Hello everyone,
I just came back from a late dinner after spending around 5 hours on Twitch with all of you. First of all I want to thank all of you who decided to tune in - we had around 140 viewers at one point, more than we have followers on our channel. People even accused us of viewbotting (a term that describes faking the number of views on your channel to make it seem like you are a famous streamer) multiple times, which made it quite clear that our community is really going strong, and that we as a whole are on to something pretty great.
If you want to see all of it again, you can view the archived version of the stream here: https://secure.twitch.tv/nhlgamertwitch/v/77259439
When we started the Draft ECL / Summer Cup project 4 weeks ago (that's when I opened up the initial thread in our staff forum), I was not entirely convinced about this format. History taught us that summer time is usually a devastating time to play NHL, as the community slowly parts from the current edition and eagerly awaits a new iteration in September. I had a feeling though that this kind of tournament is exactly the kind of thing that works best during this time - giving you the ability to join the community, get to know new people and just have fun outside of the usual environment we are caught in for the first ~6 months with every new NHL game.
After we opened up registrations on June 19th, the feedback was overwhelming. I expected no more than 50-60 registrations, but you actually doubled that number. A big shoutout to all of you pioneers out there, who decided to join us on this journey towards this completely new format within the European NHL community! I am also convinced that this will not be the last time we will pull off this kind of tournament, and I fully believe we can increase the number of registrations once again.
Fast forward to when registrations were locked: The hardest part now was to set up the whole draft procedure. This is the point where I want to thank all of our captains, I think we could not have chosen them any better. All of them were very active after we initially contacted them, making it very easy to find a time where all of them would be able to participate. Just imagine if one or two decided to just not show up on draft day? Yikes, this could have endangered the tournament as a whole, due to the remaining time we have until NHL 17.
On Friday, @Kenu and @Lurkins met each other somewhere in southern Finland and built the whole draft tool which you saw in action today. Even though there were a few hiccups during the stream, I really think they made it a pleasure for everyone: An easy-to-use website to make your picks, and a real-time site for everyone else to follow the action closely. And while I think that @Kenu and me are certainly not the most experienced streamers on this planet (yet), I hope we were able to entertain you during the 4-5 hours we spent together.
Our newest staff member @The_Alpha_Furyan will go into detail about today's 1st round picks tomorrow, so definitely check out his news then!
For now I want to leave you with the final team rosters (schedule etc. will follow tomorrow), and say one last thank you to every single member of this awesome community. It really is a pleasure to keep on building this whole project with all of you, I enjoy every single minute of it.
Now please share your thoughts on today's draft in the comments below, especially:
Do you want to have official streams more frequently?
How did we perform on the moderation side?
How did we perform on the technical side (stream setup/design etc.)?
Please tell us, we are curious!
- gzell60
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