Franchise Mode Updates

@EA_Kent I was going to go around and link to a bunch of posts from the past week, but I think I’ll summarize it for you now.

Custom Leagues is a great addition to the game. That said it being advertised as “control every aspect of your league” and then finding out that we would not be able to control more than one team, and would not be able to edit players made the entire announcement very underwhelming and extremely disappointing.

The custom league COULD have been something great, but instead it’s like someone inviting you over for pizza, then getting there and discovering they only have bread sticks.

@EA_Kent Haha yes Kyl said it… look around the forum Kent. NEARLY NO ONE IS HAPPY.

EA claims that we have all this customization and control over the league… but WE DONT. We don’t have any control. We can’t EDIT PLAYERS. We can’t control more than one team. We can adjust the schedule… cool? I find no use in it. Same with adjusting numbers of teams. We can’t edit players. We can’t control anything. We can’t even have an expansion draft mid career. Only at the start. What’s the point?

You should definitely actually maybe read through the Franchise and Suggestions forums… you’ll see what us franchise players think…

https://answers.ea.com/t5/Franchise-Mode/Franchise-Mode-information-should-you-buy-it/m-p/11872690#M8 Here is a thread full of discontent

https://answers.ea.com/t5/Franchise-Mode/Wait-that-s-it/m-p/11879482#M18 Another thread.. being flabbergasted by the little changes Franchise got..

https://answers.ea.com/t5/Franchise-Mode/Multi-team-control-franchise/m-p/11873352#M9
Another thread confused why we don’t have multi team control…

@EA_Kent Like Kyl said… cool idea, but as usual like everything EA does… AWFUL implementation.

@EA_Kent The information given is a minor update that is not enough to justify buying another edition of the game. I only purchased it because of the promise of better female hairstyles from seeing them in the original trailer. If these hairstyles are not available in the offline modes, I am going to be pissed as hell about that since that is WHY I paid a god damned $100 for another edition.

The Franchise mode addition, singular, seems to be this create a league which allows for some good changes. It sounds, at least, like a step forward. However, it is a half fleshed-out idea. There is only one way to add teams to the league - and that is by manually creating everyone on the team and placing the team in at the beginning of the mode. There are no expansions later on and you cannot add the teams as an expansion. That really should have been thought out better with multiple ways to add these expansions.

However, what I am expecting, based on EA's record with faulty products and inattention to offline modes, is that we are going to run into massive problems creating these teams as the create-a-team teams require rosters beforehand and traditionally you have to place any created players far away from the NHL into very limited spots in other professional leagues or national teams to prevent there being dual copies of them. Nothing in this "deep dive" trailer told us how the logistics of this would be fixed.

Now, a simple solution is to allow these to be empty shells of teams and we can add them as undrafted members of the create-a-team teams directly when creating the player. You create the team first, then the players. If you don't have the fleshed out team, EA could start the mode right after the draft and force them to pick up free agents. A completely empty team could be treated like the expansion teams over the past few years. Of course, EA could have given create-a-team teams the variable of "entry year" and treated them as such there. Alternatively, EA could have randomly generated players within ranges for each line like they generate drafts.

However, as EA has not said a thing about this aspect of it, I am assuming that you cannot do that and that we will be forced to drag over European teams and may be able to cram in 1 or 2 custom teams with custom players by cramming all the players onto national teams or European teams that we don't bring over.

There was a bunch of more pressing things to correct (such as drafting Ricky DesLauriers from Poland rather than someone with a Polish name) and if we are going to see improvement, it really should have been in finishing the conversion of Be-a-GM mode to Franchise mode by redesigning it around being about being a team owner - out to make a profit - rather than being a GM that floats around the league for 25 years, max. There is nothing that immerses you as being a GM other than getting unreasonable demands from the team owner to not get fired from the team that you've spent all your time working on.

There should be work on decoupling Franchise Mode and Be-A-Pro from EA rule changes designed for online, multiplayer play where you are tripping people by trying to block the puck and have a one shot faceoff.

We should see the rules changing over the years (which you can influence), debates over expansions, contract negotiations, and such that is more representative of the idea of owning a team that you care about rather than being a GM that jumps from Stanley Cup contender to Stanley Cup contender every 3-5 years that I am betting most players don't actually do unless the game forces them through GM firing.

Probably the biggest problem I see is with communication - EA refuses to say anything about these issues. Even if EA did think this through and do everything needed to make this work, they act as if they have a long history of putting out a great product when they don't - particularly with offline play. EA takes away parts of the game that work and reintroduce them slightly differently, but probably not any better, 5 years later. Focus is on tweaking things from year to year for online players in a losing battle against human nature to exploit necessarily simplified mechanics and it shows year after year. EA needs to explain exactly how they made this work and what bugs they have fixed, which minor changes requested were added.

If this were Paradox, which has a strong reputation for putting out quality games where everything is thought through and bugs are quickly corrected, then there wouldn't be the same need for transparency. We would know that when we picked up the game at launch that we could create all 48 teams and everything would work fine. We cannot expect the same from EA because of decades of reputation for failing to do that - major bugs often persist for years. You are lucky Paradox doesn't do sports games.

I also want to add that I have seen them announce launches of mere flavor packs, live, that go into much more detail about the changes and all the careful thought that was put into each change, lasting an hour or more. There was nothing deep about this dive.

@EA_Kent Now that I have access....

I see that my expectations about this being poorly implemented in regards to creating players for the team was accurate. There are no empty shells we can fill - you cannot place them directly onto the created team when you create them. You MUST use inferior players in creating these teams - AHL quality - or you must create duplicate players that will be signed by other teams. Do I know EA or do I know EA?

Oh, and my fear: that EA would create those female hair meshes and that they would not be available for created skaters, meaning that I threw away my $100. Yeah, that happened. EA bothered to create the hair, put it in HUT, then give offline players a huge middle finger. We don't get access to it with our $100 US we blow on this game.

It's going to be a tedious time before I can go see what else is broken with the new mode because I have to hand create 21 players, find teams to cram them onto, and then find them again in order to assign them to the team I want them to be on.

EA blew this BIG TIME. Failure to launch.

@VeronicatheCD This is precisely why I didn’t even bother buying the game… sorry to hear that you wasted your money though… EA just cannot make a good hockey video game. They are actually awful. They do not know how to listen to their fan base whatsoever…. It’s laughable how terrible they are

@heavydutyrammer I am doubtful your reason is that you thought that female hairstyles not being used properly in create-a-player is why you didn't buy the game. I expected the mess with the franchise mode additions - but I thought they had the sense for character creation when I saw the hairstyles in the promo on the actual players.