Online play, lag, glitch, and pass blocking

As is tradition, the newest iteration of NHL is pretty much the greatest thing to happen to the franchise ever... and then the first balance patch hits (except, confusingly, there hasn't yet been a first patch????). Once people have time to discover the new meta (and earn certain trait unlocks) it's pretty much all over for those who want to play hockey instead of a hockey game, if that makes sense.

It was explained a while ago in the main forums that goalies are weaker to make the game more fun and to reward skilled positioning; a lot of people outright blame the 'influencers' because they whined and moaned about not being able to score (across all modes).

The hugest factor when pass blocking is your defensive awareness stat - I don't understand why a puck will just phase through my body or I somehow forget to use my stick when the puck is in front of me but I guess it makes sense a D man is slightly better than a sniper at this (to a very fine degree). I just wish we could position the L1 block way better (IE instantly choose if you want to point up or down without having to manually backskate) and even use our arms to bat the puck away so we don't just deflect it into our own net. 80% of the time blocked shots don't even count towards the total in your stat screen so meh.

The only thing I can recommend in regards to teams scoring on 50+% of their shots is to just buckle down and have at least 1 human defender on your team. I would much rather play RW bu have been forced to play RD to stop others from fully exploiting the AI; of course, the moment I go even 1/4 of the way towards center ice the LD zooms into my zone leaving the whole left side exposed (seriously, EA, you NEED to fix this).

Before it used to just be horrible lag all around but in 20 there seems to be a unique random ping spike (for me at least) that usually lasts for around 10 seconds where there is input lag galore. Obviously this only really happens when i'm down by a goal or the other team has the puck ( I won't call this ice tilt but man oh man is it ever annoyingly coincidental).

I know it's hard dude but try not to let it get to you. Just accept how the meta is and just learn to exploit it like everyone else.