERALLY NOT ATTACHED TO THE GROUND in the scenario I posted. I swear nobody watches any of the video evidence I post. I've had instances where our goalie does the right animation and should easily make a save but he goes against the laws of physics and quite literally hovers above solid ice, unable to do anything useful until a whistle. No defending it - this shouldn't be happening at all. 

You must be a HUT only player then, I assume? Never once have you EVER had your team jersey reset back to default black and white? My blue chrome gloves show up as purple. The last team I played stains our jerseys with their colours in the locker room. The other team's goalie in Eliminator is wearing MY goalie's pads that I created. Even our logos can get swapped or made default Anaheim Ducks. This has been a thing since 15 and I'm just supposed to accept it? Wouldn't matter that much if I could save a jersey scheme but noooo.

You've seen my videos about faceoffs; you know exactly what I'm talking about. I wasn't allowed to record anything in the closed beta and matchmaking was a bust in the second test.

How is it not black and white? The AI is practically useless and the exact same thing happened in 26's tests so clearly it's gonna happen yet again for launch, especially now that there are more perks making players faster. You say that like it's my fault for not being able to be both a forward and a defenseman at the same time. You just hustle and that's that, they won't defend you. "Just have a whole team of humans" is only a bandaid bypass. The team should be looking to make a great offline game that translates well to online with balances. The trickle down effect would help with every mode the game has to offer.

Kid plays lots of WoC and we've maybe played 2-3 times ever.  Me personally I've never once had my team jerseys changed to black n white or even changed from what I had created and I'm usually my teams owner each year.  Worst thing that has ever happened was the lobby gets locked up and took some time to reset it.  But I'm not saying these things don't happen.  I also don't play silly modes like Eliminator or 3s because it's not hockey in the slightest.

The AI isn't meant to be that great in WoC  And if you are playing 3s then there is no way in hell they could program them to be good defensively in the slightest with so much ice out there.  Unless they program the AI to have ungodly attributes above anything a human can get they will always be a liability because of humans not playing what is deemed proper position and the opponent knowing how to get the AI to be dumb.   But since you played the 26 beta you know what to expect from the AI.

Well it freaking sucks, lemme tell ya, especially when the team customization feature has taken a nosedive over the last few years.

Nobody wants the AI to be perfect; I've always just wanted them to be minimally competent instead of useless to the point they may as well not be there at all.

I expect nothing and am still disappointed

Fix be a pro on NHL 26 badly now 

TTZ_Dipsy wrote:

Never once have you EVER had your team jersey reset back to default black and white? My blue chrome gloves show up as purple. The last team I played stains our jerseys with their colours in the locker room. The other team's goalie in Eliminator is wearing MY goalie's pads that I created. Even our logos can get swapped or made default Anaheim Ducks. This has been a thing since 15 and I'm just supposed to accept it? Wouldn't matter that much if I could save a jersey scheme but noooo.

Had you actually let these games load, you'd know that everything actually loads fine. This was a known bug after roster updates and patches. 

I don't play eliminator as the gameplay is far too arcadey for my taste, so I'm not sure what you mean about saving a jersey scheme. 

TTZ_Dipsy wrote:

the team customization feature has taken a nosedive over the last few years.

How so? They've added plenty of customization for teams over the years including being able to customize the colour scheme of your arenas. You can unlock all kinds of different stadiums, jerseys, equipment. I honestly don't quite understand how you can say it's taken a nosedive when they've literally been adding things (almost) every year. 

TTZ_Dipsy wrote:

Nobody wants the AI to be perfect; I've always just wanted them to be minimally competent instead of useless to the point they may as well not be there at all.

The Ai is heavily influenced by what you're doing as humans on the controls. Nobody seems to want to accept this. A couple of years ago I posted a bunch of GIFs proving that a human action on the controller will cause A.i. to make a move or take an action. Once I discovered this, I've had much less frustration with A.I.

So many people I play against in OVP at the top level make the same mistakes - they'll execute a ton of actions as a human controlled player only to have their AI wildly out of position. Those who've managed to grasp the connection between controller inputs and AI effectiveness are the ones who get the most out of their Ai.

You know those messages we constantly see here where people say "The other team's Ai goalie was lights out" and "Their team always gets the better AI".? This is why.

TTZ_Dipsy wrote:

I expect nothing and am still disappointed

It sounds like you're predisposed to being disappointed. For example, your issue with dark jerseys. Rather than let the games load and realize it's just a U.I. bug in the matchup screen, you default to the position of 'everything's broken'. 

