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Hello gamers! I've been wondering this whole summer thing here and there sometimes, since we had some very tight hockey played on NHL14's offseason mostly between HC Sika and OODAP's Summer Inc, months before NHL15 was released. This also happened on NHL13's offseason but in smaller scale (less players to take part). Could there be official cup/league gaming played during official hockey offseason? How easy it would be to make it work, by this I mean amount of admins etc. needed. Would people be interested? How many teams there would/should be? Obviously summer is great time to get some fresh air from whole hockey genre (watching/playing/living it). But I love playing NHL, plus I was in the military service from 2015's July till March 16th so yeah, personally I have missed alot compared to you guys! But surely this is topic to talk about, right? Lots of questionmarks tells pretty much about the whole summergaming, that could it work etc. About the whole Cup, amount of games and so on, I'm just going to throw something here what could be talked about... How interested NHLGamer's staff see this whole Summer gaming? Any interest at all from the management? Secondly, how many NHLGamer's moderators it could need. Obviously you can always have new assistants for this, but still. Which would be better; longer basic kind of league (regular season + playoffs) or Cup format (play through brackets, step by step)? Make sure that ESC (or ESL) is totally different thing than original ECL, but still have something to motivate players. Dont know how to say this better than this but hey; it's not shame to win official league even though it would be just summer gaming and there wouldn't be that many teams to take part. Pace. How many games per week? 2-3, or just "get these 10 games played in next 3 weeks, and then we'll have playoffs", for example. Perhaps most important thing; is our community interested to play some hockey during summer against friendly, well-known teams/players? I know that time to talk about this is not perhaps the most great one, but atleast I got it out from my mind so community can discuss about it. Sorry if there's some mistakes, I'm trying! Have a great spring and even better ECL!

So here's my take on this Summer Cup thing. I think teams are not active in Summer because a few guys are away and even if like half the team is still willing to play it's not enough to play 6's. I also think Summer Inc was a great thing which allowed my clubless ass to play with Oodap, Supremski, Terasniska etc. Basically I really enjoyed playing with new people (especially the excellent ones) even if games meant nothing. Lastly, I know it's Summer and no one wants a tight schedule in Summer damnit! With all that in mind I came up with this concept: - I need a small-ish amount of team captains, like maybe 4 or 8 individuals. So that would make for rather big teams. Maybe those guys are tournament admins. - Instead of teams, individuals sign up for the Summer Cup. - Teams are devised by snake draft, to add a dimension of mixing teams up. - Every team makes the playoffs. The goal of this tournament being less about competing and more about killing time and fun, I think it's ok. This is very much a work in progress and I have not addressed any of the boring techincal rules shit, but you get the gist of it. It's something fresh, not too bothersome, admittedly not so competitive but... I dunno. But you're on to something Sile, I think.

I like the idea proposed here and we've tossed around the idea of a Summer Cup of some sort before. Like @gzell60 said, our understanding is that people don't want anything too serious in the summer at least, so we didn't have anything planned. Depending on player interest it could definitely be done. I agree with the concept that it needs to be more relaxed than your average tournament and due to the summer it could indeed be a good idea to mix things up with different rosters than during the regular ECL. Keep voicing your ideas and thoughts and we'll see what you guys think.

If it is still up for discussion with divisons i think it would be awesome to instead have a league system that is almost identical too the real NHL, same amount off teams, team names,, divisons and conferences as identical. If not 82 games(if that would be too much) then 41. Team names is Anaheim, Arizona and so on. Teams that finnish as the last 4 for example in regular season will be degraded too AHL(?) and top 4 from AHL will take their place next season. As Billy would say, You have none honour as mutes, so What say you?

Absolutely have thought about it and will do that in the future, but I hate to disappoint people, so I'd rather work out an internal time-line before going public about the plans. 1vs1 and 2vs2 are definitely in the works and should technically be easier to pull off than the 6vs6 stuff. We love the 6vs6 community and the passion we all share for the EASHL and gaming as teams, so we want to make sure we get that working smoothly before moving on to the "smaller" stuff. The 6vs6 stuff is working quite well at the moment, but as you may have noticed, there are still some bugs to fix here and there. We had to cut some corners in order to get the first tournament running on time and some of the functionality wasn't created with more than one season in mind. This is why you might notice some weird stuff going on in some parts of the website. We are working through these kinks and once we get those polished, we are confident that starting a third season - whenever that is - should be much smoother of a ride. Very happy about the bug reports we've received, as we've been able to squish quite a few bugs before the became a problem for more users.

