[AR_Six]

^First thing I thought of.

Originally Posted by slybomb

With that update they did a few weeks ago they said that they tuned it down a bit. They said that the players with high pokecheck attributes would still be good where others would not, but I did not notice any difference with it. I would think they will come out with another patch for that, considering you see people bitching about it everywhere. Has anyone even used the stick lift this season? That was most effective in the past and now it is useless compared to the poke check. Also, where you lay your stick flat on the ice to block a pass, I find in this season, it does not work at all. So...that leaves us with one option - pokecheck. yay!

I completely agree with you and I made an epic long post on the EA forums complaining about it when the game came out:

Spoiler!

This has become a bit of a thing for me the last little while I've been playing.

Every year, including this one, the NHL iteration EA puts out has some issues. People grumble and raise legitimate gripes in relation to said issues. We all recognize that the game can't be perfect, and it isn't realistic to expect a hockey simulator. It's not even clear that a 100% faithful hockey simulator would be particularly fun to play. Se we just kind of put up with it and accept the game with its flaws, because it's still pretty fun, and it's still a hockey game.

This year is, by and large, similar. We get GM connected, and there are some lag issues in the menus. We still have HUT, but there are a bunch of bugs that arise, and some people gripe (rightly or wrongly) about the training and the lack of careers. EASHL has been changed, and some people are upset about how sluggish their guy starts out and how hard it is to advance. Others have general concerns, like the superhuman goalies stopping cross-creases everywhere. But these gripes are like the gripes every year. They're annoyances that bother people to varying degrees but can be dealt with.

Now, maybe my pet peeve with this year's incarnation is exactly like all of those above. Maybe this just bugs me more than everyone else. But for me, it’s on another level than previous nitpicks about the gameplay. In a nutshell, my problem is this, and I’ll put it in question form:

When was the last time you played a game online where someone’s defensive strategy didn’t consist almost entirely of poke-checking?

Defense is half the game. Or looking at it another way, it’s 100% of the game – either you’re playing defense, or you’re facing the opponent’s defense. And the way poke checking works in this year’s version of the game, it dominates the gameplay. When on the forecheck, the strategy is to try to poke-check the defenders before they can make an outlet pass, or poke-check in time to deflect that outlet pass. When in the neutral zone, you want to force a turnover using the poke-check. Defensively, stand up at the blue line and poke the puck away before they get into the zone. If they do manage to get possession in your end, you guessed it – poke it away and head back up ice.

I do this too. Everyone does. This is simply because the other defensive tools aren’t anywhere near as reliable. I can hit a guy, sure, but I might miss – hitting isn’t as forgiving as the poke-check, because the poke-check covers more ground and has a longer duration (I can still get the puck away on the backswing even if the initial poke misses).

I can stick lift, sure, but my penalty risk is higher, and I really have to be in the right position and at the right angle to do a stick lift. Even if I do it right, the opponent will often – most of the time? – get the puck right back. And most importantly, any situation where a stick lift will work, a poke-check will work at least as effectively.

I can pin a guy to the boards, but then he needs to be near the boards – it’s not even an option most of the time. When it is, I have to guess which way he’s skating correctly. Sometimes the pin works, sometimes it doesn’t. When all the stars align and the pin works, he still has control – he can kick the puck to a teammate. If I poke-check him, he doesn’t have any control over where the puck goes.

I can drop down and try to block the pass – but this only works if he either tries to pass, or tries to stickhandle over my stick. Otherwise – and usually “otherwise” happens, if you’re playing someone with the least bit of wherewithal – going down in the pass block turns you into a pylon, easily skated around. This tool is only useful on an odd-man rush to hopefully force the puck carrier to take the shot, and hope the goalie stops it.

So that about sums it up. Poke check it is. But no worries, right? Poke check works really really well. You don’t have to be that great at it, just have to get your stick in the near vicinity at more or less the appropriate time. The thing is, since it’s the only game in town, people ARE getting good at it. Very good. And when you’re very good at something that’s very effective even at the worst of times, you can pretty much foil the vast majority of offensive strategies without much trouble.

At this point, offense becomes a matter of relative effectiveness. There are a couple of ways of scoring that work better against the poke-check master that everyone’s become than other ways of scoring. Since the poke check is so effective that those other ways are borderline useless, we’ll just have to use the couple of relatively efficient ones. And now, every offensive foray looks largely the same.

Your offense may not work most of the time, but that’s fine – you’ll get the puck back because you’re good at poke-checking too, and you pretty much know what the other guy is going to do. There aren’t that many things he reasonably CAN do in this environment. So the question is, who’s going to mess up and miss that poke-check? Which AI goalie is going to kick out the wrong rebound? Who’s going to get that weird goal that just managed to trickle past the AI keeper for the other team?

It was you? Congratulations! You won a game of NHL 13. Wasn’t that fulfilling and rewarding for you?

The point here should be obvious. Games look more or less the same each time. They’re a contest of whose poke-checking skills are the most advanced. That is not, for me, a whole lot of fun. I could definitely see the issue with 12 and its figure skating deke machines who couldn’t be knocked off the puck for love or money, but at least there was variety. You could play the game that way, but you didn’t have to in order to win.

As long as the mechanics effectively force players to use poke check as their primary defensive tool (an understatement – for a lot of players it’s their ONLY defensive tool), this game is going to get old very quickly. Maybe we’ll still play it, because we’ll all figure, “hey, it’s a hockey game”. But it doesn’t look much like hockey to me right now.

Originally Posted by lox888

I can definitely play without the poke check but that would mean that zone entry and passing would be very hard to stop...hitting is pretty difficult so the only other option would be to try and anticipate player movement and physically block shots/passes.

Yes, very true - I just think they need to balance these things to make the block pass / shot thing more useful, same withs stick lift. Right now if you play without poke check you're deliberately handicapping yourself, so why would you bother? Especially if you're good enough at it that you don't take many penalties. Penalties are supposed to be the main deterrent to using it a lot, but PP's aren't the end of the world anyway even if you take a couple tripping minors and it's not like you don't end up getting called for boarding when you hit or high sticking when you stick lift too.

Next season, or if I have time to play on my own to figure it out, I will play without the poke check as much as possible and work on a way to play tight D...no more complaining if I find a way to do it!

I don't think anyone's complaining (besides Gary apparently), you're just doing what the game allows you to do. But I do think what you're talking about is the ideal, because if you change it up the other guy doesn't know whether to play keep-away to avoid the poke check (which makes him an easy target for a hit) or try to skate around you / dodge the hit, which makes it pretty easy to knock the puck away with a poke. But the poke is so overpowered that you're probably still better off just using that 80% of the time or more.