Re: Franchise mode - Players who have a great season do much worse next year
It's Tuesday... and you know what that means...
Please let us know if development has responded.
Forum Discussion
37 Replies
EA_AljoCommunity Manager
The dev team is aware of this issue, but I don't have any updates. I can't guarantee that I will. It's being looked into. If there's any news, I'll post it here.
@davehoehn970Well, we got our “answer”, and I can’t say I expected anything more.
Given how late in the release year it is (usually release in oct, so nearly halfway there), I think we’ve been given up on. Considering how they’ve said that the first few months are used for fixes, then the rest is used for the next game. So I think we’re stuck with the broken game mode.
I won’t be buying next years game, after the release of this broken game that came with false promises and little-to-no support.Yeah, I know, but had to try, anyway.
I decided to buy on a sale this year, when the NHL still hadn't decided on a return to play, and I was missing hockey, plus all the stay-at-home, I was out of interesting things to do. I haven't been an every-year buyer in so long... I don't think I've bought since '15. I gave up on Madden in like 2000. It's been a long time since college, with readily-available opponents. I can't stand playing PVP games online (gave LoL a good 3-year run before not being able to put up with people anymore).
It's just disappointing that this edition is what it is, at a time when I was hoping for more. I am still playing this version (still have nothing better to do), and I'm sure someday I'll upgrade to PS5, so I guess I'm just holding out hope that they will acknowledge us and commit to fixing these things in future editions, at least. I suppose next time I do think about buying, I'll definitely be researching first, rather than an impulse buy.
Just a hockey fan that wants a good hockey sim...
- @davehoehn970 I feel you man, it really sucks how terrible this game was this year.
For the next year, I’d definitely look at the player reviews, and not what EA says is being added.
This year they claimed a trade value revamp, the deadline addition, multiple positions, and class/quality sliders.
The trade value has been even worse than the last few years, so they completely missed that target.
The deadline is pretty useless with the trade values being so buggered. Not to mention the clunky ness of it, and constant interruptions while trying to initiate a trade.
Record book is still bugged.
Can’t edit players anymore to fix the generated prospects. TWF/TWD are still worthless in chemistry. And can’t edit players so that hinders chemistry even more.
Not to mention this bug that makes prospects (and this game) worthless
They promised a lot and delivered next to none of it, so I would definitely not rely on their news releases when it comes to checking out the game.
I know I wish I didn’t. They made FM and BAP sound super exciting, and they’re the two worst versions of the mode I’ve played.
I’ll always be checking the forums and listening to the players instead of EA. The players will tell the truth and show the game for what it really is. As someone who has bought this game on release day every year and someone who has tried constantly to defend the series, I can honestly say if they don't get this bug worked out for this years game I won't be buying NHL 22. (I know they don't care, but still) I have managed to get around a lot of the problems with this mode and as long as they aren't major bugs, I try not to complain about them so much except to offer suggestions on how I would prefer them to work. This however is much different and not something we should be forced to "work around" especially considering how many other bugs we have had to deal with this year. There are 2 reasons for this not to be fixed this year: either they don't care enough about the customers that play this mode or they simply cannot figure out how to fix it. That only tells me that there is a good chance future games could also have game breaking bugs that would make this mode useless to play and so I would have no reason to purchase future titles if they have no obligation to fix these bugs.
- @Beauts90 “future games could also have game breaking bugs” that sentence is exactly what I’m worried about. Can’t remember if it was Blueberry or Aljo that said it, but the Devs will work on bugs for the first few months, then the rest of the time is spent for the next game. And they will save the bug fixing for the next game. But where does it stop? I understand that no game in existence will be without bugs. But game breaking bugs like this, (quite a few game breaking bugs for FM this year tbh) how often are we going to see them? It doesn’t make any sense to spend money on the next game when it’s going to have the same bugs, and more, as the previous title.
They attempt to add new features, which is great, but they don’t flesh them out.
That can be said about the entirety of FM as well. It has lots of potential and CAN be a great game, if they just fleshed out the features that they add. Instead, the features just get jammed into it, adding bugs, not meshing with the rest of the game, and then it’s left to sit and rot.