My blue gloves showing up as purple in the customization menu is the only visual bug here; Many teams have had their entire jerseys default back to black and white IN-GAME and on multiple occasions and we have to MANUALLY change it all back - Some people even said this was PERMANENT for them and Aljo has already acknowledged this; "oh we'll look into it", he says. "We definitely fixed it now :3", he says. Well, a week later it happens again. Sometimes the entire team can just have black gloves or helmets - I want a very specific colour scheme and shouldn't see black anywhere. 

Opposite goalies have always used your colours on their pads im Eliminator, I've shown multiple videos of this if you cared to watch. Opposing goalies can have this happen in EASHL as well - I've shown videos on this as well.

Regardless if my purple gloves show up normal, that still shows awful coding and no developer should be proud it happens year after year.
When jerseys are set back to default this means you have to change it alllllllll back manually, of course I'm gonna be mad about this. You can enjoy playing OVP with unrecognizable real players all you want but that shouldn't mean the rest of the game is in any sort of respectable/acceptable state.

I don't give two hoots about colour swaps, weed pants, and cyborgs skating around - I'm talking about how they outright removed the farm team colours from the menu. I'm talking about how it takes like 4 clicks to reach the colour wheel for tweaking. I'm talking about the fact you have no multi-select feature for colouring in multiple segments on your gear. You can't even manually delete colours of your recents swatch - like what kind of BS is that? I need to exit out and lose all of it...
We should be able to save more than 3 colours at once but of course there is 0 tech for that... MS paint has like 1,000 more features.

The game now has phantom segments that don't even show up on some gear, most of the time you don't know what area you're changing, especially when it's small and the equipment is still spinning around, and there are no code options to just pick the exact colours you want - you need to somehow, WITH A CONTROLLER, pinpoint it exactly with the colour wheel? Stupid. Also, they actually removed some stadiums - there haven't been any new ones since, like, '16.

As for the storefront and battlepass side of things there are a metric poop-ton of colour swaps (yay just what we all want when we have a dedicated look throughout the years...), and event rewards that are being given out AFTER season. Why the heck would I want Santa gear in January, or to look like a spooky spider during Thanksgiving? Half the time the store can't even load items in and more often than not we see doubles of gear, like, how pitifully coded is this game? Devs should be embarrassed by that. I was outright promised by our pm that things would be different a few years back now and i've been left hanging - you can say I complain too much but sorry for not biting my tongue.


They still make stupid decisions even if you don't press anything - I've provided videos on this too. You're playing with a full team of NHLers in OVP, much different than rated 75 two-way idiot builds we need to use in EASHL. In OVP you control all the players so of course that is going to have an impact - I can only control myself in EASHL - big difference.
I have no way of proving it but it makes much more sense to me if they are using 6v6 logic in 3v3 - You can spin this and defend them however you want but that is unacceptable to me. You can put them on maxed defensive settings and doesn't matter the position, the AI will try to crash the net. Them just "playing as programmed" is such a cop-out: I say they need to be programed better; I've been saying this for over 10 years and have noticed 0 changes.

What's truly frustrating is when I actually have to try against a team, they can just whiff it 1mph from behind their net and my goalie just can't handle it. "Show me a guy who can handle losing and I'll show you a loser" is one thing, but you can't honestly say the amount of times the game seemingly goes out of it's way to sabotage you is low - That's just how the spaghetti code works, sure, but that doesn't mean it's OK.

If you played a week or two of WoC I'm sure you'd change your tune about a lot of things.

TTZ_Dipsy wrote:

My blue gloves showing up as purple in the customization menu? Sure that only happens there  but many teams have had their entire jerseys default back to black and white IN-GAME and on multiple occasions - Some people even said this was PERMANENT for them and Aljo has already acknowledged this; "oh we'll look into it", he says. "We definitely fixed it now :3", he says. Well, a week later it happens again. Sometimes the entire team can just have black gloves or helmets - I want a very specific colour scheme and shouldn't see black anywhere. 

Can you post a video or a screenshot of teams having these things happen in-game? Just because people say it was permanent for them doesn't mean it was. There's a LOT of people who don't clearly communicate their issues and make assumptions about what's happening and are completely wrong. 

As someone who has played over 500 games in WoC this year, I can assure you this did not happen to us ONCE. The only time we saw generic jerseys and Ducks logos was directly after a patch or roster update, and the issue did not persist to in-game models. 

TTZ_Dipsy wrote:

Opposite goalies have always used your colours on their pads im Eliminator, I've shown multiple videos of this if you cared to watch. Opposing goalies can have this happen in EASHL as well - I've shown videos on this as well.

