Kenu

I'm liking the approach as well. Do we want to categorise the teams in the top 20, or just say that #1 is equal to #20, meaning, we can randomise the 20 evenly into the 4 groups.

Because the votes started when ConsoleHockey was still around and some people were considering playing in both leagues. The votes are now 69 for 2 days a week and 63 for 3 days a week. I know at least 3 people who have told me that they want to change their vote from 2 -> 3, after finding out that ConsoleHockey won't be running a tournament. This means the votes are at least 66-66. (Please note that I have recently added the option to change your vote, but this thread is old and people haven't found the option yet.) This is up for discussion, it is only our suggestion.

We are suggesting 3 game-days per week, unless the community is strongly against it.

Hence I did asked for the findings to be referenced and explained. Also, I asked to do this publicly, so it can be openly criticised. Very happy with the activity here guys - great work! Please keep the discussion going and comment on the different lists that the guys have put great efforts into making!

@gzell60: To be honest, I don't care as long as people are happy. I would be happy to randomize all, but if we have a fair way to say which teams should be seeded separately, I'm happy to do so. What ever sort of TOP-list someone would like to compile for this purpose - I'm happy to look at!

Would anyone be interested in compiling a list of the TOP 20 teams that should be seeded evenly, in order to minimize the risk of "groups of death"? Please do so publicly, for example by writing your findings in this thread with references to why you chose this order. Thank you! Kenneth

Yes, this might be the best idea. 1/3 of the teams would be seeded based on leaderboards and rest would be randomized. Any thoughts from others on whether it should be all-time or monthly leaderboards?

Hmm.. guest posts should be disabled. Interesting. Anyways, I guess partial seeding could be done. Not all teams have played enough games (especially 6vs6) to be able to be measured. But sure, we could consider putting the known top-teams in different groups. Keep the suggestions coming.

I posted a reply to the other blog as I missed a couple earlier comments. Apparently that moved the other blog to #1 position, so this is a bump for this one, so it appears on the front page of the community. Below is also the comment by @VilberttoCarlos and my reply to it, as I assume most people would miss it otherwise: Hey @VilberttoCarlos, Sorry I didn't notice your comment earlier! We won't have an upload option, as you can upload to YouTube, but we will have the option to submit your YouTube-video ID, which allows us to embed your video to our website. Shoutbox... yes! I was going to say that we already have that, but it's true it's only in the community side at this stage. We'll see how we can implement it. I would prefer to have the same shoutbox everywhere. If we are doing a live stream, then we can embed the Twitch chat. Thanks to @Enkmanni for chiming in with his opinion too!

Hey @VilberttoCarlos, Sorry I didn't notice your comment earlier! We won't have an upload option, as you can upload to YouTube, but we will have the option to submit your YouTube-video ID, which allows us to embed your video to our website. Shoutbox... yes! I was going to say that we already have that, but it's true it's only in the community side at this stage. We'll see how we can implement it. I would prefer to have the same shoutbox everywhere. If we are doing a live stream, then we can embed the Twitch chat. Thanks to @Enkmanni for chiming in with his opinion too!

Thanks for your comments all. We will do our best to start earlier. @gzell60: I would prefer to do it with a random generator, while I do understand the dramatic "names drawn from a hat" aspect. With a random generator it's truly random and I can try to make some functionality so we can still do a live stream or something while we do it and announce the teams in group name by name. Of course there might be people yelling "rigged" then, but to be honest, I wouldn't even know how to rig it, as I don't know most of the teams. I definitely see the drama aspect of it and would like to have some tension and anticipation instead of just a list that we spit out.

I agree, if all teams are on their toes despite this little silent period in between.

If you voted that the 14th is too late, can you please write in the comments what date you would prefer and how long of a time do you think we should give the teams to get accustomed with the site and adding their roster? How are you finding the blog posts btw - are they easy to find, or is it hard to notice when there is a new post? Edit: I can see that the screenshots look pretty low quality. I literally used MS Paint to crop and save them, as I wasn't on my own computer. That may be the reason.

