I don't know if I'm just more accepting of what is being done than you are Clevo, or you just want to stir something, or whatever, but team stats make perfect sense to me. Teams that have players of less individual skill than other sides can still perform better than other sides, and I reckon that needs to be reflected. Look at Melbourne this year, certainly not many big name players in there, especially in their pack, but they out played sides this year that have a lot more individual talent.
The same goes at the lower end of the scale. Souths playing roster, at full strength, may be about equal with the Manly or Wests sides, in fact, I'd say Souths have more talent in their standard side than Wests do, but (ignoring that Souths beat Wests twice this year, I'm going on general results throughout the season here) Wests performed a lot better than Souths did, they were more competitive throughout the entire season and won more games. I don't think Souths are gonna be at a level of say, Halifax (i.e. wont win a game all season and get hammered by 60 each week) but face it, Souths aren't that good, even if their individual players have more talent than some sides, they are more likely to capitulate, especially in defense, than other sides, because that's the way the team has gone this year.
As for players being 'handicapped' by going to another club, that's the way it has to be implemented. How else would you differentiate the way some teams play from others? The Warriors have great attacking flair, because of the WAY they play football, and there is no individual rating for 'make a team play fancier football' in the game, and it would be impossible to do, so you do the next best thing, make the players in the side perform better in attack by changing their team attacking rating, so players using the Warriors will be more inclined to attack and play the way that side does.
Same goes for Souths at the bottom end. Even though their players aren't that bad as individual defenders or attackers, they just have no cohesion in many games, and since you can't have a rating for that type of thing, because even with decent individual players (like Parramatta this year, they have great defenders in their side, but still had games where they got beaten by 30 or so points) there can still be hidings dished out to them, and how do you reflect that? You change players ratings in defense, so that it requires more effort to hold teams to lower scores with them. It's as good as the game can manage at this stage, and if you want a game that doesn't need to use techniques like this to replicate how certain teams play, you'll be waiting a long time, and will be expecting too much, because it wont happen for a long time yet.
Soccer and gridiron games have it easy. You have formations and player tendencies, to be aggresive or defensive, in gridiron you have playbooks which can be manipulated to replicate a teams attack or defense, the more attacking sides simply have the more adventurous playbooks. You can't do that with league, so you have to come up with other measures, and I think this is the best way they could have handled it.
So what, Joey might not be as good as he is at the Knights if you move him to souths. Fletch did have a great season at Souths, yeah, but if you moved him into another club who performed better in 2003 and had him play the same level of football he did for souths, he probably would have played better in a better side, more chances in attack, better players running off him and supporting him, etc...
Just lay off Mario. You haven't played the game, not many people have. Give it a chance before you crucify it, and if it really does offend you that Souths are going to be a sh!t side in the game, do two things, one, watch some more of this years football and see they were sh!t this year and its only being accurate, and two, if you are still offended by souths being crap, just don't buy the game, go and play ET's Rugby, I hear they were still a decent side back then. Just don't keep whinging about the same thing over and over when all you are doing is speculating, because you've just come in here, whinged, complained and stirred the developers of the game, offering nothing positive at all.