Well it's good to see atleast that we have some interest on the topic! I'm pretty sure that whole Summer Cup as an new idea could be too early for this summer but in the future having certain moderators, rules and pre-registered summer players/teams ready in lets say, uh May, this could work. Right? Good idea from Billy, about mixing teams up. Throw every player's name into lottery and lets see what happens! Would be more interesting than having same teams or certain groups playing together, but I'll go both ways in this one. Also I'm with Heksa in that part where ESC should kept easy as possible, just like summer is! You dont want to cause stress with tight schedule or have pain in the ass about who's gonna make it and when etc. Btw, Skype groups should be a must in this one, to keep more "random" groups together. And like you guys said, ESC would be great opportunity to get experience with new people and even better players. Billy wrote well about Summer Inc and I'm with you on that, gave me atleast good experience even though there wasnt anything serious on the line except our names... Maybe I'm too late with this when you think about upcoming summer, but having whole next year, building something new and fresh for this community, could be worth it if we get right and interested people working on it. Nice to hear something from Staff too, even though I changed couple words with Janbo before I started this topic here as he said just go ahead and write about it and so I did. I'm going to add poll later about this that could we have bigger interest on this from whole community, hope so people just gives their voices on it. Also I'm going to write about it's regular season and playoffs, but now I dont have enough time for that. Later and keep them words coming if there's something left!

Hello there! I'm completly new in this Area My Name is Raphael i'm 23 years old. Born in Kuusankoski (FIN) grown up in Germany. This is my first NHL Game for the "Next Gen" Consoles and i'm looking forward to this new type of Leagues. Happy to be a Part of Inter Iceland as Goalie. Thats it so far for now Kippis

Only if you make it so, but you don't have to. Have you not read my previous wall of text about division systems? Anyway, a system that forces new teams into bottom division is gonna have people complaining before it has people sticking together despite not wanting to play together anymore. I think it's stupid to put team longevity ahead of player enjoyment.

So basically you have division 1, where the top 16 fight for the cup and the bottom 8 fight to avoid relegation. The bottom 8 play against each other to decide who's going down. In the 2nd division, the top 8 teams fight for promotion. What if we connect these "relegation playoffs" with each other, so #23 from division 1 plays against #8 from division 2 (and so on... #30 from division 1 against #1 from division 2)? I imagine this to be quite exciting too. We are watching

Okay, thanks @Kenu! As you can see, I added poll so we can see the numbers.

I dont know how to do this better than this, so here it goes. Here's regular players thoughts: Max. two different levels of playing. Elite division and then rest - thats it As long as we (teams and players) dont get paid from playing this game overall + ECL, this wont work. People with not that much time to play, cant be as good as those ones are who play alot and I mean, alot! PS4 has now like ~50 teams and yeah, it could be split into divisions but hell no for three different levels. It would definitely break the community somehow, as there would be "those elite guys" and then basic boys and rest who dont have enough time/skill/interest-combo in their hands. I'd rather have healthy and competitive community than just competitive community. Personally I dont see people sticking into their teams just because of this. Yeah, there's some teams who have been there for years with same name and same core (more on Xbox, less on PS?) but its like 15-25% of teams. Working division system would need serious jump from 20% to 80%, for example. And then these "new" teams start from the championship just like the real new teams, if they want to split up for some reason. Offtopic: I dont get this team hopping thing. I've played now like 5-6 years and so far I've been in two teams (when you dont count the "lock-out season during NHL15). ELITE: 30 teams -> 16 playoff-teams. I dont know how it could work, just an idea that jumped in my head right now; bottom-8 teams fights playout games and four teams that lose their playout round (best of 5 or 7), goes to Championship level and then four best teams rise from Championship. I like the playout idea, because that would bring the same danger from dropping out to 22th/30 team that what it brings to 28th/30 team for example. 22th battles 30th team in a playout series and by winning that series, you secure your team in Elite. Thoughts or just too difficult/strange to make it happen? Sorry if it's hard to understand my points.

Is that some kind a joke ? Real nhl team names ? Seriously ? I like division idea as well then there would be tight games more often than now, but still i think these division might split this community to half, then there is pro clubs and bad ones. I hope u dont do that mistake, we all are here to play together this tournament. And would you really like go to lower division ? Idk what u guys think but i want to play agaisnt best ones and beat them. So i hope you guys keep this simple, like 40 teams and then games on. Im sure that if we drop team number there will be tighter games, this system will offer more skill hockey and more hard games

Teams would split up less than before because they need to start in the lowest division again, if they do.

It's always a bit hard to get people to play during the summer time, but no doubt that some organised cup/tournament would gather more players to play. With a huge community like this, it shouldn't be a hard task to do. The key is to keep it as simple as possible. For example like Silenttio wrote, to get X amount of games to be played in few weeks - every one of us have a lot of things going on during summer, but this way it would be in players own hands how to schedule the games. Also a bit easier to take part of the cup/tournament knowing that you don't have to play on particular day, and it would also be easier for staff to organize. I prefer "summer cup" is kept far away from the original ECL - this way there could be more like mixed teams playing just for fun during summer. There wouldn't need to be anything same, except the players. Would there need to be anything else about the games than just the scores? Not sure how people would feel like not marking their personal points as there might be some who wants to take this more seriously than I am. Just making some new contacts for the upcoming leagues and have an option to play hockey instead of football. This seems to be my way to wrote a simple answers as a long and unclear essay.