Again, Eliminator is such an arcade-focused mode, I never touch it. So maybe this issue is specific to that mode.

TTZ_Dipsy wrote:

Regardless if my purple gloves show up normal, that still shows awful coding and no developer should be proud it happens year after year.

Are you familiar with game development and how bugs get fixed? It can be an arduous process that breaks other things that are unforeseen. This specific issue is a basic UI problem that doesn't really impact the game, so naturally it falls to the bottom of the priority list. 

TTZ_Dipsy wrote:

When jerseys are set back to default this means you have to change it alllllllll back manually

No, it doesn't. If you chilled out and let the games load, when coming back to the WoC hub, you'd notice everything returns normally. 

As I've played over 500 games in WoC including games as a drop-in on a club team, I can confirm there were many clubs out there who saw the default jerseys and ducks logos and incorrectly assumed they had to re-do everything because they didn't load into a game first before losing their minds. 

TTZ_Dipsy wrote:

I don't give two hoots about colour swaps, weed pants, and cyborgs skating around - I'm talking about how they outright removed the farm team colours from the menu. I'm talking about how it takes like 4 clicks to reach the colour wheel for tweaking. I'm talking about the fact you have no multi-select feature for colouring in multiple segments on your gear. You can't even manually delete colours of your recents swatch - like what kind of BS is that? I need to exit out and lose all of it...
We should be able to save more than 3 colours at once but of course there is 0 tech for that... MS paint has like 1,000 more features.

It sounds like you're struggling with the U.I. and giving up before trying to grasp how to use it properly. As someone who has played over 500 games in WoC this year and has spent plenty of time customizing every aspect of our gear, I can assure you it's not as cumbersome as you make it out to be. 

TTZ_Dipsy wrote:

The game now has phantom segments that don't even show up on some gear, most of the time you don't know what area you're changing, especially when it's small and the equipment is still spinning around, and there are no code options to just pick the exact colours you want - you need to somehow, WITH A CONTROLLER, pinpoint it exactly with the colour wheel? Stupid. Also, they actually removed some stadiums - there haven't been any new ones since, like, '16.

The part of the equipment being altered will flash lime green when it's selected. Yes, on some equipment - because EA allows you to customize very small details - the flashing green isn't apparent. That's an issue for sure, but you're making it out to sound like customizing every piece of gear in this game is some incredibly difficult minefield of UI issues and that's just not the case. As someone who's played over 500 games in WoC this year  and has spent countless hours fine tuning the appearance of our club, the issues in using the U.I. are minimal. Sure, it could be better. I'm not saying it's perfect. But I think your initial bias is clouding your ability to utilize the UI effectively.

TTZ_Dipsy wrote:

As for the storefront and battlepass side of things there are a metric poop-ton of colour swaps (yay just what we all want when we have a dedicated look throughout the years...), and event rewards that are being given out AFTER season. Why the heck would I want Santa gear in January, or to look like a spooky spider during Thanksgiving? Half the time the store can't even load items in and more often than not we see doubles of gear, like, how pitifully coded is this game? Devs should be embarrassed by that. I was outright promised by our pm that things would be different a few years back now and i've been left hanging - you can say I complain too much but sorry for not biting my tongue.

So the gear isn't for you. Why is that such a problem that you need to claim the people working on this game are 'lazy' and that the game "doesn't run properly" and people should be embarassed? If you don't want to wear a Santa suit.. don't wear a santa suit. Why is that so hard? Again - I've not seen these issues you claim with the store not loading items. 

TTZ_Dipsy wrote:

 In OVP you control all the players so of course that is going to have an impact - I can only control myself in EASHL - big difference.

You do not control all the players in OVP. You control one at a time. 

The AI in WoC are still reacting to your inputs, your positioning, trajectory, etc. 

TTZ_Dipsy wrote:

it makes much more sense to me if they are using 6v6 logic in 3v3 - You can spin this and defend them however you want but that is unacceptable to me.

Why not provide a clip - in this thread - that showcases how the Ai in your 3v3 games is acting up? Just a clip. I don't want to scour through threads to find ones you've already posted. I think it's fair to ask you to provide a clip in this context for the sake of the discussion. 

TTZ_Dipsy wrote:

You can put them on maxed defensive settings and doesn't matter the position, the AI will try to crash the net. Them just "playing as programmed" is such a cop-out: I say they need to be programed better; I've been saying this for over 10 years and have noticed 0 changes.

If you've noticed 0 changes in the AI in the last 10 years, this demonstrates that maybe you're just not paying close enough attention and I say that respectively. 10 years is a long time and there have been quite a few changes to how the AI reacts and how that reaction is based off of human inputs. 

