sopulii_

Here you can talk all about the SG World Cup 2025! First gameday was an intense one! Gameday 2 on Thurday, May 8th with the following broadcast games: 21:00 CEST Norway - Czechia 22:00 CEST France - Great Britain

Blackbirds (Elite) looking for options for starting G Message here or discord (sopulii04)

Not ECL - but some FCL content with our party chat

Just gonna say it here - thanks LA, for making a decision on the spring seasons ability bans now instead of right before the season starts. The decision itself is a pretty interesting one, but some decision had to be made. Hopefully this is the compromise between banning everything vs nothing that most people can get behind 👍

Yeah I've tried different builds, personally rocking something like 87-88 on slap shot stats. A teammate tried 94/94, and I've seen what the typical playmaker/pmd slap shot looks like and I don't see a huge difference. The unfortunate reality is that I honestly think 75 slapshots with silver one tee is at least as good as 95 slapshots 😅

Just gonna make one observation about this topic: the confirmation bias on both sides is like insane 😂 It seems like the people who are for banning all abilities have a blindspot for anything negative with the change, while the opposite is true for anyone against the change. (Examples: anyone who thinks "this will make the gameplay just forces and tips" is going to have that experience, because this is what they look for and go for all the time - even though the change isn't quite that radical. Anyone who thinks "this gameplay will be awesome" will just completely ignore the obvious fact that shots, especially one timers, are now COMICALLY bad. I think I've seen like 2 or 3 one timer goals in 10+ games from further out) The more I think about it, the more I think the right solution is probably somewhere in the middle (only silver abilities for ECL Spring...?)

Having played 10+ games of no abilities gameplay I think there's some upsides, but one major downside with the change. I think the gameplay itself is pretty good now, especially because of no golden stick em ups. But that said, I think the core gameplay was already very good, even with abilities. For me the BIG issue now is the lack of one timer threats. I do see how gold one tee can be considered OP, but the fact that defensive teams had to always defend for it, opened up the offensive gameplay. This I think is a huge L for the gameplay in general, because it makes passing plays for one timers less rewarding while driving people to force plays to the net (which they were already doing even with those one tee options) I personally now believe the best of both worlds would be achieved by banning only Gold x-factors. Silver abilities don't feel at all gamebreaking, and for example silver one tee would bring back that passing threat when currently it isn't really there...

This. They definitely didn't put 90 in shooting. But the issue is kinda the fact that the top teams all play the same way and rely on having 94/95 speed on everyone 😅 Can't really blame them though, in the current meta I would never trade my 40 point speed attributes for 10-30 point shooting attributes. The gap between the values is F'd up... Most Elite players with their 75 shooting stats 😅

A little off topic but... It's kind of sad how in the current gameplay it doesn't make sense to sacrifice something like speed for shooting stats. If it was like 5 added points to shooting by losing 1 point in speed I think we would start seeing a lot more variation in builds being used. Like a lot of people have said, it's tough to score without shooting abilities... But that is only the case when people are running builds with like 70 shooting stats. In my experience you don't really need shooting abilities if you have 85+ in shooting categories - especially when skill-based one-timers activate! Sadly this scene is so boring that if abilities do get banned, I think most people will start using PMD builds on wingers etc. and won't even give a try to a sniper build with like 90 shooting.

I honestly do not see reasons to ban a specific set of abilities (except big tipper) - to me it's either the way it is right now, or everything banned (honestly the current gameplay isn't too bad, don't really care which way it goes). I do wanna hear some reasoning behind banning uf, no contest and truculence though. Uf and no contest are already super rare to see players use so that's a mystery for me why those would be banned. When it comes to truculence, I do see how it is annoying to play against but my question is why would truculence be banned while stick em up is literally used by everyone. Let's take Parasite as an example team: they have 5x stick em up & 1x truculence. So the best team in Europe thinks stick em up is basically 5x more useful than truculence but truculence is the one that's a problem?

Great that @l-Furyan-l was quick to open this conversation well in advance for the upcoming season(s)! Personally (kind of like last time) I feel indifferent about whether or not we see player ability bans or not, but just here to say that I'm sure most of the players competing would appreciate if we get the information from league administration earlier than last season 😊👍

Shoutout @matireemo