Coaching abilities need a lot of help for next year, imo. First, they need to add a feature that scales your coach progression based on the number of seasons you expect to play. For an offline dynasty, you can play through 10+ seasons super quick because you're the only one playing. For a 10 user online dynasty that advances twice a week, progression is significantly slower, and you don't even get to experience most of the coaching tree until very late in the cycle. Obviously I understand that you can speed up coach XP (we have ours one tick above normal), but even that feels too slow. I haven't tried the "fastest" setting, but it just feels like they could tailor it much better based on information you input at the beginning about what your dynasty is going to look like. What's the point of having coaching abilities like "CEO" if unlocking them is basically impossible or doesn't happen until the new game is coming out? Second, they've gotta stop patching coaching abilities throughout the game cycle. Come up with a system that works from the beginning, test it, ensure it's solid, and then roll with it for the entire cycle. We are now late into season 2, and everyone has picked a path for their coach. It's [uck fay]ing ridiculous for them to be nerfing and buffing coaching abilities at this point in the game when everyone is already locked in. It trivializes the strategy around the initial decisions and makes the entire thing a basically a crapshoot.
I finally picked it up last week. I’ve just been playing a bunch of exhibition games. Gameplay seems pretty good to me. It does something wonky every now and then but nothing that’s really been rage inducing.
Just to recap one of EA's biggest "feature" upgrades for Dynasty this year - manual player progression: At launch, in-season XP was completely broken. If you had ANY penalty higher than 0% for manual progression, 99% of players would not receive ANY XP whatsoever during the season. So off rip, a brand new feature was just completely broken. They fixed that, so now the penalties are actually accurate, and you can now gain XP in-season, which is great. You can still cheese the penalty by turning "auto progression" on while you play your game, then switching back to "manual progression" after the game. It allows you to get 100% of XP with no penalty while still manually progressing your players. Now recently, people have noticed that off-season XP gains have been nerfed. Players are not getting nearly as many skill points in the offseason to improve. This means that certain coach abilities are no longer as effective as they were previously. Why does that matter? Well, if you're in year 2 or 3 of a Dynasty, you are just reaching the point of unlocking the 2nd level coaching abilities you've been aiming for since you started playing. As an example, if I decided I wanted to go with Strategist, I would just now (multiple months into the game cycle) be reaching the point of unlocking Strategist and beginning to utilize it. And now they've nerfed some of the abilities in these 2nd level coaching ability tiers. So you've spent all this time building your coach toward something that may not be as good or useful as it was when you chose that path at the beginning. Which sort of begs the question - what is even the [uck fay]ing point of building your coach? If they can just change the abilities on a whim, why even bother?
That's what people are saying. Not sure if anyone ever pinpointed it to anything specific, but it would be something from the Motivator tree or the Program Builder tree. It's probably hard to test because you can't really run a parallel study with the "pre-patch" setup.
Turned this on to play a game with my son yesterday. He had about a 40 yard TD pass called back due to PI on the center. We turned it off. It’s impressive that EA is so bad at making games.
I haven’t really had anything like this happen. I’ve had one snap get to my QB and then teleport to the ground near a defender who ran it back for a TD but that’s the only real WTF thing I’ve had
On one of the old versions of NCAA I had a RB that was waste deep in the ground for an entire game. He hilariously ran slow as hell as moving through solid Earth isn't easy. But he was tackled the second a defender touched his head. Took me a while to get him hotswapped out of all the formations. The next game he was back enjoying life on top of the ground.
I promise I'm not exaggerating when I say I experienced the most nonsensical CPU game I’ve played in this iteration of the game last night. Possibly the most ridiculous game I’ve ever played. Some highlights include: 4 INT’s (I had 8 through 11 games going into the game). Not one was legitimate. We’re talking receiver goes up, high points, 2 hands on the ball, gets hit, drops it into a DB’s hands, type of shit. It was the 3rd straight game where I had an INT that came as the result of my QB throwing it right at a defender as I’m getting hit. We’re talking like, once in a decade type stuff, and it’s been 3 games in a row. Ball could have gone ANYWHERE on the field, and it hits a defender in the chest... 3 weeks in a row... Had a blocked XP that would have pushed it to an 8 point game at one point. Had a TD get called incomplete. His foot comes down, clearly about to land inbounds, and then it just stops, hovers above the grass, and then moves to land 2 yards out of bounds. One INT - my WR absolutely torches press coverage. I throw it up immediately. We are talking possibly less than a 3 step drop. Green timed, easy TD…. But it’s underthrown, INT. No idea why. Replay shows a DT splits a double team (second guy engages, but just… doesn’t) to hit me almost immediately after the snap, causing the bad throw. Numerous examples of WR’s and OL failing to block people directly in front of them for no reason. WR screen with 2 WR's to block 2 DB's? Multiple times of one of them just running past his guy 5 OL, 5 defenders in the box? Multiple examples of one guy running right past his man, and a few of TWO different OL running right past their guys Had to have been 10+ times in a single game, and multiple on key 3rd/4th downs. Multiple examples of defenders just standing still for an entire play. Literally just not moving. Multiple examples of defenders not reacting to a ball thrown near them. I had one that was legitimately incredible. Like, the ball literally flies directly across his face, within 2 inches of his facemask, and he does not react. Multiple examples of the CPU flipping/changing the formation and my defense just failing to re-align in a way that made even a lick of sense. I have one picture where I have FOUR [uck fay]ing people lined up OUTSIDE of a single TE. The TE is the ONLY eligible receiver to that side (even the HB is on the opposite side), and I have a DE and 3 DB's lined up outside of him. It was so absurd looking that I paused the game to take a photo. At one point, I was outgaining my opponent 527 yards to 181 yards, and it was only a 7 point game. And before anyone says "sour grapes because you lost," I dropped 35 on the cheating [uck fay]s in the 4th quarter alone and won by 40.
Three straight weeks of this nonsense: https://www.xbox.com/play/media/XmMgY7x34K https://www.xbox.com/play/media/5rbj6GaCNK https://www.xbox.com/play/media/wVWnkJDVbK
