Thanks for the replies Jimmy, always good to hear a different point of view.
As for your answers, I'd argue however that
- players on blue arrows, and purple, for me seem to play extremely differently. Shots tend to go way off target for example. I appreciate this makes away games harder, but seriously, if I pay top money for a world superstar for example, I wouldn't expect him to hit shots far less accurately purely on the basis that he's playing away from home.
- Refs are game breaking. I've had countless attacks where I've been in great goalscoring positions only for a free kick to blow against me for literally no challenge whatsoever. A defender can come in, collide with me while I have the ball, then the game penalises me. Always in a decent attacking position....
A great example is this from yesterday. I turn on the ball, AWAY from the defender, he brushes against me, but I can still run off with the ball, next thing I know, the game stops because the ref's given a free kick AGAINST me! It's absurd and happens, in my experience at least, several times if I sit down and play a few games back to back. In this case, it's the awful collision detection that fools the game into thinking that, because the ball is momentarily loose while I knock it ahead of me, that it's an off the ball challenge even though I did nothing wrong. And in this case, I didn't even make contact with the player despite him recoiling like he'd been kicked.
YouTube - IMG 0337
Offsides; That's exactly what I do, Jimmy, I rarely now get caught offside, but it severely halts attacks on a regular basis. Even with top world class strikers, they're constantly just sprinting beyond the back line then walking back, at times when all I want to do is continue build up play. I've altered stats, everything, nothing seems to stop them. Half the time I just end up having to pass the ball backwards until the game decides they'll make it back onside. Heck, I've even before now hit a long goal kick from for the ref to blow offside just inside the other team's half. Not much I can do about that.
AI formations. If you pause the game and look at their formation in the game plan screen, you see the bizarre formations it adopts. It's either all out defence or all out attack, which is why you can randomly get a long through ball only to find the AI has five strikers to three defenders. It's verging on replicating what it's like to play against online players who abuse formations. As for ebb and flow, I'm all for this, but not to the extent where the AI is trying to hold out for a draw by having nine of their eleven players within 30 yards of their own goal in the formation screen. I've seen this often.
As for strikers attacking the ball, I score plenty of headers and absolutely love the crossing mechanics. I 100% agree with you on crossing. But I need to hit crosses that are slightly pulled back from the position of the kicker most of the time. Crosses across the goal, between the keeper and defenders, begging to have a big striker bundle the ball in, often results in them being slightly out of reach of the cross.
Diving headers; I often have my players auto-perform a diving header even when they could easily stand still and wait for the ball to hit their head. Like I said, I score plenty of headers, but if anything is even mildly in front of them by a foot or more, the default seems to be the diving header which almost never connects. I'm not trying to perform a diving header, I do the same thing as I do when I regularly score headers, but it seems that now and again the game makes them randomly perform this action, and almost 100% of the time they'll miss the ball.
Keeper bugs - coming off their line and standing still;
Check out these videos if you've not already seen them. One is Van Der Saar, the other Almunia. This isn't a result of stats, or keeper ability in any way, but the game freaking out due to bugs. No other way to put it. These aren't isolated videos, just ones I decided to upload when I got fed up of seeing this sort of stuff. The one where the keeper lets the ball roll into the net happened literally a day after the exact same thing happened to David James when playing an England match. Shocking.
YouTube - PES2011 Free Kick Fail
The next video shows keepers randomly sprinting out of their area;
YouTube - IMG 0287
Note, on the second video, not only did my keeper come rushing out like a madman but when the ball comes back in, my player is positioned on the goal line, but despite being on semi-assisted, the game simply would not let me switch to him, and he just stands there and lets the ball roll into the net.
Player strength; I'd not argue the point if it was based fairly on player stats, but it simply isn't. On regular level, you don't get shrugged off. On Pro, you do. On Legendary, it's ridiculous. I witnessed Drogba being shoulder charged off the ball by much smaller players, just as it seems impossible for players like Walcott to outpace far slower defenders, even when using tricks like tapping R1, or knocking the ball really far. It's just a cheap mechanism FIFA also uses to simulate the game being harder to play against.
Stumbling animation; there's no inertia involved at all in this. It doesn't depend on body position, speed you are travelling, it can happen when running in a straight line and the AI decides to just shunt you out of the way. I'd argue it's not inertia related because it's nigh on impossible for you to do the same thing to the AI. If there was some physics going on in there then I'd see this happening to players on both teams, but it doesn't. There's no scope to recover, it's drawn out, unrealistic looking and drives me mad.
GK releasing the ball. I know you can use the buttons to do basic throws or kicks, but try controlling the keeper on FIFA when he has the ball. You have total control. You can dictate the exact direction and strength of kicks and throws. PES more or less tells you where it's going to throw it. Most of the time, if you want to throw it left, it will, but often the keeper refuses to do it, then without even allowing the rest of the team to properly move upfield, he automatically clears the ball with a kick. Compared to FIFA, this function really feels dated.
Super cancel; I completely agree, super cancel is a genius way of preventing the game from making your players do things you don't want them to, but honestly, it's 2011, and the AI should be aware enough to not make your player sprint at full speed until he runs into the ball and gives away a throw in when he's completely unchallenged and about to win a throw in. It used to happen in PES on the PS2, and it's still happening today.
Cursor switching; I too use semi-auto, and it's far better when defending, but it freaks out on me when attacking often.
Take this video for example. Okay, so I make a mistake by passing the ball into the legs of the defender. But then the ball breaks loose, the AI removes my control from him, to someone not even on screen. The AI then makes him back off from the ball, along with the player at the top of the screen, because the AI is making space for a pass presumably because it still thinks that I have the ball. All because the player switching went crazy. This sort of thing happens all the time.
YouTube - IMG 0344
But thanks again for your opinion, always good to hear contrary arguments
But for me these issues wouldn't matter if I rarely saw them, but if you add all these things together, then many become apparent when playing more than a few games in a row. I'd put these arguments to Konami's feedback section, but I really don't think they listen. If they did, they'd have taken a lot less time than it did to fix simple things like moving off the ball for a throw in, which they simply left until last year's game.
