All the things wrong with the Enforcer Engine

[Bleak5170]

1. Anytime the goalie freezes the puck, two random players will lock up and do their little aggro dance. Not once has this led to a fight in my games. I am beyond sick of seeing this canned animation play over and over and over yet never amount to anything.

2. "Enforcers" almost never fight. I play as the Sens vs. the Leafs a lot, (coach mode - both teams CPU-controlled) and Neil, Kassian, McLaren, and Orr have been on the ice together several times. How many times have they fought? Zero. The center on the Leafs goon line, (David Bolland - a guy with 2 career scraps), has fought more than his two enforcer wingers. And Milan Michalek is far and away the PM leader for Ottawa. Not only does he hit everything that moves, he starts fights! This could not be LESS like the guy in real life.

3. The odd time you get an enforcer, (or truly tough player), to fight, it's almost always versus a non-fighter. And worst of all, the non-fighter often wins, (handily at that). There's something not right when a guy with a fighting skill rating of 70, annihilates a player with a 90.

4. The majority of real NHL fights end in a draw or something reasonably close. 90% of the tussles in NHL 14 result in a knock-out, (a somewhat rare occurrence in the real world NHL).

5. Huge hits seem to be the impetus for pretty much every fight in the game. It would be nice to see random eruptions of violence just because there happens to be two tough guys on the ice. Or fights taking place right after a face-off. Or when one team is losing 6-0.

I know most people probably turn off fighting altogether, (I know I did when it was that first-person nonsense), but it's sad to see such a highly-touted feature this year, implemented so poorly.

[JezFranco]

On your first point I have noticed that if you press triangle during the "aggro dance" they'll push even more, and I have got into a couple of fights as a result.

I've started hitting less during fights and instead, trying to doge, then press down on the stick, which takes a huge amonut of damage/fatigue, and if enough causes a non-knock win.


However, I think the handling during fights is to unresponsive. Like sometimes if you try and punch but your opponents pushes you or dodges, your player will then throw a punch about 3-5 seconds later without you even touching the sticks. That just feels awkward, slow and unresponsive.

I understand that fighting skills makes a big difference, but as it is, it's not working very good.

I still play with fights on, because I like the fact that you'll get punished when you do something you shouldn't. It's just that I feel that I could just as well watch a CPU-vs-CPU fight as trying to affect it, because my controller input doesn't seem to do much difference.

[Splitter77]

had a sweet thing happen last nite while playing.
i play offline against the cpu, and i had a fight going on against the cpu, while my fight was still going on, the two cpu players that were in a scrum dropped the gloves too. it was the best thing ive seen in the game this year.

[adayinthelife]

Quote: Originally Posted by Splitter77

had a sweet thing happen last nite while playing. i play offline against the cpu, and i had a fight going on against the cpu, while my fight was still going on, the two cpu players that were in a scrum dropped the gloves too. it was the best thing ive seen in the game this year.

Really? This I have yet to see. Did they each get 5 min fighting majors as well? Every few fights I'll see maybe one or two other groupings of guys doing the little dance that OP mentioned, but I've never seen it break into another fight...

[Splitter77]

Quote: Originally Posted by adayinthelife

Really? This I have yet to see. Did they each get 5 min fighting majors as well? Every few fights I'll see maybe one or two other groupings of guys doing the little dance that OP mentioned, but I've never seen it break into another fight...

yup. they all got 5 min for fighting.
even the commentary mentioned it. i think they said something along the lines of "now you have a choice of fights to watch." or something like that.

[adayinthelife]

Quote: Originally Posted by Splitter77

yup. they all got 5 min for fighting. even the commentary mentioned it. i think they said something along the lines of "now you have a choice of fights to watch." or something like that.

That's awesome, and a very far cry from the terrible first-person-all-other-life-forms-disappear fighting system they've had for the past however many years.

On topic, I do agree with some of the issues mentioned and would really like to see things like proper players fighting addressed (I don't feel like this is an epidemic in my experience, but it's incredibly inconsistent - sometimes the right guys jump in to fight, other times not at all). I still feel like this is light years ahead of where it was.

[walhalla]

Quote: Originally Posted by Splitter77

had a sweet thing happen last nite while playing. i play offline against the cpu, and i had a fight going on against the cpu, while my fight was still going on, the two cpu players that were in a scrum dropped the gloves too. it was the best thing ive seen in the game this year.

The same thing happened to me too. I was playing as Jets @ Canucks, and a scrum began in front of Vancouver goal, after the whistle. Then the player I was controlling dropped the gloves with a Vancouver player. A second or two later Kevin Bieksa started fighting with Anthony Peluso, while my fight was still going on. I was amazed to say at least! All four received 5 min fighting majors. I can confirm, it really can happen.

[Bleak5170]

Quote: Originally Posted by Splitter77

yup. they all got 5 min for fighting. even the commentary mentioned it. i think they said something along the lines of "now you have a choice of fights to watch." or something like that.

Okay that's pretty cool. I have had a couple of instances where it looked like two other guys were going to go but nothing came of it. I'm totally surprised that can happen in offline games.