Hey NHLGamers,
A new tuner & patch have been released. The changes of note (at least for EASHL) are the nerf towards a player's skating (acceleration, agility & speed) whilst backskating with the puck, some improvements towards blending of certain animations in the attempt to reduce the effectiveness of "shovel" style shots, a rise in the reliability of faceoff counters, as well as the network performance screen now correctly displaying your ping.
Regarding the 'main' change (i.e. backskating), the tweaks that EA have made are described to be "subtle" in nature. So, it should not impact play too wildly in theory, although with that said, even a small adjustment to such a widely used mechanic will invariably lead to some pretty stark differences.
The full changelog is as follows:
Patch 1.55
QuoteHockey Ultimate Team
- Added in a new Leaderboard functionality to have HUT Champions and Competitive Seasons scoring also be Wins-based
- Wins-based Competitions will rank players by the number of Wins, with Round Points used as a tiebreaker.
- Points-based Competitions will continue to rank users by Round Points.
- Removed the ability to see the opponent’s team name and information during the loading screen. The screen will show your network connection and the HUT logo now.
With the addition of Wins-Based leaderboards, we will be able to use them in any HUT Competitive Season mode while still maintaining the functionality of being able to do Points Based events. We wanted to maintain the Points-based competitions functionality as there are certain season structures (i.e. HUT Champions Qualifiers) that make a lot more sense to do in Points-based competitions as opposed to Win-based.
Additionally, we have removed the ability to see your opponent’s team name and information during the loading screen as we received complaints from a lot of players that opponents would back out against them if they recognized their name, making it harder for them to find a game. You will still be able to see the connection bar as you enter the game.
Online
- Fixed an issue where the Network Performance Screen was showing a user’s ping rate as half of what it truly was. (e.g. a 20 ping rate showed up on the screen as 10) This was a purely visual fix and will not affect your online experience. It will now show correctly on the screen.
Gameplay
- Improved how goalies track puck and player motion behind the net
- Improved how goalies react to wrap around attempts behind the net
- Improved blends from deking into quick shots to make the timing more realistic
- Improved motion into backhand toe drag in some contexts
- Identified and fixed a bug where a player skating backwards with the puck wasn’t properly accepting the “with puck” penalties to speed, acceleration, and agility. Alongside the bug fix, we’ve also done some tuning changes to reduce the impact of what the original values were supposed to be.
The gameplay changes made will help address some of the key areas we’ve seen complaints about: backskating with the puck, wraparound goals, and “shovel shot”-style goals. These are the only gameplay changes made in Patch 1.55Source: EA Forums
Tuner 1.04
Quote
- Turned down the top-level ability for speed, acceleration and agility when backskating with the puck
- Overall, this will help address the issues we have seen the community raise regarding backskating with the puck being overpowered, especially when entering the offensive zone.
- This value is in between what the penalties were for backskating with the puck in previous NHL titles and what they were with no penalties. The changes will be subtle, but should help prevent the effectiveness of backskating with the puck.
- Backskating without the puck will be unaffected by these changes.
- Added improvements to faceoff tuning to fix potential rare edge cases that were being reported around faceoff counters not working reliably at times
- Fix for an issue introduced in tuner 1.02 regarding AI penalty frequency in offline modes. Penalties from the AI offline using this tuner will now be the same as they are in tuners 1.00 and 1.01
Source: EA Forums
What does everyone think of the changes? Do you think the backskating nerf was something that needed to be done, or was it a necessary evil to give teams more options on attack? Please, feel free to post your thoughts below!
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