https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y6eCwE8oCIEVideo Proof That This Game Is Broken
April 19, 2021 5:57PM
edited April 2021
Here's a video explaining why the AI is complete garbage, and this game is unplayable.
Preface - this is in Rivals. I had just changed D lines so they're fresh. I'm playing collapsing and protect net. The Makar is the TOTY Makar, with Distributor/Spark/Balanced/Swarm/Gladiator syns active (meaning that his defensive awareness, stick checking, strength are at 99).
Watch my bottom left D, Cale Makar. From face off, I'm busy playing a forward and then the other D. Watch the opponent's Eichel go post up by the net. Then, and this is key, watch my Makar go skate over to Eichel, and skate AROUND TO THE BACK OF THE OFFENSIVE PLAYER. Again let me reiterate, Makar literally skated over there and literally gave Eichel his position; stood behind him. No defenseman who has ever lived would purposely skate around to an opponents back and give him position to bury a cross crease.
This garbage is why NHL has turned into who gets more cross creases. I can't control both defensemen at the same time. I was trying to pressure with Burns. If you're going to put out an AI that literally says "oh excuse me, let me just tuck in behind you and give you that position", then you might as well just give up the license.
The thing is, if this was some dumb silver/bronze plug, then whatever. It is TOTY MAKAR. If I can't trust the highest rated RD in the game right now to actually act like a hockey player, why am I investing in these top level cards?
I'd love to hear any defense of why this is acceptable game play.
Preface - this is in Rivals. I had just changed D lines so they're fresh. I'm playing collapsing and protect net. The Makar is the TOTY Makar, with Distributor/Spark/Balanced/Swarm/Gladiator syns active (meaning that his defensive awareness, stick checking, strength are at 99).
Watch my bottom left D, Cale Makar. From face off, I'm busy playing a forward and then the other D. Watch the opponent's Eichel go post up by the net. Then, and this is key, watch my Makar go skate over to Eichel, and skate AROUND TO THE BACK OF THE OFFENSIVE PLAYER. Again let me reiterate, Makar literally skated over there and literally gave Eichel his position; stood behind him. No defenseman who has ever lived would purposely skate around to an opponents back and give him position to bury a cross crease.
This garbage is why NHL has turned into who gets more cross creases. I can't control both defensemen at the same time. I was trying to pressure with Burns. If you're going to put out an AI that literally says "oh excuse me, let me just tuck in behind you and give you that position", then you might as well just give up the license.
The thing is, if this was some dumb silver/bronze plug, then whatever. It is TOTY MAKAR. If I can't trust the highest rated RD in the game right now to actually act like a hockey player, why am I investing in these top level cards?
I'd love to hear any defense of why this is acceptable game play.
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Howdy, Stranger!
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Anyway, I'll stay posted to this thread for updates on what they're doing to fix it. In this years game.
I don't know where we said we never found anything. It's entirely possible changes to the cross-crease will happen at some point. Just because there's no update currently, it doesn't mean issues aren't recognized. Updates to core functionality can very drastically change a game and not always for the best. There's a lot of work that goes into making these changes. Often, it's better to wait for a future release to give more time to test and fine tune updates to gameplay.
Thanks for the feedback and the video. It's all most definitely appreciated.
What about the fact that simply adjusting some sliders could greatly improve the game? Is that too much work?
Is playing more active defense too much work? There are those that can break up cross-crease passes and those that have a more difficult time with it. Do we need to raise the interceptions slider to make it easier? What about the sim players that want more accountability for their play? Wouldn't that make the game less skill-based and promote passive defense? I'm not saying cross-crease passes are fine and don't need any changes. I'm just wondering why we have seen so many calls for a more sim style of game yet there are many here that want some functions to be more automatic.
I can't speak for everyone but I don't think it's a defevensive issue. Obviously it's not perfect but I think it's fairly good. There are little tweaks that could be made, like not having a pivot penalty for players without the puck for one, and a big one in my opinion.
I think the problem lies on the offensive side of the puck. There's too many things the player with the puck can exploit. LTing, gliding, puck protection, hook passes are a few.
I feel like this game takes the greatest TEAM sport ever and turns it into a 1 man side show. Why pass when every guy one your team can chain deke after deke, spin after spin or just glide and protect the puck? Feeling pressure, don't pass, just nose dive into the boards for shelter.
That's definitely fair, I shouldn't have said that EA said they didn't find anything. My bad, that's on me.
I'll correct my statement and say that if EA did find something, they sure did keep quiet about finding something. Otherwise, why wasn't it told to the community that there's a known problem where defensemen will go for a tie up behind an offensive player (in other words, skate around to the offensive player's back and literally hand him a free one-timer)?
Also, to say "it's entirely possible that changes to the cross-crease will happen at some point" is a whole lot different/vague/shady then saying "thanks for pointing out this glitch, you can expect that this will be fixed in this year's game" or "thanks for finding this glitch, it's a known issue and here's when the fix is coming".
One of two things happened here. Either I found a glitch that EA didn't know about because they couldn't find it/didn't care enough to, or (more likely) I found a glitch that EA already knew about but chose to sweep under the rug, because they either couldn't figure out how to fix it (difficulty doesn't matter and isn't an excuse, EA is a billion dollar enterprise, not a small studio) or (more likely) EA does not care enough to put the time into fixing it and instead has their ears plugged and doesn't want to pull resources from something else to work on it, so they're just done improving 21.