TTZ_Dipsy wrote:

they can just whiff it 1mph from behind their net and my goalie just can't handle it

Show a clip of this happening. 

TTZ_Dipsy wrote:

but you can't honestly say the amount of times the game seemingly goes out of it's way to sabotage you is low - That's just how the spaghetti code works, sure, but that doesn't mean it's OK.

This is conspiratorial thinking that gets us nowhere. Claiming the game is out to sabotage you is just ridiculous. 

TTZ_Dipsy wrote:

If you played a week or two of WoC I'm sure you'd change your tune about a lot of things.

500 WoC games played this year. 

My blue gloves showing up as purple in the customization menu? Sure that only happens there  but many teams have had their entire jerseys default back to black and white IN-GAME and on multiple occasions - Some people even said this was PERMANENT for them and Aljo has already acknowledged this; "oh we'll look into it", he says. "We definitely fixed it now :3", he says. Well, a week later it happens again. Sometimes the entire team can just have black gloves or helmets - I want a very specific colour scheme and shouldn't see black anywhere. 

This is a legitimate issue. As is the glitch with everything turning black. Not everyone experiences it, but there are some that have had it happen multiple times and I get why it's so frustrating. If it happened to my club, I'd probably give up and just use stock branding. There have been attempts to fix this, but obviously, those fixes didn't work out.

Look, I've provided more than enough evidence for all my claims here and internally; you can put your head in the sand and just accept what they give you but I want and expect more from the team.

You know full well I'm referring to player switching and not literally controlling all 6 at the same time somehow. Yes, for the most part they react to human inputs duh, I'm saying they do a horrible job and need serious updates the team is refusing to make. Updates need to happen for both cpu and human players alike - How can things be properly balances if both sides aren't constantly evolving as a steady pace? At the very least allow me to set them up to NOT "cover" my actions. I can maybe stomach more of their decisions if they just worried about themselves instead of me - this should be able to trickle into all modes.

Yes, I do firmly believe their implementation of a lot of things was lazy regardless of it being a yearly title or not - they didn't even take the time to make sure the store worked before giving the green light and offered seasonal rewards after that season ended. It's just like them reintroducing single button hipchecks (which I wanted) and not even bothering to balance them until late in the game's life cycle. That could have easily been worked on alongside the new hitting mechanics at the time.

When it comes to all the confirmation bias and blah blah regarding losses and stuff, you need to take a step back and just look at what's going on as a whole (Picture me clapping at the screen and then slowly widening my hands in dramatic fashion). You are so quick to just blame the humans but again, there is always something going on out there AI is useless, pucks can sometimes bounce the opposite way they should (you can even slapshot backwards at the speed of a rail gun), players can hover above the ice, sticks and pucks will clip not just through the boards and sticks but goalie equipment, arms will break, goalies are still floppy chickens on slow shots, we have next to no control on pass/shot blocks etc etc.
You'll say there are reasons for things like clipping and yeah, I know why that has to be there, but don't make my arm shatter in the process and completely take it out of the play and until my guy "resets" for lack of a better term - That is an absolute death sentence in modes like 3v3 (even though you don't touch it I'd wager it's the second most popular mode next to HUT so it is an issue). 

TTZ_Dipsy wrote:

you can put your head in the sand and just accept what they give you but I want and expect more from the team.

Please explain to me how engaging with literally every criticism you have and asking you to provide more context in the form of a short clip showcasing your issue is me putting my head in the sand.

I'm begging you to provide links to the evidence you've "already provided" and rather than do that, you go on a rant about how lazy the developers are. 

TTZ_Dipsy wrote:

I do firmly believe their implementation of a lot of things was lazy

That's your belief. Respectfully, I believe you are wrong and I say that as someone who's been in the studio and have witnessed what actually goes into the work behind these games. 

At the end of the day, the reason I ask for clips of examples is because more often than not, people's explanations of 'issues' they have with the game tend to differ from the actual videos. Furthermore, I know developers scour these forums and I like to think when people post clips of issues they have, they may have captured a sequence of events that developers haven't seen before and that can lead to permanent fixes. Not everything can be recreated in QA and I'm not quite sure why that's so hard to grasp. 

10 QA testers will not be able to recreate things that tens of thousands of users can. 

And context is important too. Sure, you've posted threads with a video of something you don't like. That's great - but understand that sometimes there are other topics with deep discussions that could benefit from re-posting those clips again. Scoffing at the requests and acting as if we're the lazy ones for not deep diving into every thread you've posted is contrary to your stated goal of wanting 'more' from the team. You can play your part too.