Leaderboard

ECL´25 Winter Elite - Voittamaton vs Tohtorit

The lower you go in ECL divisions, the harder it is to schedule games with inexperienced teams & captains. Also, players in the lower divisions play more casually because they more often than not have late nights at work, family and other things in life, meaning team management for captains is much bigger of a task. I don’t have an exact number on how many games are played according to schedule, but wouldn’t it be easier for all parties involved if the games are only allowed to be played on official division game days (Tue, Thu, Sun in Core for example) between 19 - 22 CET? I have witnessed with my own eyes a team declining default schedule and proposing 15:00 CET on a Saturday. And even if we are not talking about the most extreme cases, currently captains are basically allowed to propose anything between Sun-Thu 18:00 – 23:00 CET, no penalties for not answering in time or scheduling matchups on top of another matchup. My quality-of-life improvement: Each matchup (=two games and a start time of the 1st game) has a status of “Accepted”, “Proposal pending” or “LA case”. By default, each matchup is “Accepted” as the default date & time. Captains can set a default password & home game server for their team to be viewed by other teams’ captains. The password used for the matchup will be the first game’s home team’s password, set by the official schedule. If there’s no need to reschedule, no need to send any rally-english / google translate DM’s. You can just go ahead & play as the schedule says. If the opponent doesn’t appear in 15 minutes after the scheduled start, you can create an LA case with evidence for WO wins and call it a day. Naturally common sense should be used and if something urgent happens right before puck drop and you can’t play, you can always try and send a message to the other team, but the other team has no obligations to read or answer. If, however, games need to be rescheduled well ahead of puck drop, there is a Reschedule-button next to the matchups listed in the current Schedule-view. The Reschedule-button is greyed out if there is less than let’s say 2h until puck drop. With the Reschedule-tool, you can only select dates & times from dropdown lists that are: A) official division game dates (Tue, Thu, Sun for example) B) start time between 19:00 – 22:00 CET, ½h intervals C) you cannot select a time that overlaps with other matchups (because matchups are accepted by default) D) you cannot select a start time that another team has proposed to you or the opposing team (because the matchup status is “Proposal pending”) You can add up to 5 unique date & time proposals. Along with the proposal you can add additional information like “we can never start before 20 CET, we got kids” etc. The team receiving the proposal has 12 hours to either accept one of the proposed times or respond with a new proposal set & free text. If a new proposal set is sent, the other team only can only accept/decline it in 12 hours. If declined or not answered, the matchup status turns to “LA case” and LA will figure it out in DMs. So basically every “Reschedule” is a process that takes up to 24hrs before LA jumps in and settles the case. Benefits for… LA When an LA case is created, you get all the required information immediately Teams follow the rules, you know exactly when games will be played Captains currently the amount of effort & time captains put into this (mainly for free of course) is mind-blowing Team members players with different life situations (work, family...) can make plans days or even weeks ahead for the competitive season I know this sounds like a lot of full-stack development for SportsGamer, but we are paying a rather premium price for playing on this platform and usually there are quality-of-life improvements on such services. Yes, there are downsides too, for example if a starting lineup player can never play on a certain day of the week that happens to be a default game day or a team can never play before 20 CET, but I think having regulation would certainly outweigh the downsides (and currently those examples I gave would have to be negotiated in DMs anyway). The only reason I currently don’t want to be a captain is simply the game scheduling: gathering your own roster’s availability is already a task on its own and, on top of that, you sometimes must negotiate with people you don’t even share a common language to begin with. I also understand that if you’ve only played in Elite/Pro or never negotiated on a reschedule you must be thinking what on earth is this guy talking about, but it really gets wild down here in Neo-Lite. Teams are filled with more casual players who have late shifts at work, family, other hobbies so team management is much harder and the amount of games to be scheduled isn’t any less. So, in a nutshell, this QoL improvement wouldn’t change anything in Elite/Pro, but it would greatly save captains’ valuable time in Neo-Lite and bring some much-needed clarity on the rules of following the official schedule. Question for other casual teams with a variety of life situations among roster: How do you keep track of availability? Do you find scheduling games hard? I'd love to hear others' thoughts on this

I would pay cold, hard cash (more than I'd admit) for a similar breakdown of all the traits and abilities currently in the game.

I had a chat with the gameplay producer at EA and they gave me the following facts about truculence tuning for NHL 25: Gold Truculence provides a 25% boost to stamina drain on a shoulder check hit (NHL 24 it was 30%) Silver Truculence provides a 0% boost. (NHL 24 it was 20%) Truculence also increases the power of a Shoulder Check, which would naturally drain a bit more stamina than a non-truculent Shoulder Check. The X-Factor should only trigger on Shoulder Checks (not push checks).

Great point! And this is very important. The viewing experience is a massive part of making this community grow as well, so making the games entertaining should be one of the priorities. In my previous message I didn't really consider this, so I somewhat changed my mind now. (Though the entertainment perspective still probably doesn't warrant banning truculence) I guess the decision should be made based on both a competitive AND an entertainment perspective. Obviously "what is entertaining" differs person to person so a perfect decision doesn't exist. I guess this is what this conversation is for. A lot of great ideas here already: banning everything, mandatory different builds inside teams etc. Hopefully some kind of consensus around the topic can be found. Personally I'm happy to play the game no matter what decisions are made 😁