After another couple seriously-frustrating days of dealing with AI idiocy, two more additions to the wishlist, from me:
- Ability to set what your AI goalie should do (strategy) when a puck is cleared into his end
- Sliders to work as-advertised/have actual meaning, or a point to them
Rarely does the AI goalie ever leave the crease anyway (contrast to NHL goalies that basically come out and stop every puck sent into their zone for their D men to pick up, or that actually play the puck), and I'd say a good 75% of the time when they do, they get whistled for playing the puck outside the trapezoid (when all they're even doing during this animation is stopping the puck behind their net as it's flying around the boards, as they should be doing). Why isn't this animation directly behind the net, instead of out in this danger zone? Stupid. Sure, you could say "turn off the trapezoid rule"... but then we're not playing a simulation of NHL hockey. My answer would be a choice list of like "play the puck", "stop the puck", and "don't leave the crease". Maybe allow for a different setting when on the PP vs. other times.
On sliders, the ones that disgust me (and is why I opened a largely-ignored thread a while back) are the individual penalty sliders. Boarding = 0 needs to mean "do not call this penalty ever again". I have it set to zero because this game doesn't know WTF boarding is, and calls a game misconduct if a player gets hit by a stiff breeze when you glide past him, let alone when hitting the guy legally.
Most of the penalty sliders are completely meaningless. Why is there a Delay of Game slider? If the puck goes out of play from your end without being deflected (glass or person), it's a penalty. Call that. The game never calls Too Many Men (when players jump off the bench and onto the puck or into your skating player, nothing is called). Contrast that with the general "Fights" slider (though, why is this one just 0, 1, 2??)... you put that on zero, there is absolutely no fighting in your game. On "1", the AI will pick a fight for any reason it feels like (NHL games don't have 4 fights per game, especially in the playoffs)... at least some are skippable. I'm afraid to put this on "2"... maybe doing that unlocks one of EA's abandoned fight franchises instead of playing hockey anymore.