Holy Mackerel! Some of you momos are taking this too literally. It's not there's no skill needed. In fact, if you were a complete beginner with little understanding of baseball, you'd have a large mountain to climb to become a competitive online player.
That being said...
Have you ever heard of EA's patented DDA? Maybe you know it as Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment or "Surprise Mechanics". It skews the base level of the game when certain criteria are met. Call it whatever you want, but all the major sports triple A games that want to sell you packs and stubs and hubs and bubs, use subversive algorithms in hopes to manipulate enough of the players into spending money.
That being said...
Yes, there are players who are really good. You can apply the Pareto Principle, where 80% of the players will be average and below and 20% will be above average to elite with the extreme 1% being super elite. The code allows for this because it has to. It has to have some resemblance of reality or else there would be no argument. Also consider, that it is NOT a perfect system. It is a work in progress. Like any other computer coding, just getting it to be stable is a difficult task on its own. Plus, with all the scrutiny these companies have come under, they've had to change their methods to better hide their deception.
That being said...
It's just a buff and nerf system. It's not scripting. It doesn't mean I can automatically take advantage of my opponents defense if it has been nerfed. I still have to execute an input to achieve the goal, point, run or whatever. A bad player, or a player on tilt, or a drunk or stoned player may miss most, if not all of his/her opportunities (although, on some older versions of NHL, it was known that if you put your controller down, your goalie would become super human at least for a short while).
That being said...
It's about the 80%. The game is buffed and nerfed where the elites can get through, but the average players can be manipulated. Don't feel too bad however, there are plenty of elites who over spend. They will need the higher powered items (cards in this case) to compete at the high levels. Back in the day, an elite player could get to the high levels with base cards, but that's a thing of the past. The code has clamped down on that sort of thing.
That being said...
I could care less. I just want a deep Franchise mode with great gameplay that works properly. Not this half baked nonsense we've gotten ever since the money modes were introduced. You think we're ever going to see Online Franchise again? Probably not, because a lot of people would enjoy that and SDS fears it would take away from DD. They want everyone sucked into that garbage. That's my theory anyway and that's why I hate them and the apologists that defend this garbage.