This team has proven every year that they are not willing to patch much of anything unless it is EXTREMELY bad, i think they patched the passing icons once this year? Every year people are asking for bugs to be patched or certain gameplay problems and unless it's an extreme problem they ignore it, EA Aljo says he will tell the dev team and that's it. They took their time this year to make McDavid a 99. Pay your $70 this year in hopes the things you want fixed next year are fixed that is what we are told. They will not release anything detailing what they are working on. They function like a major AAA company when that is convenient and expect the same money for their game, but behave like a small indi company in terms of output. They get $70 from millions of people every year, and complain about their budget. Only sports games are taking advantage of these yearly releases, these UT modes bringing in lots of extra cash.. yet online season mode took years to make the most barebones mode I've ever seen in any game since maybe ps1 days? These devs have experience making mobile games and Mario strikers. At this point we can only hope EA decides to drop a bit of money to actually develop this game and get AAA quality devs or hope 2K is making a hockey game because this franchise is in full regression and going toward arcade/ micro transactions. Just watching gameplay of before this team took over and now.. the game looks so much less like real hockey. The hits alone look absolutely ridiculous.
Hockey is my favorite sport but this is far and away the least developed game among all AAA sports titles. Them saying this online season mode is a complete mode... CRAZY. I can't understand how you would even think to call it "franchise mode" and say it's "complete" call it season mode.. then... fine. Remember guys.. they took the first two years, and gave us almost nothing because they were working on multi-year projects... if this is an example, what were they doing this whole time? I feel like even if it was only 1 individual working on it... and you have an offline mode to pull code from.. and several other games under the EA umbrella.... how is this the completed product? I would like to know how many people were working on this and their salary. I feel I could accomplish more given all of EA assets in a few years and I've never coded anything in my life.. but just out of sheer drive for wanting a good hockey game. However, that's another problem.. I don't think these devs are even really hockey fans at all. Hence why this game is becoming the Mario strikers/ mobile games that they created before getting hired, it is the game they enjoy making/ playing.
TLDR: The dev team doesn't care, they only come out to push sales, and they're not skilled or driven enough to produce the game we want.
Dev team does care and feedback is listened to but let's remember just because it's asked doesn't mean it will happen. You should watch the video of NoSleeves and the Devs where they talk about doing some exploit fixes. Overall the changes from 26 to 27 are noticeable in defense being so much better in tuning. And the LT situation greatly toned down for the better. Updated presentation. WoC shockingly got changes to builds that definitely make you need to play now. Which the community had said there was nothing to play for in WoC well now there is.
Changes happen but at the end all the sports games will feel similar each year unless you actually look for the changes.
What examples are there of the team actually listening to feedback that has stuck? Only thing I can think of was them refusing to issue the traditional day 1 patch that reverted all good things added to the beta because we always complained they did (which ironically was the year we told them to go please revert back).
They claim L2 is fixed every year and it never works. They couldn't actually fix anything to do with the builds so they figured they might as well just do an overal nerf to stats to make it look like they did work.
They claim thr AI is better but you can still easily blow past em even with the speed nerfs. They still let me waltz right into the zone in the beta
