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Looks like there's some interest for an F1 2016 league! Drop a message here or in private if you'd be initially interested to join. No assists and 25% races - the only house rule is you have to have fun! I thought I'll be answering some questions publicly in this thread, as some of them are themes that appear often. First up is camera angles and FOV i.e. Field of View, which is probably the most overlooked aspect by simracers and even game developers, until recently. A game can never have 'correct' FOV settings by default, because the correct FOV always depends on the user's setup - the size of the monitor(s) and the distance to it from one's eyes. FOV literally means what you can see on your screen and depending on the game it can be adjusted horizontally and vertically. Here's two screenshots illustrating what FOV means: FOV 35 degrees FOV 100 degrees As is quite evident in these screenshots from rFactor, FOV makes a big difference to the driving experience. People have a natural inclination to use way too large FOV settings, because it allows them to increase their spatial awareness; it can be intimidating to drive at 300km/h inches away from other cars when you can't see them. There is a significant problem, however. A large FOV setting causes a fish-eye effect, distorting the image horizontally and/or vertically. So, while one may see the apex better, the problem is that the visual cues are that of a warped matrix, making it all too easy to miss that apex nevertheless. The human brain is tremendous in its capability to adapt and it will do so to any camera settings really with enough practice. It should be well worth considering if you want to pick up bad habits though. If you 'master' a racing sim using incorrect FOV settings, you will most likely see a hard time transitioning to another sim with different camera settings. An illustration of different FOV settings in one picture In the picture above you see several rectangles marking different FOV settings. Notice how evident the warping is on the 125 settings; the mirrors are hugely out of proportion, and the same effect applies to all corners on the race track of course. The optimal settings depend on the size of your monitor and your distance to it, but most likely from the options in this particular image the FOV setting of 55 is closest to optimal, but it may be still too large. With a 24' monitor and a FOV of 55, one would need to place the screen 23' or 58.5 centimeters away from one's eyes. Some games only have sliders and no exact degrees to adjust, especially on consoles. You'll just need to figure out the approximately right placement with a few simple calculations. I'll leave some links for further reference. Sim Racing 101 : Field of View - Seeing is Believing (Ep7) Screen size and FOV comparison A great guide with integrated FOV-calculators Did I make any sense? Oh, and all of this of course applies to a variety of games, but it's not even remotely as important in other games as it is in racing sims. In FPS games for example, you might be just happy to put it at 90 and enjoy your wide vision and spatial awareness; some warping at the edges isn't as bad when all the aiming happens in the middle of the screen.

Dynasty is looking for an ELITE forward, preferably LW.

I appreciate your comments and feedback. Discussion is always required to make improvements to any community. The old NHLGamer server will work out even better as it most likely has more members as a basis, I just did not know about it and did find a link, nor did I find any discussion about it in the forums (tried the search function for word discord). That is why this thread exists. What I am trying to be vocal here about is that as a newcomer to the revamped NHLGamer site and being experienced in other competitive gaming communities how things could be improved. This is not because of ego or trying to get a position of foothold in it. This is merely for the good for all. I just wanted to clear this out. I think you are getting me wrong. Discord would not be rivaling the forums, for they can feed off from eachother. If to begin with not everyone uses this site then how will it be fragmenting things more. To be honest the forums don't look very active at all for the player base it has minus for the chatbox and I think there is a reason behind it. Forums are getting outdated slowly and younger generations require more interactivity. That's why it's a step forward I think. So if anything a positive success on creating a good service of such kind would enhance the sensation of community. If there is no web page / forums, there cannot be any links to the chat service either, they are both required. At best a more interactive service would replace majority of the stuff from forums though. Obviously I am not in a position to make any decisions, but I am in a position to raise discussion and give insights as well as is everyone else. Those separate channels are very common for any other competitive gaming scenes and they work out well because of the large user base they have, actually they are required to keep things under control. Danger here is that things stay so scattered that things just fall a part little by little. Hop in or stay scattered, sounds harsh but that is my two cents as things do look quite scattered now. There is nothing personal here and I hope no one takes it so, just stuff for positive constructive feedback. [edit] ps. I just checked the server out and it's with the name PS4 for it, I would not separate the servers between Xbox/PS but rather create roles for PS/Xbox players accordingly. I also cannot write anything there currently. Roles for admins, team captains etc. When captains have their own roles they are easy to be approached and you see who is online etc. for arranging games etc. pps. Perhaps there is the reason why that server did not kick off last time as even I could not find anything with the search word discord for info of that, if people did not know about it or could not find there on their own?