Hi everyone, First of all, I want to apologize for the lack of communication on our side regarding the progress of the website and the league format. I have been extremely busy in my personal life and that has impacted my ability to spend as much time with the website as much as I would have liked to. Samuli (@Lurkins) has been very busy as well and as a result we were unable to open up the website for your testing as quickly as we wanted to. I hope you can forgive us for this and continue to believe in us and NHL Gamer as much as we do. Moving on to updating you on our progress: Let's start with some great news: Samuli was able to locate our the problem we were having with the login functionality on our tournament website for a long time and getting that up and running has relieved us our biggest concerns and it allows us to move on to polishing the other aspects of the website. Let's get some key information out there. We will discuss this further during the coming days, in order to keep this post brief. We have decided to start the league with 60 teams, divided into 4 groups. Since this is the first league, we suggest that the teams in the groups are simply randomized. Each group will have 15 teams and every team inside a group plays each other twice (once at home, once away). 8 out of 15 teams in each group go to the playoffs, totaling 32 playoff teams. Playoffs will be best-of-seven. The teams that are left out of the regular playoffs would play another type of playoffs for positions in the 2nd season. We can get into this more in a future blog post, but I have been in touch with @Billy44205 about his division concept and I personally think this is an interesting concept that is worth looking at. Unfortunately I don't have my notes with me at this time, so I will have to touch on the details in the next blog post. As all who read Billy's post about his vision, you know that it's a bit of information to chew. In order for us to make sure that everyone finds the new site satisfying from the get-go, we have decided to open the site next week, on Friday the 4th of December. We want to give the teams roughly a week to get accustomed to the new site and enough time to add all of their team members. Thus we suggest that the league starts on the 14th of December. If the majority of teams feel like this is too late, we can agree to give teams less time to prepare their roster and look for an earlier date to get things going. Please let us know in the poll and comments section how you feel about our suggested time-frame and ask any other questions that you might want answered. On behalf of the NHL Gamer staff, Kenneth

Appreciate the feedback. I do admit (as discussed from the get-go) that the website status is pushing back the start of the league, but at the same time I honestly do think that the league would benefit from it, if EA fixed their issues. If it was a two week wait, then sure. If not, I guess we have to move on and hope that the fix arrives somewhere along the line. The poll was made to get an overview of the urgency inside the community to determine whether there was patience or not to wait for a couple weeks. Since about half of the voters felt like there's no need to rush into things, we continued on our design path instead of throwing something quick together as a quick fix. This will benefit us in the future. I absolutely hate to keep the community waiting and I'd love nothing more than to get to start the league. With lag, as it seems to be looking like. Regarding your comment about how the site has been in my mind for at least a year and you're still waiting: The website has been in my mind since 2009, but unfortunately it takes a lot of work to make it a reality. If this was a business, I might fire myself, but since we're investing our money and time into bringing people a platform they'll (hopefully) be happy with, I hope you guys have the patience to wait just a little bit. And I don't blame you for being impatient; I would be too - especially with the lack of quality communication from our side. With all of the above said: We will update you further on Wednesday.

Excellent write-up @MartindalexC and I agree 100% with your concerns. When originally bringing up the issue I was a bit more hopeful of EA coming up with a solution quickly. Now that we've got some more facts, it seems that it will take more time than anticipated. At this point, like @MovaaN said above, we're not simply sitting on our hands waiting for EA to fix the game. @Lurkins and I are working on the finishing touches necessary before "letting people in". We ran into a bug with signing in that is just as annoying as it sounds. We have a temporary fix for that in our mind, in case the planned sign-in won't work from the get go. I apologise for the poor communication on our part. I've been overwhelmingly busy in the past weeks and it saddens me that it has taken its toll on the web development side. Unfortunately, I have had to prioritise work. I have now taken three days off work in order to write an essay and work on the website. This is why I've said that you can expect an update by the end of Wednesday.

Hi Everyone, Due to popular requests, I have made some changes to the forum settings. The most interesting once for regular users are: - You can now change your mind about your vote on a poll. - You can now delete your own content. - Added a flood check, so you don't accidentally double-post (applies for both creating topics and replying to topics). Time should be short enough not to stop anyone from actually posting content. Any other requests, let me know. Also let me know if these changes somehow make your experience worse.

Glad to hear @selänne8 & @cHIIMEERa! We intend to embed streams automatically in the future to maximise visibility of your streams!

Yes.

Well said Billy. This is why I think it's a win-win situation to postpone. Of course half of it is our own fault.

Good arguments @gzell60. I would like to underline that we are not suggesting waiting for months, but rather 2-3 weeks to see if there is any further communication.

As you are probably aware - if you've been playing EASHL this year - there are some major issues in the EASHL this year, causing at least the home team captain to suffer from an enormous amount of lag. This may also apply to other players. Due to this, the game is often unplayable for at least part of the players on the ice. We here at NHL Gamer think that it would be a good idea to postpone the start of the ECL with a couple weeks, to see if there is any progress with this issue. This will also give us an extra bit of time to test the website some more and give you, the community, time to get familiar with the site and build your roster. Please note that the outcome of the poll is not the final word on this issue, but rather we are looking for some data on how the opinions about this issue are split. Below is EA's statement on their forums: Source: http://forum.ea.com/eaforum/posts/list/10370055.page Please feel free to discuss things more in this thread. On behalf of the NHL Gamer staff, Kenneth

We've been discussing this, actually, but haven't had the time to look into it more than some initial tests. If anyone can suggest some good software for this, I'm all ears.