Zeppo wrote:Im rapidly nearing the point where I'll be fed up with this game.
I guess a big part of our success in OTP last year was due to the fact that we had a team and were playing against motley groups of randoms. With the Club thing now, we don't have that advantage, and our total lack of any consistent success is really wearing me down.
Another issue is this whole 'are we 85s or not?' thing. I would say it's hard to believe that EA would screw that up so badly after making such a big deal of it pre-release, but we all know how silly that would sound. Still, it is a big problem for me, and I wish they would just abandon the whole idea and make it consistent.
But mostly, it's the same old FIFA control problems that are driving me up a wall. It seems to me that there is much greater latency in club games than in the private games we played the first few nights, and this latency seems to exacerbate the sluggish controls. It's not just the sluggishness, really, it's more of a philosophy of player control. The game will let you change the direction of the pass at the last moment, say if you are tracking down a distant ball, but it will always make you shoot or pass if that's the FIRST button you press; you can't change your mind at the last moment, and this really bugs the he'll out of me. You have to hit the pass or shoot button early to get into and fight for position on a header for example, but you can't change how you want to hit the ball at the last instant without the crazy multi-finger cancel and then re-input. So frustrating, and so completely antithetical to the real game that it just makes me scream for PES.
I wish I could figure out why we can't score. We defend pretty damn well, now that we've adjusted to the changes, but we just can't score. Some games well have close to or above 60-40 possession advantage, but they get some cheap garbage goal thanks to a 'I meant to clear it, but that pass button was a tackle attempt I made before the ball came to me and I was hammering the shoot button' type of turnovers. And then we keep passing the ball around, playing keep away, but can't do anything in the final third. Frustrating to say the least.
I'm with you on the frustration. In fact during the game after you left last night I suggested that we scrap the club and just go back to playing OTP. Personally it has nothing to do with the controls though.
At the risk of oversimplifying, we just don't convert on our chances. As you said, we're holding our own on defense and we knock it around ok. But as I've said about 100 times, we're allergic to the penalty area. We don't finish, we make one pass too many, we don't make the extra pass, we shoot wildly, we shoot right at the keeper...you name it and we screw it up. Last year if we got the ball in scoring position, we scored more often than not. Not so this year.
I'm not just blaming the locked players here either. We are all deficient in the final 1/3. I think a lot of it comes from our trying to play to conventionally. The teams that score freely agaist us are adept at ball handling to take us out of position or evading our tackling and jostling. We do virtually none of that. As I said last night we play like a 1950's Soviet team: machine-like with no individual creativity. We try the same things over and over and we get nowhere. Again, I'm as guilty of this as anyone.
I think we need to apply ourselves to playing with more flair. We need to be willing and able to undress a CB 1v1. We need to really work on our finishing touch and avoid giving the ball away to the GK by dribbling it in too close to the goal line etc.
I think we'll improve, but it is frustrating. We were something like 40-22-70 the other day and we've lost something like 15 out of our last 20 I think.
Not for long, but every now and then LOL