What the hell is going on with the team sheets online? It seems to take your formation, and your starting lineup... but it seems to default the substitutes, instructions, but not tactics?! God I hope this is fixed soon.
I understand it can be a slow and frustrating case of trial and error with sliders, but if you aren't prepared to tinker yourself, I am not sure one can complain too much about the state of the AI defence. By design the game is made to appeal to the largest market of casual players, presumably those who want quick counter-attacks and lots of chances - just as you said. At default settings, that is what it does.
Are you serious? The majority of modes in the game can be played on nothing other than default sliders. The default settings are OBVIOUSLY what people should base their feedback on.
mfmaxpower said:
I think it was Xaor/Rodelero at FUThead who said sometime not long ago that the problem with online FIFA is that it doesn't properly reward skill and this still holds. It's just so easy to create chances in this game, and it seems like the vast majority of people do this: win ball, long pass to striker, sprint to goal.
It's certainly something I say, though I think a lot of people say it
One of the most aggravating issues with this game right now is the ease of going from defence to attack. You often see in real life that teams struggle with a disconnect between their lines - sometimes the defence is struggling to find the midfield and sometimes the midfield is struggling to find the attack. That doesn't seem to really be a concept in this game. I'd love to play a possession game of football, but if I push forward the tendency is that my entire team does, and the remainder don't really mark the attackers.
Once I lose possession, it's always a single, perfectly accurate pass or clearance directly to the striker, often blind. It's almost impossible to challenge for that ball, and players don't really seem to want to try and cut off the passing options either.
When long passes are played (not so much over the top, but towards a target man), the person defending is often screwed over by their defenders not challenging for the ball. They won't necessarily get it but they should certainly get close so that the man can't easily turn. Unfortunately, the game doesn't do this automatically, won't lock your player into the path of the ball, and hence you're left to do it manually. That's fine, except for one major problem: you're not on the screen.
When you get a couple people interested in not exploiting the game, you can get some brilliant matches. I moved up a couple division pretty easily, 'cause most played like tools and didn't know what the hell they were doing, rushing into tackles and spamming long passes, but hopefully the matches get better in the higher divisions rather than get more exploitative?
I think you can kind of guess the answer to that. People get better at exploiting faster than they get better at playing football, going off previous years.
I'm playing someone right now who at half time had 33% passing accuracy, yet is still pretty threatening. He gets the ball, hammers it up to his three, totally unmarked attackers, and then tries a long ball. Every time. If I make one mistake when defending these long passes, he will have a golden opportunity to score. This would be reasonable if I was playing ultra-offensive or all out attack, but I'm not. I'm playing a 4-2-3-1, on default mentality.
It is horribly sad to say, but 6-0-4 or 7-0-3 is the optimal way to play this game.