Coaching and chemistry was introduced, which is a cool addition, but it’s execution is awful. TWF/TWD are useless, coaches have no willingness to adapt (if McDavid doesn’t fit his scheme, he’s worthless) and now we can’t edit players, so our star TWF TWD will continue to be useless with chem now that we can’t change them.
Anyway, before I stray even further off topic and keep on ranting, there is no point to buy 22 next season. Not if FM keeps getting scraps from the bottom of the barrel, and little support from EA. This year really showed how much they don’t care about us. To add on, I know someone brought it up in all of our conversations, but as you just mentioned, the inability to Edit and fix these problems ourselves is massive. Not that I'd necessarily want to go edit every player to fix their Progression, but it would at least allow me to make the game make some sort of sense. Same with the idea of forcing or vetoing CPU trades. To your point, I can see what they were going for with the new "Trade Deadline", but all you have to do is play through it once to see how bad it is, in practice (such as getting interrupted on what you're doing with every trade notice).
I haven't figured out yet... does chemistry even matter if I'm playing the games instead of simming? Two-ways should still fit in some way, anyway, but I'm not sure how much that impacts me, personally. Not to say that's not an issue that I would want to see fixed... it is. I have bigger issues with things like how I couldn't fire and hire my AHL coach mid season (which got zero response), and some of the other topics I blasted in on the day I got really frustrated.
I agree... it can be great. I would literally take a second job with these guys to work on fixing some of this stuff (stuff that doesn't require a graphics programmer, anyway... that's outside my skill set). But this progression thing... as I said to Aljo, this is Franchise Mode. Ability for us to edit anything and everything and help ourselves would (while tiresome) go a long way, but I don't know how a game/mode gets released like this, and it isn't addressed in any way.
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...
- @davehoehn970 Yeah, exactly. Stick a bunch of buggy features together and the end product is just a disaster.. if they gave us the customization and editing ability, it would save them so much resources because we can work around their bugs. The bugs that they seem to never fix, since it comes with perennial leftover bugs dating years back.
The deadline mini game is just laughable. So atrociously laughable.
Imagine if NHL had a “steam workshop” type deal. All the modders would simply focus on fixing the bugs since there is so many, there’d be no time to make actual mods lol 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.
- @SkylerJames13 good take. I'm completely against buying their games again unless I see some major change and there's a 0% chance I'll ever buy their game on release no matter what they advertise; I've completely lost trust in them. Honestly hoping to support another NHL game developer even if it starts small.
- @davehoehn970 I honestly think it's another way to entice people to buy their future games, If it wasn't so restricted in editing (e.x. inability to change a player's age or even height/weight) people would be less likely to buy in annually. They way they're going, I wouldn't be surprised if restricting player contract editing was next.
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.
It wouldn’t surprise me at all if it was due to the agreement they have with the NHL/NHLPA that doesn’t allow us to edit certain features of players. The agreement does not seem to be great and they have a lot more limitations than the other sports games have on what they can do.
I am all for having more customization and control in the game mode, especially if they can’t figure out how to give us a properly working game. What would make more sense though is to fix the chemistry system and have player types be actually based on their attributes. I think they would have to add more attributes and use a weighted system for ratings to do this, but that’s another discussion.
The GM logic was actually improving in previous years (slightly) until they decided to change how each team was classified and add the trade deadline. I just want to be able to pick up the game and not have to spend the majority of my time trying to fix the glaring issues this mode has myself. I would even say that morale has really improved over the last couple of years to the point that I enjoyed it more when it was turned on and yet this year having it on creates even more issues. It’s definitely going to be a tough sell for NHL 22 considering the amount of work needed to make this game enjoyable again.
@Beauts90 @LordDecland @SkylerJames13
I know we're talking AI GM logic in a couple threads, but something just struck me as I was playing just now...
I'm a Pens fan, and as such, watched the game and ceremony last night for Sid reaching 1000 games. There were stats aplenty about how many people have done so, have done so for one team, who has more games played, etc. One of those guys is Marc-Édouard Vlasic, on the Sharks. I'm nearing the playoffs in my current FM year 2, and on the Trade Deadline, I remember the Sharks sold off essentially their entire team, while 2 points out of second in the Pacific, and 4 out of first. Playing against Buffalo just now, who are barely holding onto a wild card spot, I realized Vlasic was out there skating around.
