Offline players deserve better
I’m writing this out of genuine frustration as a longtime offline hockey fan and slider creator from Operation Sports. Every year, I spend hours tweaking sliders to get the gameplay as close as possi...
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I'm not saying it doesn't have it's issues, however a lot of the gameplay changes that ultimately change the feel of the game comes from feedback.
Prior to the release the game was slower, had more strategy involved when setting up plays, penalties being called that were not called previously.. however this is not fun for online modes so adjustments were made which seemingly changes the fundamentals of how it plays.
The online community wants a fun, fast paced game that is more lenient on penalties where the offline community wants a simulated experience based on strategy and overall flow of the game.. the issue is that you can't have 2 separate experiences in one game and what we get is a weird mess of the 2 styles after a few patches.
When it comes to what you said about Hutson.. thats more of an issue with ratings - which is an issue for EA and how they build their system. The higher the overall the worse or less real the player will play.. it's how they breakdown and score the overall levels out to different areas of the players overall.. thus putting points in categories that doesn't reflect the real life stats or playstyle the player has (this actually got worse with the 99 club added this year for McDavid).
There would have be a fundamental change to how player overalls work to fix this issue. The overalls and player data conflict with eachother, thus why it's so inconsistent.
Speaking as an offline player myself.
however this is not fun for online modes so adjustments were made which seemingly changes the fundamentals of how it plays.
and this is the point for offline players. EA caters to online players because of the money they spend. that's a load of bull IMO. I'm not sure how difficult it would be to separate the modes. make a strict offline mode then a strict online mode. if there are several "servers" for online, why not dedicate a "server" for just offline and fix the mode for us who want a realistic hockey game. yes somethings needed to be changed for both but when you said "the game was slower, had more strategy involved when setting up plays", this is what us offliners want. yes the penalties needed fixed for both but not at the expense of realistic hockey. I've seen several real hockey games where there should have been a penalty called but wasn't and then some that was called that should not have been. and if you can't separate the two modes then have us the ability to NOT update the game or have it "cater" to offline because to me, it's easier to use sliders to make the game fast with more lenient penalties. I can change the penalties to near 0 and most would not be called, I can up all the sliders for speed, agility, shots, ect ect, and score as many goals (or not) that I want probably on superstar difficulty. and yes I believe that everyone's sliders need to be the same but again it's not fair for us that pay the same amount as online people to get a crappy game.
Sadly, I think it would almost impossible to have basically 2 different games built to cater to both player bases (based solely on the development cycle currently in place and also the difficulties of trying to work on balances and patches for essentially 2 different games).
I don't know that it's they only cater to the online community it's more the fact that the online community is a larger portion of the player base, they also don't have the ability to adjust their game experience with sliders so it has to be adjusted within the structure of the game.
