Here are my personal thoughts and wishes on the future of NHLGamer and ECL. It's more like bunch of notes than wall of text, but anyways here it is.
ECL Wishlist
1. Get comments back to game reports. I know it's not that big deal but I'd say that our community would like to have it back.
2. Using whole time period of NHL-game, like the other competetive sites do with their leagues and games. Yeah, it might sound too much now but after all it would be best for the community to play this game a lot, and hey, after all there would be only two leagues per year, with two shorter Cups.
--> 2x Elite ECL leagues per year (+ divisions)
--> 1x Euro Cup, big tournament with every team who wants to play > as much as possible groups, about 6 teams per group which would keep the Cup short. Just like Football and Hockey has their short tournaments before/during/after their real seasons.
--> 1x Summer Cup in July-August, snake draft teams etc.
3. Bigger Staff. To make this whole thing really work, NHLGamer needs to have strong and active Staff. I'm not saying there should be over 20 guys deciding what to do or anything but more people, with different tasks and responsibilities would definitely be better than handful of guys. And after this, create new topic or site where is every Staff member, their introductions, what their main tasks are and how to contact them. Community needs to know about our Staff.
--> site-admins: big bosses, all-arounders
--> moderators: league maintenance, news, articles, interviews
--> country captains: this is something new I've had in my mind for some weeks now and the meaning of this would be basically to have certain guys representing their countries team captains. For an example, one finnish, one swedish, one russian and one "european" person, and their only task would be to keep things clear between our captains and Staff. If this sounds stupid, then get bigger group of moderators who have their own responsibilites (certain guys taking care of certain groups/countries). -->team captains: I guess everybody knows what this means. But I just wanna say if someone really wants to be captain of their team, and gets his team to the ECL for example: respect the rules, staff and your opponents.
4. Profile-info in the forum, which people would see when we write here. Just a little subtile add to forum, not much. Example:
vSilenttio
Advanced Member +148
Team: SIKA
PSN ID: vSilenttio
Gamertag: Silenttio
Twitch: vSilenttio
Posts: 58
5. Bring us wild cards! For an example, if there's 30 teams in ECL, 15 per group, lets have wild card spots. Six best teams go straight to the playoffs, 7th-10th teams battle for remaining two playoff-spots. Teams that dont make playoffs (11-15th placed teams in both groups), would battle in elimination round for their next seasons ECL ticket. Five losers from these five pairs get eliminated.
Hope here's something what you guys could even consider to do in the future of NHLGamer.