Yup. There is a setting where you can select which tuner set you want. I tried a bunch and found 1.02 to be the most enjoyable. But it is all personal preference. 1.02 has a lot of hitting, and the skating physics still effect the game, unlike 1.04 which is essentially skate straight and fast towards the net, rinse, and repeat.
I think the way to get to it is: my NHL 13 --> settings --> gameplay settings
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This game is just getting way less interesting now that people have adapted to the gameplay changes and are becoming more expert at the pokecheck-only defensive strategy. It doesn't even look like hockey anymore. There are ways to counter that and succeed against it, sure, but they really don't make the game all that much fun.
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Originally Posted by Iginla
They keep ruining the game with every tuner. The game was just fine the day it was released.
No, it was a mess on release, but I'm definitely with you; the last couple of tuners have really made things worse.
This game is just getting way less interesting now that people have adapted to the gameplay changes and are becoming more expert at the pokecheck-only defensive strategy. It doesn't even look like hockey anymore. There are ways to counter that and succeed against it, sure, but they really don't make the game all that much fun.
No, it was a mess on release, but I'm definitely with you; the last couple of tuners have really made things worse.
I won't say who they are, but I've played some people in our CP GM Connected league and I absolutely loathe playing them. Every second of game time that I have the puck they spend just mashing the pokecheck button over and over and over.
They have no other strategy, like positioning, hitting, stick lift, anything else.
It's stupid to play against these people. Totally ruins the game for me.
I won't say who they are, but I've played some people in our CP GM Connected league and I absolutely loathe playing them. Every second of game time that I have the puck they spend just mashing the pokecheck button over and over and over
Yeah, I know. But it's like 75% of the people who play online so you'd have to expect you're going to have them in the GM league. I can't even get a game in in that league lately.
Anyway, earlier today I played some Online VS, went 5-3, got annoyed after the third one at some particularly brutal poke checkery being done by a team with 3 human players (just rush the puck carrier and pokecheck, ignore everyone else). So I went on the EA forums and posted this.
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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.
(TL;DR: The effectiveness of the poke-check narrows player options to a point where the game isn’t about hockey anymore but how good your poke-check is, which in turn makes most of the games played online look very similar. As a result the game gets boring in a hurry.)
i have to change my position on the game/tuner a bit from my previous post. I HATE the tuner for offline, and therefore, didn't even bother trying online vs.
I played a few games today in online vs, and it actually felt great.
So i hate the tuner for offline season, but online vs, feels good...
So you guys are complaing about players playing defense?
Protect the puck better. Dump the puck more rather than expecting to skate through where you want without harrasment.
Hockey players in real life have to deal with lots of stick harrassment if the defender is in range. How is NHL 13 different and not realistic in that manner? Maybe the issue is the game doesn't have enough options/controls in regards of protecting the puck, but poke checking I don't think is a major flaw of the game.
Hockey is a very messy sport, with the puck being extremely loose. This is what makes generating good scoring chances so tough. If anything, the direction of the franchise is going to have the puck become even more loose on realistic settings in future interations.
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So you guys are complaing about players playing defense?
Protect the puck better. Dump the puck more rather than expecting to skate through where you want without harrasment.
Hockey players in real life have to deal with lots of stick harrassment if the defender is in range. How is NHL 13 different and not realistic in that manner? Maybe the issue is the game doesn't have enough options/controls in regards of protecting the puck, but poke checking I don't think is a major flaw of the game.
Hockey is a very messy sport, with the puck being extremely loose. This is what makes generating good scoring chances so tough. If anything, the direction of the franchise is going to have the puck become even more loose on realistic settings in future interations.
My complaint is the opposite. As usual, EA appears to have turned the tables to the offensive side of the game yet again by dumbing down the poke check. The best thing going for nhl 13, in my opinion, was that they brought a rewarding feeling to playing defensively, getting in passing lanes, having an active stick.
