Kenu

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.

@MartindalexC: I have been working on a goal tracker thing (optional), where you can click where the goal was scored from. Shot tracking sounds very time consuming. The same concept can be used of course, but I doubt many would use it for shot tracking. Definitely something that can be considered adding as a super optional feature at a later time, but at this point, there are no plans to have it available during the first tournament.

As always, I appreciate your opinion and I understand where you're coming from. I can understand that not everyone is willing to share their real name and we will not force them. I would like to see people at least use names that appear like legitimate names and hopefully we can find a way not to have people use the same names. Our database will keep track of name changes on a league basis, so even if you play in three tournaments with three different names, it will all link back to the same user and is traceable for anyone viewing your profile. You will not be able to change your name during a league (unless you have a typo or something). In the end, when listing stats and what not, we're always referring to a user ID, so if we were to decide to change our mind or display Name + gamertag, that's totally doable. The site will see many changes during it's development, some will be good, some will perhaps be a step in the wrong direction and the community will have to help us by providing the feedback on what is loved and what is not. :)

I couldn't disagree more Billy. In my opinion using full names makes things more authentic and a simulation of real life. That's why I play - cause I failed at real life.

I've only played 3 games that weren't even 6vs6 since I did that. My connection was quite good for those games, but it's impossible to say at this point if that was just luck or if I've fixed the problem at my end.

I'm glad you like it. I'm sure a lot of people might complain if you cross a certain line, but I hope we can find a balance between awesome and fast. :)

I don't think that's up to you to decide @Billy44205, but of course these are things that are up for discussion. We will tell you more about the stats side soon. I am hoping people would be fine with recording the penalty times for the penalty their team takes. While it might feel useless, it opens up a whole new world of analysis. What if we could tell you when your team takes the most penalties, how your penalty kill is working and if there's a certain time-frame when things are going worse than others? We're not quite there yet with the analysis part, but by collecting the relevant data, we are able to do a bunch of cool stats in the future. Of course analysis is not everyone's cup of tea and we are building the features so that we can choose what fields are must fill and what fields are optional. I'm hoping the penalty times is not something people are against reporting, but as I mentioned, it will of course be taken into consideration.

Thanks! Samuli spends more time in the box than he does on the ice.

Hey NHL Gamers, As we near the release of the actual league side of our website, it's time to raise the curtain a bit regarding what the site looks like. I have attached some screenshots below, where you can see a little sneak peak of things to come. Please keep in mind that the images do not represent the final product and changes will be made before release and we will continue to develop it after release as well. It's also good to note that just because something isn't visible in the screenshots, doesn't mean it isn't a feature. Please feel free to come with questions and comments and we'll answer your questions as best as we can. Until next time, Kenneth