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Haven't played it too much yet but here are my first thoughts: - Human goalies' movement has slightly got improved, moving towards the shots and rebound control gave me more realistic feeling. - Stick blocking is almost impossible, which is a good thing, this will lead in changes in dman builds or even play style. - Shots have been boosted, which is in my opinion fine but also goalies should get some kind of boost, not sure yet where but perhaps hockey iq (or movement?) which could in my opinion be boosted for skaters as well to see more beautiful goals. - Servers were trash, which is probably not gonna be a problem when the game gets published, but if it is then I wouldn't be surprised if half of the players quit.

I had "only" one evening of experience so far which where around 6-7 games. Most of them came to 6vs6 play and two 3vs3 games. - Goalies seem to be pretty hot trash. While AI goalies can only save cross creases and high percentage shots, you can score on pretty much other shot. Human goalies also struggle to save some "easy" shots and received a lot of goals during scrambles or better to say when they can't make the initial stop. - hitting/bumping is completely unnecessary or useless. I know that those endless bumps favoured the defense but in the test it felt for me that you can't even bump anymore, it didn't trigger any animation in most of the cases and when it occasionally happened it didn't had any effect. Furthermore you either were able to hit the opponent right in the face or not even at all. If you weren't spot on on the hit, like completely centred, I flew right by the opponent without any impact. Felt also the way that I basically was animated around the opponent. This was for PMD and with a "heavier" TWD. Heard that from someone with a 95kg DD as well. - skating as an offensive player is fun and I like that if you have a decent speed advantage with the puck you can keep it and don't get penalised just for skating straight forward with the puck. So you keep your advantage, that makes sense to me. Skating as a defender especially in backchecking situations is extremely awful. F.e. the basic situation where you cover the middle of the ice and the forward wants to skate near the boards to get the entry over the side, you can't defend that beside camping basically already near your own zone or hustling straight backwards towards the net and hope for the best. Normally you skate a little bit across to the boards but you loose so much speed while doing it. This needs to be fixed, otherwise RIP defenders - stick lifting feels ok/good, quite the same to NHL 22, idk if they changed anything there but IMO there is no immediate need. - still unsure how to judge the poke checking. I like that that you can't spam it anymore, which was just brutal. Personally I had the feeling that it was up and down all evening, like sometimes it was pretty accurate with the timing and the effect it caused, and sometimes I poked three times perfectly but it didn't had any effect on the opponent. He still kept the puck (unstoppable force on gold). That non effect occured with other builds on the opponent side as well though. - still unsure how to judge the speed penalty for holding the defensive skill stick. I get why they changed it and it was abused a lot of times, f.e. blocking, but yesterday it felt like you can't use it at all. You basically stop while doing it. So it's effectively you can poke one time or never. My guess is they can't prevent the blocks so they made the penalty for using the defensive skill that high, which should make it pretty much non existent. If you have to penalise that, then probably not that much IMO. - occasionally a flickering effect occurring on the center ice line. - no server selection --> big L - we didn't play a private game, but I guess it is highly unlikely that you can connect the SG stats to the ingame stats for the team leaderboards which pops up after goals. While this is cool for normal EASHL games, I guess it could be annoying for private games as they don't count towards the statistic so it will probably pop up multiple times with the same stats in private games which is useless. Like the goal celebrations for a certain amount in the last game. - are those new OT celebration cinematics randomized, I thought MAYBE you can set them also up in the club settings which was obviously not the case. Never played an OT game though so far. - passing felt quite smooth so far. I like that you had better aim and strength to some "drop" passes.