Now, it's back to NHL 12, where players can skate/pass uninterfered after getting out of their own zone. offline play (season) on allstar/default is brutal. It's back to that game of basically waiting for a good minute of watching the CPU skate circles around you in your zone until:
1.The cpu scores, with the goals all being of the following variety:
short side snipe
broken stick or blocked shot that goes directly to the cpu forward with goalie completely out of position
Trickle goal off goalie equipment
2. You take a penalty
3. Wait for the cpu to go shot after shot where they are always first to the rebound, and maybe after 3-6 iterations of this, you finally get the puck or your goalie covers it up.
i seriously think the EA team looked at this tuner strictly from the online/eahl perspective, but have ignored offline play altogether. I can't see how anyone playing offline (season) on the allstar/default settings can feel that the game play is satisfactory.
Hockey players in real life have to deal with lots of stick harrassment if the defender is in range. How is NHL 13 different and not realistic in that manner?
Yeah man, in my men's league it seems like every time I cross the blue line there's a guy charging at me with one hand on his stick, stretching out frantically and repeatedly trying to poke the puck in the other direction.
Are you serious? If people played like this in the NHL, they would be made to look like idiots, scored on, and benched for eternity, in that order. In the video game version, you are rewarded for this ridiculous play. Example: if I'm playing online vs. against 2 human players, and am on the PP, I see the following strategy a lot: human players aggressively attack the puck carrier, ignoring everyone else, poking at nothing and hoping the puck carrier tries to pass or go around them. What do you think would happen in real life? I'd probably flip the puck past them and let one of my other guys - who now outnumber the defense 4 to 2 - skate in and probably score. In NHL, you can't do that - you have to go down the boards and set up a passing play from there, or try to skate around the defenders rushing at you while keeping a safe distance from their magical puck divestiture wands.
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Hockey is a very messy sport, with the puck being extremely loose. This is what makes generating good scoring chances so tough. If anything, the direction of the franchise is going to have the puck become even more loose on realistic settings in future interations.
Cool. Loose puck is fine. Even looser than this is fine. It's not, however, fine to have the mechanism for the looser puck be everyone who plays the game just poking at the puck over and over and over again. That is just incredibly lazy on EA's part. Even high school floor hockey didn't look this amateurish.
Maybe it's loose because I fumble it more often, or it slides off of sticks on shots more, or hits skates. Maybe it's because the opponents tie up my stick or get away with light hooking (gee, it seems like we have this stick lift button, I wonder if that might be used for such a defensive strategy). Hopefully it's a combination of all of these things and more.
I am not arguing for a game where you can skate through wherever you want unimpeded. I am arguing for a game with balanced defensive tools so that you have to actually use more than one.
This is by far the worst NHL game I have ever played and I say this as having a pretty good online record and I'm ranked in the top 200. I'm just really good at exploiting the easier ways to score in this game.
Quick passing is a really easy way to get past the whole 'over playing the puck carrier' strategy.
When I first picked up the game, it took me 3 games to score a single goal because I was used to being able to dangle around the defense and score. Now I play GM connected with three other buddies and we all play on superstar difficulty and rarely lose a game.
This is by far the best NHL game for realism. My biggest complaint in the old games is that you could pretty much rub right up against the defense without losing the puck, in real life if you try to accept a pass or shoot the puck when you're within arms reach of an opposing player, chances are they'll knock the puck loose or just knock you over, this is the closest NHL game for me that got that aspect of defense even close to right.
With one touch passing and the loose puck dekes, it's pretty easy to make opposing players look stupid for charging the puck carrier over and over, it just comes down to skill and timing.
My complaint is the opposite. As usual, EA appears to have turned the tables to the offensive side of the game yet again by dumbing down the poke check. The best thing going for nhl 13, in my opinion, was that they brought a rewarding feeling to playing defensively, getting in passing lanes, having an active stick.
