Multiple issues with create-a-team
NHL 24 added the ability to create up to 80 teams, so that's exactly what I did: enough to create a custom Franchise Mode with 40 NHL teams and 40 AHL teams. It was hard, and not just because it was obviously time-consuming, but also because of multiple bugs that impeded my progress.
First, I learned the hard way that I had to keep every team's roster at the minimum 18 skaters and 2 goalies, because it seems the game has a hard cap on the total number of players that can be on created teams, and I don't believe that cap was increased when the number of teams one can create was increased from 50 to 80.
What I learned was that if you exceed that apparent cap, the game will remove the "excess" players from a team when you save it - and if that drops the team's roster below the "18 skaters, 2 goalies" minimum, it will display that team's overall as dangerously low, anywhere from 0 to ~25, and it will cause a corruption that crashes the game if you even scroll past that team on a menu; you can't even delete the team, you have to delete the roster file and start over.
Second, and the issue that brought me here today: even if you jump through that hoop and make the max number of teams, if you put them into a custom league (again, 40 NHL teams and 40 AHL teams), when you save, quit, exit the game, turn the Xbox off and come back later, anywhere from two-thirds to three quarters of the AHL are unplayably broken - their logos won't show up on the menus, and if you attempt to play a game with one of the broken teams, it just soft-locks while trying to load the team select screen.
And furthermore, the reason I'm bringing this up here & now is that both of these bugs carried over from NHL 24 to NHL 25 - when I downloaded a roster someone else made with 80 custom teams, it was afflicted with the corruption I mentioned, and when I made 80 bare-minimum teams myself & put them into Franchise Mode, the same exact thing happened where a large part of the AHL was unplayable; I even took a screenshot of it, which I've attached to this post.
Is there anything y'all can do about this? Team/league creation is basically the one feature that keeps me coming back to these games, so when I can't get it to work correctly, it's extremely disappointing.