I get that things are gonna be different every year because different systems get created and cause problems which require more changes. As a stricktly Chel player these are my gripes:

1) in hockey when a player scores the whole team celebrates. It was always annoying that only one player could really celebrate a goal even when there were 2 assists attached to that goal. However at least you could sort of control the player a bit and make it fun. i.e. a lot of players slide through the goalie's legs, or my team's favorite was to do pushups or something and try to interfere with other players animations. I was hoping this year each player could celebrate and as a team we could come up with funny scenarios lol. Instead they now make it so that not even the goal scorer has any control of their celebration. It's just ridiculous.

-- it's especially sad cuz when 23 launched there was a bug that kicked in after you scored. if you just kept moving and didn't stop skating the camera would linger on your player for a bit longer and the rest of the team could coordinate funny things like surround a player on the opposing team or all piling up at the bench. it was silly but it brought joy and they patched that out.

2) It's already been talked about but I need to bring it up again. WHY oh WHY do we need to change our names, numbers and everything else across Home, Away, Alternate and Casual? Just utterly ridiculous. The new screen is def a bit better, but then it's completely ruined with this decision.

3) The new tethering system for human goaltending is one of the dumbest things I've ever seen in a hockey video game (and I've played a ton of them since the mid 90's). I played goalie a lot for my team, and we all preferred having a human goalie game vs against the cpu. This way the normal glitchy goals wouldn't be something we'd have to worry about and we could play something closer to real hockey. But now it's just hot garbage. I know they're going to patch this at some point but by god, it's hard to believe they play tested this and people told them it was good to go.

4) We're now playing our 2nd 'next gen' hockey game. There's no reason the loading times should be this long. Every screen, every menu takes forever to load. I get the game was made also for last gen systems, but any other PS4 game I play on my PS5 is snappy and quick. Even games that haven't been optimized for PS5. Yet it's a chore to change anything about my guy cuz the loading between screens is ridiculous. And now I have to do it 4 times for each instance as mentioned in point #1.

5) Why can't we remove the pressure graphic? Why can't that just go onto the boards like everything else? Doesn't need to be on the ice like that. It's distracting.

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On the plus side, they added people in the stands that are holding popcorn and pretzels so you know...improvements.