In that case then I may as well post the old one, wasn't sure if the admins were cool with a non-expiring link being publicly available, anyways here it is: https://discord.gg/ZUMrB3s [Updated] Most of the teams that have played in elite/pro/lite are already available as roles for members to quickly spot who is a part of which team (think Gzell did the tedious work for it originally, although my memory could fail me on that). The points you raise @Depch were the ones I originally brought up however I don't think you have considered the fact that not everyone actually uses this site (aside from coming on to make their player card and such), as well as the fact that it's probably not in our best interest to fragment where people come and go as this can ruin the 'sense of community' I suppose. Therefore I don't think people will use discord as a straight replacement (something it seems you are trying to achieve by copying across some forum sub-divisions).

A lot of the online competitive scenes have their own chat service somewhere. In the past this was done via different IRC servers and to have a channel there used to be pretty common, but many gaming communities have moved away from IRC to new services like Discord etc. I am not to promote Discord solely here, but I can only speak of it as an example as I have experience of it from the past few months. Overwatch & Rocket league and have their members at Discord at least and the rocket league server for example has over 4000 online members at the moment. This seems to be the new direction, IRC is dying out and new services taking that place. It might be good to make a jump to a such a service where a lot of the gaming communities already exists. This makes the jump for new players easier to get in to. I know there are many similar services like Curse etc. but have no clue which one is the most popular, but I know Overwatch competitive scene & Rocket league use discord. We made a jump from AIM to Discord just recently with our tiny NHL94 community (Yes, lael AIM. :)). I tried to look for one in the nhlgamer forums but could not find any centralized chat for it, maybe I just missed it? Or perhaps one could be impelemented if there is enough interest. The Overwatch Finnish community in Discord has several sub channels created to that server of their own. You can have a core channel for general chat, then something for like league chat, a chat for looking for games, chat looking for players/promoting yourself/if you're able to sub etc etc. Everyone joining that server can see all those channels so it's like having your own IRC server where you see all the channels. Teams can create their own servers to Discord as well and to have a publi chat and private ones for the members only. Discord also comes up with a VoIP, but I know the Overwatch players tend to use something different like Mumble for VoIP as it's much lighter. The con is that Discord is quite heavy to use. I'll import a picture from Discord Rocket league server as an example here below. If something like this already exists I just missed out on it from the forums and if not perhaps it could be of an open discussion. I have reserved the server NHLGamer in Discord for the admins and will release it for Kenu or Lurkins if something should come out of it. Of course there are other services as well that might be better, but I know a lot of competitive gamers already use Discord. In summary it's good for text based chat and something that that's taken IRC over for gaming sevices, but I would not use the VoIP in this service. Even bots can be used in the service. Open for discussion. You can use it by web browser or download apps to desktop/laptop/mobile.

I have a server that I reserved with the NHLGamer name for Kenu or any other of the admins. Any NHLGamer admin joins and I'll toss them the admins for the server. If people like the chatbox and it works well enough then a discord does not have to be official, but it can work for people who use discord already to talk about the games / ECL etc. If a critical mass should take over at one point then it can work out well for arranging games, freeagency etc. Below is a pic of the current channels I have created for it as a reserve. And below is the invite link for the server that I set as never to expire. https://discord.gg/cTu4YqP

Yeah? You know what, here's a message for Charlie. Fuck off, honestly, fuck off! Also rip the legendary F1 2016 league. ;_;

Legendary team Victorious Secret HC are looking for players! What we can offer ? This team gonna be "summer team" so if you are looking new ECL teams skip this nonsense. We try play 6v6 everyday even when holiday begins. So basicly we just play normal games. Team is already on 1div so no need to play cpu games. We need Center and D who can play LD or RD. Contact me here or PSN: KingOfApes_