How's Your Franchise Progressing?

@Beauts90 @arrowheader22 @EA_Aljo 

This is why I made the detailed post, though.  I agree, (offline) NHL 21 is left for dead, but I also have no confidence that EA has determined a root cause, yet, to be able to fix NHL 22.  I'm putting all this information out there to potentially help that effort.  Maybe they never will care, I don't know... but if nobody is going to say anything, nothing will ever get done.  As I said in my bullet point reasons for posting all of that, if my information will help figure it out, awesome.  I hope others don't also sit silent, to show EA that we do care and play, and there's enough of us that they should give us the time of day.  And the gravy on top would be if they'd come out and say "this is how it's supposed to work", and we can see how my data lines up with that.

I'm as un-confident as anyone else that anything will come of this... but I want to try, because there's not another hockey game out there, and I want to play video game hockey.  As I said in some other thread, I would literally take a second job with EA to try to help fix this if they had any interest in fixing it, rather than the entire staff existing to produce profit margins.  I couldn't care less about playing in the toxic online world or spending money on microtransaction modes, but within what we have for Franchise Mode, there's a whole lot of a product that I want to exist, and I know I'm not alone in that sentiment, even if so few of us are on here (or other social media, which I completely avoid) talking about it.

As bad as Franchise Mode is, I'm still playing it and somewhat enjoying it, working through and around the bugs and AI idiocy, therefore I'd like to help improve those things to whatever extent I can.  Maybe it'll amount to nothing.  But saying nothing isn't going to help at all.

I am not overly concerned with this bug making its way to NHL 22. Over the last few years there always seems to be a bug that lasts the whole year, but this is the first one that has caused me to stop playing the game. Maybe its a combination of the terrible AI GM logic, useless additions and absurd chemistry system that has helped with that too. Just looking at the patch notes from this year and all the bugs that we have had to deal with, it is pretty clear that they were/are all hands on deck for 22 and spent just enough time on 21 to meet their yearly release obligation. 

In my opinion, that is the biggest issue with this series and the reason I don't think we will ever get a really great game. Making a new game every year while continually providing "support" for the current game just does not allow them to properly implement new features, improve the ones they have and also keep the game running smooth. So we are left with a game with great potential that has rushed/poor execution of features and bugs that go unfixed. In the case of franchise it almost seems as if there is no long term plan or direction each year as the time spent on the mode this year added nothing to what they had started to build the last few years.