In other words - There's no reason that the cross crease spamming problem should be a vocal complaint for six months by the whole community and EA doesn't make concrete progress that players can see, yet it only took me a few minutes of actually being motivated to dissect video and find/prove that cross-crease spamming works simply because of massive glitches in the defensive AI. If I can find a cause for cross-crease spamming in minutes, EA developers should be able to at least acknowledge that the AI glitch exists and say what they're going to to to fix it.
You know how there are conversations on this and many other forums/boards where a lack of trust in EA is expressed? You know how sometimes an answer is given on here, but yet it's not accepted by players and it's challenged and there is continued back and forth? It's because of things like this. No game is perfect. But trusted studios put in the effort, and they're also transparent.
We hadn't seen this until your video was received. It wasn't a known problem previously.
We can't say if an issue is going to be fixed or not. That's up to the dev team to announce.
This is pure speculation and very inaccurate. You found an issue we weren't aware of. At this point, it needs to be reproduced and a fix needs to be found. Whether or not that ends up in 21 or a future game, I don't know. It has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with not caring.
This isn't exactly a massive glitch. It's a rare one which is why it's now being reported. So, while you say it took minutes, I assume you've played many games of 21 and this wasn't your first one.
Don't even pretend for a second that any decisions relating to this gameplay has anything to do with being sim. When 4 out of the 5 skaters on the ice have no idea how to play defense, "sim" gameplay goes out the window. You had a problem with skill zoning and couldn't think of a better way to fix it other than making all AI controlled players idiots. On top of that, you allow offense to have all the room for error and assistance in the world - they can figure skate, run into the boards, do insane behind the back passes, do perfect auto sauces, pass to guys they can't see, have all sorts of animations for reaching for pucks to one time them, etc. Meanwhile, if your defender is one millimeter off from where they are supposed to be, you can forget about an interception, stick lift, or body check happening.
It is a joke that you even suggest that EA cares about making the game more sim, because everything they do is the opposite. Buddy take one look at a high level game where the players repeatedly skate backwards with the puck for zone entries and to drive the net. How sim is that? And we are going on three years of that. It's a horrible attempt at being a punishing sim on defense and NBA Jam on offense.
Good call with the video, glad for anyone that takes their own time to contribute to a better game.
🙏
But if you think of it, it makes sense what he says. He's just pointing out that they (Aljo, Blueberry) can't say if issue is going to be fixed or not before dev team has announced it.
I think maybe @EA_Aljo phrased it just a little bit unclear?
P.S. there was something wrong in quoting, it gave me an error so I had to modify it a bit...
Apologies if I was unclear. What I'm saying is that we can't make statements about unannounced games or updates before they are announced by the NHL studio.
I've got news for you , even if he positioned himself in front of the player receiving the pass, it still would have gone in the net and his stick would have followed through the defensemans body to ensure it went in. I will post video of this mess soon. Still trying to figure out how to do it
Lol.... so I'm just supposed to trust that EA is going to actually do something about the video I uploaded?
We all know that isn't going to happen. Quit asking for videos if this is the response we're going to get.
Game broken. Why would people get 72 goalie with 95+ team?!
Can any community manager explain it? :D
For the players other than myself (those still playing this game), you owe them an update.
Bug reports are logged for the team and eventually prioritized. Thank you very much for raising concerns to us on issues you see in game. As a reminder while we're on this topic, the best place to submit a bug report is our Answers HQ which is utilized by the NHL QA team. It is a great resource to gather how many players are being impacted and the info we need to help reproduce bugs.
https://answers.ea.com/t5/NHL-21/ct-p/nhl-21-en
Regarding time-frame, we do not have any forward leaning statement on where these issues fall under their priority tasks. When issues are confirmed fixed they are written in the released patch notes. It doesn't hurt to remind us on posts from time to time to let us know if there is a bug that is consistently ruining your experience with the game so we can continue to raise that in discussions with the team, however to set proper expectations for you @quartermaine28 we do not have a date on when you should expect changes around this. If we hear any changes otherwise, we'll be sure to share them with you on these forums.
lol what a joke. if the best place to submit a bug is somewhere else, then quit asking for video proof of everything here. you ask people all day for videos and then you get one and do nothing?
quit making up garbage and just admit that your dev team doesn't care and isn't doing a thing with it. you think anyone is dumb enough to buy that generic timeframe garbage? just take your L with some class and admit that the devs aren't paying attention to this years game anymore.
Videos always help paint an easier picture when we're trying to grasp what's happening in game and from a QA side, it always helps them reproduce it a little easier. Videos are not always required for bug reports and we really do appreciate it when players take time out to record it, upload, and share it on a bug report here. It's without question you're frustrated with the way defensive AI plays and we acknowledge that. We'll see conversations like this on the forums that are important to players and send them over to the NHL team to check out. I, too, hope discussions for topics like this result in changes in future EA NHL titles so we can have a better time in the game. Having fun in our games is always going to be a top priority.
The reason why I ask for you to submit it into he Answers HQ because that board is more heavily leveraged by the QA team because it #1, comes with a bug form with the info they need and #2, it is one of the many valuable resources for tracking specific data for hot topics happening in the game. With the many threads that are created daily on these forums, locating a thread for a similar bug one might experience can sometimes be tough. The Answers HQ does a fantastic job sorting those out for community visibility. The more people post there and vocalize it, the more it helps push a fix or change in our games.
Again, thank you for taking time out to post on these forums where we can all have a discussion around it. I hope you have a more enjoyable time in NHL 21 this year.