Now, it's back to NHL 12, where players can skate/pass uninterfered after getting out of their own zone. offline play (season) on allstar/default is brutal. It's back to that game of basically waiting for a good minute of watching the CPU skate circles around you in your zone until:
1.The cpu scores, with the goals all being of the following variety:
short side snipe
broken stick or blocked shot that goes directly to the cpu forward with goalie completely out of position
Trickle goal off goalie equipment
2. You take a penalty
3. Wait for the cpu to go shot after shot where they are always first to the rebound, and maybe after 3-6 iterations of this, you finally get the puck or your goalie covers it up.
i seriously think the EA team looked at this tuner strictly from the online/eahl perspective, but have ignored offline play altogether. I can't see how anyone playing offline (season) on the allstar/default settings can feel that the game play is satisfactory.
this was exactly my experience. Skate along side the other players, hitting them, pokechecking them and the puck will stay right on them. A minor problem is that it can be impossible to get the puck, the major problem is the defensive A.I. is completely moronic. They will skate away from the puck/stand flatfooted, be way out of position for no reason causing odd man rushes all the time.
Supporters generally will just say I wasn't good but my record was 14-13 online so it's not like I could never win, never going to play again because of the broken core gameplay mechanics and because I don't have it anymore. How anyone can defend it when the hitting is fundamentally broken baffles me, hipchecking a guy onto his head only to have him get up with the puck and score 1 second after says everything about this game, it is not more realistic, it is garbage.
I was just on the EA forums and my suspicions of the sliders being mislabeled are indeed correct. The sliders for ''human hitting'' and ''cpu hitting'' are actually reversed. Human hitting does not mean YOUR hitting power, its actually the strength of the cpu when it hits you. Same with the cpu slider. Turn the cpu slider all the way up, and your hitting power will increase. Decrease it all the way down and you have no hitting strength. I'm going to try this when I get home tonight, but this would explain why I have my human slider all the way up, cpu down, and I bounce of every single hit that I lay on and fall down. F'ing ridiculous how this is setup. I don't even think the sliders really have any accuracy to them. I turn my shooting slider all the way up, and magically the opposing cpu has same shot velocity as me. Turn mine down, and the cpu shots decrease as well. It's as if they are both linked together.
I enjoy the NHL series to a certain extent, but the more I play it, the more angry I get. This years version just has so many stupid glitches that ruin the flow of the game.
-The ''Aids'' puck. Seriously, wtf. Did no one test this out? Why do none of the new tuners fix this? How was this even allowed to happen?
-The trades the CPU makes. Kipper traded for 2 scrub goalies immediately after winning the Hart Trophy?
-I win the Art Ross, Rocket, and MVP and when I request a trade, I have to ''prove myself'' before I can be put on the trading block?
-Iginla retires...at the age of 36??
-The hitting system licks balls (although I'm hoping when I try the new slider format it will fix this, but I'm not holding out hope)
-The on the fly shift changes in BAP suck. I come out on the ice, and 2 seconds later a whistle goes and I am back off? This can happen many times in a row. Or if the cpu passes the puck to me immediately after coming onto the ice, I cannot control my player? WTF.
-The menus are just horrible. It's like watching a crappy powerpoint presentation with full slide animations on a slow PC.
This game makes me angry, yet I can't stop playing it because of the lockout and I need my fix. It's like a terrible addiction, where I know I would be better off without it, but I can't stop.
I just snapped a 7 game losing streak in my Be A GM mode. Time to start up a 7 game winning streak.
Also, this Be A GM mode is broken. The Oilers are in 6th place.
I've got my Be A GM on Superstar, Normal settings and it's challenging, but it the right amount of challenge. My record is something along the lines of 23-18-4 or something.
Most of the games I play end up 5-4, 4-2, so they're lowish scoring by EA NHL standards.
I really enjoy Be A GM, but I recently traded Comeau for Kreider straight up, so that's a little messed up haha.
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