Part of the frustration with this mode is the overall lack of information on how things work. As far as I know if you change any strategies when playing games, it negates any chemistry boost you have from the coach. At the same time, do players overalls then fluctuate throughout the game based on who they are on the ice with at the time or do they always have the boost assigned to when playing 5 on 5 or PP or PP, etc..? In my experience, the simming is completely random anyways as I’ve tested numerous times by simming complete seasons without making any changes and have ranged from bottom of the league to Stanley Cup champs. Again, I don’t know if this is true because I have never heard if CPU controlled teams are affected by line chemistry or not, but I do like to go through and change all top players that are a TWF because the player type doesn’t fit and I’ve noticed more often than not teams who have TWF as their best players don’t seem to perform as well even if they are high overall teams.
I have said this before, this mode really isn’t that far off from being really great. However, as this year has taught me it is also not that far off from being completely unenjoyable. One of the problems I come across this year when it comes to being able to edit players inside the mode is that they take so long to have good rosters due to the agreement they have with the NHL. I have to spend so much time re-editing player types and potentials before I start a new franchise that if there is an update with added players and better overalls that I want use, I just have no desire to do so with the state of the mode right now. So because I can't do it inside the mode, if I do end up missing someone (because they don't release roster notes saying all of the players that were added) I have to start a new franchise in order to edit them.
The line chemistry they've implemented makes so little sense that I'd rather turn it off altogether. I see it as just being random and really stupid. Franchise mode has turned into a broken mode that keeps being added to in bad ways that make it worse along with having things taken away (editing) that makes it even worse; advertised as a "new & improved" mode though each year.
It's like they've done subtraction by addition and simultaneously subtraction by subtraction.
@LordDecland I like the idea of turning off line chemistry, especially since they locked us out of being able to edit the player to get around their awful line chemistry system. If they’re gonna make TWD/TWF useless, let me change some of their player types so they aren’t useless.
If they don’t start listening to the community and keep removing good, working features and adding broken useless feature, I’m definitely quitting buying nhl from EA. And I will continue recommending my friends and others in the FM group on Facebook to not buy nhl 21, or even 22. Nhl 20 was the last decent one, and it wasn’t even the greatest.
still can’t believe this bug hasn’t been addressed
I saw in one of the other threads the person saying that this problem extends to the generated prospects in draft classes and the coaches' preferred attributes. Not only are these "features" individually flawed, they're even worse since they don't all work together like they're supposed to. EA obviously has different departments working different tasks and no project manager tying it all together.
We want a product that works properly so badly that we're willing to put in all the effort to correct these flaws on our own, then they still take away our ability to edit, and therefore fix, these things.
I miss the days when I could just break open a PC game's code and rewrite it myself. Sure, back then, it was so I could cheat and essentially play God Mode (thanks, Doom!) on whatever I was playing, but right now, I just want to clean up nonsense, not cheat. The trades... especially during the Deadline mini game...
Oh, man... if this was on Steam...
I just can't even understand the decision to take away full editing if it was once there (as said in other conversations, my last purchase was '15, and I didn't pay this kind of attention to it). We're talking about an offline mode... why would they possibly care if we edited anything we didn't like? Doesn't affect anyone else. Doesn't affect online gaming. Doesn't affect accumulating loot pack coins. If I did make all my guys 99s and the entire rest of the league 50s, who cares? Turning off editing seems like the most useless of decisions.
Maybe if they fixed these bugs from year to year, that's a legitimate argument that could be made for why to shut down complete editing... but even still, on Franchise Mode that affects exactly nobody outside of the person editing, that's a tough sell. All they're going to actually do is continue pushing players away from the product. Nobody in the corporation is going to care about that as long as loot crate mode is what's still raking it in, though.
