Guys, even if I know The Wolf doesn't want to brag about it, he's coaching a soccer team for a living. So if someone knows about realism, for heaven's sake, that's him !
Nonetheless, I would point out that according to me, the fact a player you doesn't control give away a FK or even a PK is not that bad, what is frustrating is that each and every initiative of CPU controlled teammates is poor, and there is such a big number of other obvious cheats / flaws.
Let's discuss a thing that is crucial to any game where two players/teams challenge each other : balance. Let's see why Human against CPU games in PES have never been balanced :
CPU controlled teammates initiatives : Making fouls, even granting PKs and FKs, why not ? It's part of soccer anyway. But why do they only clear the ball when there's no one around, and keep it in their foot and turn towards the opponent the rest of the time ?
Control switch : Either in manual/semi-auto (which I would call semi-auto/auto) mode, a human player often has to hit the L1 button several times to get control of the player he wants. During this time they :
_ lose time on what they want that player to do.
_ all players they gain control of in the meantime stop running or start running in an opposite direction they were for a brief moment, thus putting them out of position in the action.
And that only if you're lucky enough to stop this control-change rally on the right player, because even in Manual mode, CPU will change player control for you just a fraction of a second before you hit L1, and bam !, you've missed the right player.
Also why is a player running towards his own goal (backwards) always favored by the control-switch engine to a player running forward ? Does that make sense to anyone ?
Stamina : has anyone ever seen a CPU controlled opponent get tired ? Have you ever wondered why you can't see how tired CPU players get ? To me, all that leads to the fact they never get tired, especially from game to game, whereas the human player has to deal with players that can't play three games in a row, EVEN GOALKEEPERS, who in real life usually play all their teams' games. In ML, players often come back from international games as tired as if they had played 10 complete games.
Passes : one major flaw that has been there forever in the winning eleven series. Every time the human player makes a pass that gets intercepted by the CPU, this pass is powered exactly so as to make a perfect pass to the intercepter. More than that, almost every "bad" pass is aimed directly at an opponent's feet. How can one call that realistic ? A bad pass is a pass which direction and/or power is on some random amount different from what the player planned. Therefore most of the time these passes should just go out of reach of any player, which isn't the case in the game.
When two players are eligible for a pass, the CPU will virtually always choose the player who is marked, or unreachable.
Countered passes : another flaw that has been there forever. When a human pass is touched by a CPU opponent, wherever this touch leads the ball, the player the ball was aimed at stops his run. Even if the ball trajectory has barely changed. The player remains blocked for some time, and therefore loses a ball that was completely playable.
Penalty kicks : It is more than about time to change the PK system. I want to miss the goal myself, not on random. There is no problem in making a FK-like system where the player would control the risk he takes in his aiming and power, and it would be much more satisfying.
Don't get me wrong. Pro Evolution Soccer is by far the most evolved soccer game ever done, and PES 5 is brilliant in terms of realism, especially compared to PES 4. But as the game gets more and more realistic, these flaws are getting more and more frustrating.
What I blame Konami for is not to try and make the CPU able of brilliant moves to beat you fair and square when they have a much better team than yours. And allow the reverse to be true. This way they wouldn't have to ruin your play to give the CPU a chance based on anything but luck (bad luck, to the player's point of view).
In PES 5, there seems to be some progress because the CPU seldom concludes moves when he's one-on-one on goal, but there is still much to do.
Another very poor thing I want to share about is the Master League : despite the fact that game modes are by far easier to improve than the game engine, it has barely changed between PES 3 and PES 5 and is SO unrealistic.
_ I would raise again the stamina problem (see above). In Master League, it means that you almost never play with your best eleven. Even your top goalkeeper can't play four games in a row.
_ Only four leagues when we finally have all clubs from England, Spain, Germany, France, Italy and Holland plus other european teams ? Currently the game holds 138 clubs, and we use only 72 for Master League. We need at least 7 leagues, rather 8 in order to easily set up a 32-team Champions League.
_ 16-team leagues ? The obvious reason for that is to make it easy for setting up the League Cup... Why not a 20-team first league and a 12-team second league, and all those teams in the same cup, which will also make the cup more interesting.
_ Transfers : currently proposal => accept/refuse. How poor... We need to know why the offer was refused, and how to make it better. At least if for example I have to buy a CF, I would like to be able to make offers for three different CFs without risking to hire all of them. I would like to choose the one(s) I want based on the offers result. On the same level, when I am asked to sell a player, I would like to be able to make sure I have a replacement before accepting. ALSO : Why the hell do I have to pay a substantial amount more than the market price, whereas CPU teams won't even pay me half the price market, based on my experience so far ?
_ To be fair, it seems Konami has made a right move on the player progress thing. Players now make progress even if they don't play, which makes more sense (not forcing you to make your young players play all the time if you want them to progress, therefore making it barely impossible to make older players play). I do think though that players outside of your squad still don't progress, which would be REALLY poor.
And I do think, as others said here, that if we want Konami to fix flaws, we have to talk about them. It has worked, it will work again.