I have been playing The Show for literally 20 years. I have bought each edition and played them on a near dealy basis, end to end. My engagement is almost exclusively in franchise mode, and while I've had plenty of thoughts on how the mode could improve, mostly I felt changes represented incremental improvements.
Not this year.
The new trade engine -- while exciting in concept -- has drained all the joy from the game, and I find myself disinterested in playing altogether. No single feature is to blame, but the combination of features makes trading so opaque, time-consuming, and profitless as to be unplayable.
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The idea of an untouchable player is frustrating from a playability standpoint, but it's also unrealistic. Top prospectes get traded all the time. Even franchise players get traded. They are perhaps prohibitively expensive, but not untouchable. It's one thing to arbitrarity increase their cost-in-trade; another thing to have a binary on-off switch.
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Trade feedback is lacking in both information and speed. It's impossible to tell how close you are in your evaluation, and it often takes a week or more to find out you were off the mark. How far off? No idea. I have spend in-game months trying to trade genuinely valuable players until eventually the deadline passes and no deal was made. Even if I'd set my sights to high, I'm not given enough infomation to make a correction in time.
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"Find trade" is sorely missed. Even if I'm getting BAD offers, at least if gives me a frame of reference for how my guys are valued.
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The hub is unwieldy and time-consuming to navigate. Making an offer requires going three menus deep, scrolling within those menus, and then exiting one level at a time back to the calendar function. The problems with the trade engine are exacerbated by the amount of clicking around required to even engage with it.
I really, really hope some of this work can be done in-season, or this will be the first year since the series started that I basically don't play The Show at all.