If (ha ha) they ever fix AI GM logic, I think a component of that fix needs to include special circumstances for long-time Franchise players. Where they were in the standings (and they're actually holding position anyway), there's no way they would have kicked off a drastic rebuild IRL, and definitely not trade off such a tenured player.
During year 1, I happened to notice the Pens did the same thing, but at least they were way out of it at the time, and they kept Crosby and Malkin (but sold off basically everyone else, aside from Letang, who apparently had no takers, even sitting on the Trade Block for a long time). They signed absolute garbage players in the off-season, are somehow now sitting at second in the Eastern Conference this season, and grabbed Brent Burns from SJS at this Deadline (because who wouldn't want a 1-2 of Letang-Burns??).
It's just so GD erratic. Anyway, just wanted to share the anecdote. To the guy in the other thread arguing for keeping Edit off for Franchise Mode, if he happens to be reading this thread, this story is one of the reasons we want Edit in FM. We're not trying to break the game (but again, who cares if we did... it's an offline mode), we're trying to correct the idiocy. We're not going to pay $80 for a roster update every year. We're not contributing to EA's profits by buying HUT packs. We want a functioning sim.
So I’m late to the party apparently but this is an absolute joke.
Bought the game Sunday. Put about 15 hours into meticulously managing the first 3 years of an expansion GM before I noticed this bug ravaging my top prospects.
Went to Reddit to find out the only fix is to just scrap it and start over? That is just unacceptable.
Did I miss something or has EA just ignored this game breaking bug for 2 months now?
Yes it's being ignored... sorry you're only finding out now. "Scrap and start over" also doesn't seem to work, because we have evidence to the contrary for every potential "solution" that's been brought up so far.
- @grizzblue Yup, FM has been largely ignored since release. I’m sorry you wasted your money on this ‘game’.
I suggest you don’t buy nhl 22, at least not until you read the comments in these threads, so you can avoid wasting money.
Don’t believe what EA says, as they will hype up their “changes” and claim that it’s new and improved. But it’s definitely not true.
They hardly ever fix bugs in FM or BAP. When they come across bugs, EA has said that will likely wait til the next instalment to fix the bugs. But when that happens, they introduce more bugs into the next instalment and then those bugs won’t be fixed either. It’s a continuous cycle.
This years game is such a joke, and it really put a strain on the relationship between EA and their offline fanbase, and they’ve really showed how little they care about us. Frustration post time again...
Somewhere in these conversations, someone mentioned that players get a "playoffs stat increase", which then gets taken away at the start of the next season, possibly being a contributor to this bug. I just need to say it's just been soooooooo funnnnnnn getting caved in for the last month and a half of this season because every other team in the league is boosted. My powerplay can't even get a shot off anymore, and teams that are out of the playoffs and playing minor league callups are playing like Team Canada, and their goalies which would never otherwise see the light of day in the NHL are playing like Patrick Roy.
<sarcasm font> At least I can adjust the sliders in Franchise Mode to level the boosting back out. </sarcasm font>
I'm going to be soooooo excited to start season 3, just to see if my players will now be "double nerfed" (progression bug between seasons 1 & 2, and then again between seasons 2 & 3) compared to the rest of the league. Hopefully, my 40-year-old defenseman retires so I have some salary cap space to sign a player that didn't get nerfed simply by being on my team, leading the league in points, and winning the Cup.
Oh, and my goalie in his mid-20s will be winning the Vezina for the second straight year and still not improving his 81 OVR since the progress bug takes his numbers away.
<sarcasm font> Makes total sense.</sarcasm font>
😠😠😠
- @davehoehn970 Looks like they’ve completely abandoned us.
The upcoming patch literally only consists of jerseys, and chel challenges. That’s it. No bug fixes at all. What a pathetic patch.
I legitimately feel robbed. I paid $80 for this hunk of trash and it’s not playable, and it’s been abandoned by EA Natural Growth bug destroys player progress. Turn of morale to mitigate issue. With morale off the salary demands go through the roof.
Junk game that they refuse to fix just so they can squirt out a few more HUT packs.
I laughed so hard when I read those patch notes and saw the thread marked as closed before anyone could reply. “Yeah, we know this patch isn’t good news, but here you go!”
