For what its worth, the team selection aspect of SS is a circus sideshow...that is nothing more than Coke Zero marketing and stupidity - I understand why it is there, and how it can be forced onto the developers by the bean counters and powers-that-be; but the other aspects of SS, the ones that players' profiles will display and can be measured against what they are doing in games and how they play, will be very cool. As it is now, I find that about 1 or 2 out of every 10 games I play is against a worth-while opponent...knowing in advance that someone is nothing more than a stick jockey with a bad attitude will be manna from heaven to me and many other online players who are just sick of playing these asshats online.
SS for online play is going to be a HUGE improvement simply by being able to see what a player's score in these areas is before playing them. I can guarantee that the people with big Skills #'s and low Sportsmanship #'s will be avoided like the plague and will make my online experience 1000x better just from that addition alone. Anything that offers us better feedback on players is a big time improvement, whether it should have been there before or not.
Player lock is a chance to make the game play differently and to experience the game from a different camera angle - something that is also a big improvement. Playing as a LB and not being able to shift off of that player makes playing defense a whole new experience - even if you could do this in the past, the added camera angle makes it better than the old opt-in way.
I look forward to using that more than anything else - as long as it is enabled for online dynasty play...hell I might start a Dynasty that looks to get 12 guys together who all sim the offense and play only as MLB or SS for an entire season to see who can win the post-season awards or make the greatest number of user tackles and so on. The point being that it offers us new ways to play the game and is actual innovation instead of a reheated NCAA 2009.5 with different player data.
If I were a developer; and I had to read 1/4 of the bile and immature nonsense in this thread, I would officially make EVERY blog from now until the release nothing but Season Showdown - and I would go into excruciating detail about the most mundane parts of it. Have at it Ben...please make not just the next 2 blogs about the SS, make the rest of them nothing more than full-on in-depth essays on stuff like:
Week 1 - Skills
Week 2 - Strategy
Week 3 - Sportsmanship
Week 4 - Loyalty
Week 5 - Underdog
Week 6 - ESPN Classics
Week 7 - Recap them all with a montage (or just expand on something else...lol)
Hell, I would make them LONGER and more boring just to fuvk with the people on the various forums who are acting like teenage girls who got felt-up at the prom...
