But then, the game shouldn't stop something like that move from ever happening... I just think it should require a lot more precision. I don't play on manual, because I want the players' attributes to drive the game, but there's an absolutely huge middle ground to be explored between the two - hence the "assist levels" - and if we're playing online against other people, the default assist shouldn't enable you to put something like that together without trying.
Otherwise, online games are just going to be a button-mash fest and a Barcelona fest (again).
This is kind of a myth that needs to be addressed.
To me, manual in PES has never been completely manual as the word suggests. It has never meant a total disregard for passing and shooting stats.
There's still a level of
ball path correction. Some years there's more, some years there's less. I never felt the passing stats were reflected very well in both manual or assisted settings. In assisted, your inputs gets corrected and the resulting pass is highly responsive to where the player is standing, thus almost turning the game into a bunch of dots and lines (ball going from player to player, without a lot of gradation). In manual, the input is less corrected and the pass success depends on if you can play the pass into the receiving player's
activation zone. But that input in itself has error from player to player, so that's where stats come in for manual passing.
I also tend to think of the scale from manual to assisted levels as something like 1,2,3,4,5, instead of 0,1,2,3,4. Tho the jump between does levels does not always feel like a +1/-1. (e.g. the gap between 0 and 1 is pretty big in 16 this year)
So there is a some degree of stat influence in "manual" settings, but not as much as I'd like to see. That said, I don't feel assisted controls implements stats any better. It's basically the same formula, but the ball is just programmed to arrive to receiving player, the room for error for your angle of aim is greater, since the game overrides your input and make a better guess to which player you want to send the pass to, and then it also makes a more radical correction to the ball path so you don't make mistakes as easily. That correction, in itself, is not a very good representation of passing stats either, it gives too much parity to the difference of quality in passing stats.
In my opinion, the game has programmed the passing mechanics backwards.
The current programming view point of PES passing, especially assisted passing, seems to be grounded in the idea that
the game will step in and help you to pass better, when your player has higher stats.
When in fact, I think it should be programmed from the opposite view point. A player with 90+ passing stat, should allow you to send the ball exactly as your manual input, without any errors. The weight, the path, the distance, should match perfectly to your input. With a player like Xavi, you should be able to make inch perfect fine-tuned decisions to the ball placement. You should be free to do anything you want with his passing, without computer interference. Coz he has 90+ pass stat.
Here, the game should have minimal interference to your inputs.
And for lower grade passers, the game should introduce more inconsistencies in aim, direction, power, weight. So that way, you can't send a pass with a player with 55 pass stat, even if your inputs are perfect, you should find the player unreliable and inconsistent.
Here, the game should step in and reduce the accuracy of your inputs.
In my opinion, this is the reason why the game doesn't bring out the passing stats well under any settings. There is some difference between the settings, but none of them feel real enough. Tho I think in higher assistance levels, the calculations just gets even more flattened. Their approach to how they program all of this is the long term problem.
