esdor

Hey NHLGamers, Earlier this week EA SPORTS hosted a NHL 19 pre-launch event in Stockholm where invited guests got the opportunity to play the game before the upcoming release. This time it was me being lucky to attend at the event during the NHL 19 Producers Tour. Other NHLGamers attending were @The_Alpha_Furyan, @Darkic01 and @PillenUpp. I got the chance to interview the lead producer of the NHL Franchise, Sean Ramjagsingh. First off, I took the time to tell him that me and many others enjoyed the NHL 19 Beta a lot. I gave them credit for the skating in the game and for making the bots less overpowered. "Yeah, I agree. The bot stuff is mostly based on feedback from our fans. We started to change the behaviour of the bots when people played super conservative letting the bots do all the work. So we knew we had to make them more balanced", Ramjagsingh responded to NHLGamer.com at the NHL 19 event in Stockholm. Continue reading for the entire interview! Esdor: "How are EA going to promote NHL as an esport in the future?" Ramjagsingh: "We are still relatively new in the world of competitive gaming. We are pushing forward with Madden and FIFA right now but we took our first step this year with the World Gaming Championship. The NHL was in charge of that. This first tournament was mainly about testing and learning for us about how to host a big event. We got great feedback from the players participating. We got a feeling for the appetite of competitive gaming within the NHL Community. We were able to launch it in multiple different territories in North America and Europe as well. We got loads of feedback from the fans about what they want to see, what modes we should be using. Versus, Hockey Ultimate Team or EA SPORTS Hockey League. Now we will put our heads together with the NHL to figure out what is next." Esdor: "Is there an option to have one tournament in Versus and one in EASHL for example?" Ramjagsingh: "It's a great question. Tbd (to be determined) is probably the answer right now. We are still trying to figure out what our plan is moving forward. I think we saw great success with the individual versus experience, but when you look at what our community wants right now we see a lot of our core players asking for 6v6. When there are no bots involved, it's truly skill versus skill in that mode. We take all that into consideration as we build up our plans for the future." Esdor: "Have you considered hosting a tournament at an event like Dreamhack?" Ramjagsingh: "Tournaments is something that we look at when we decide about our competitive gaming strategy. All kind of tournaments kind of fall under competitive gaming - not only the World Gaming Championship -, but also smaller community tournaments, and tournaments for casual players as well." Esdor: "Will there be a challenge team option for playing 3v3 games in EASHL?" Ramjagsingh: "We are working on that right now. It's not there when the game is released, but it's on our roadmap for the upcoming months." Esdor: "Will the division packs be better this year in HUT?" Ramjagsingh: "We actually started fresh this year with a lot of our economy redesigned, and pack contents are a part of that. This year we are starting our players much much lower so there is more room to grow. We have reworked the content that is in all of our packs. So you can essentially get any of our best players from any pack available." Esdor: "Will you make it easier to apply many contracts at the same time in HUT?" Ramjagsingh: "We made some improvements there as well, to the contracts and the healing cards." Esdor: "Am I able to do giveaways as a streamer?" Ramjagsingh: "Giveaways are tbd. I don't have the latest information on that to let you know. I'm not sure where we stand at the moment when it comes to giveaways. The piece that we got to be careful is about the trades. Because people will exploit stuff if they can. It's not necessarily the streamers doing giveaways we want to find, it's more about the guys that abuse the system that we need to be careful with." Esdor: "Are wager matches possibly coming back again in the future?" Ramjagsingh: "No. We still stand by that - it's the gambling part of it that we want to stay away from." Esdor: "Have you thought about adding a logic that kicks idle players from HUT and Versus games?" Ramjagsingh: "We get that question a lot. Definitely something that we are looking at. We have been talking about players going idle in all different game modes, not just for Hockey Ultimate Team." Esdor: "Will you be able to see your opponents username before starting a match?" Ramjagsingh: "Yes you will. It's a challenge for us to make it work when people are dodging so much. People want to pick and choose their spots in some kind of try to maximize their time playing the game without taking losses. What we have done though is improving the matchmaking system. So hopefully you will get matched with someone that is at a similar skill level." Esdor: "What about cross-play between consoles when it comes to NHL?" Ramjagsingh: "That is up to Sony and Microsoft to decide. We are starting to see games like Fortnite making cross-platform possible, but that is a bigger conversation with our first party partners and not something that we can change on our own." Esdor: "Why is NHL not using the Frostbite engine like FIFA and Madden?" Ramjagsingh: "We will get there eventually. Moving over to Frostbite is almost like a console transition. It's a massive technology change. We are able to learn from FIFA and their transition to Frostbite, so we can have a smoother journey when we move over to Frostbite too. From a company perspective it's our one engine strategy, so it's just a matter of time. Now we are laying the ground work so we can hopefully get there in the near future." Esdor: "Why is there no feature that allows you to play a league together with your online friends?" Ramjagsingh: "It's something that we have heard from a lot of our fans actually, asking for tournaments or a feature where you can set up a league that track stats and things like that. This is something that we have on our to do list but there is no ETA (estimated time of arrival) yet. It is definitely something that we are looking into in the future." Esdor: "How come you can't take a timeout without going into the menus?" Ramjagsingh: "We are out of buttons, that is the main reason. There is not a faster way for us to do that. It's not ideal but we are just out of buttons." BarreBoza, @Darkic01, @esdor, Sean "Rammer" Ramjagsingh, Evan Dexter and @PillenUpp in Stockholm That's it from Stockholm, but stay tuned for our coverage from Helsinki, which should be dropping in the next few days! For NHLGamer.com @esdor

Hello NHLGamers, The ECL 5 Pro season was an exciting battle from the very start, until the overtime winner in game 7 of the finals. Let's start with the group stage: Group 1 In this group all of the top 3 teams from The_Alpha_Furyan'ss ECL Pro Preview made it to the playoffs. Gotham Knights and SIKA ended up in the top 2 during the regular season and White Trash finished 6th in the group. Group 1 was tighter than group 2, with only 13 points between Gotham Knights - that won the group - and Murohoki and Black Panther Party, who finished in 9th and 10th place and just barely missed the playoffs. When you look at the bottom of the table you find Squirt Hockey, Nemesis and Bare Knuckles Hockey. All of these 3 teams had to play Relegation games to try their best to stay in the Pro division. If you go through the personal stats in this group, we have the Inter Iceland duo @Stefan_397 (88p) and @Playmaker1010 (83p) at the top. Both of them had big roles for their team that finished the regular season in 3rd place. My teammates and I in Lavetten got a painful reminder of how good that duo can be when Inter Iceland slaughtered us 10-0 and Stefan racked up 4+6 and Playmaker 3+4 in that game. After that devastating loss, Lavetten managed to play so much better in the second half of the season without me. I was really impressed by the guys on my team when they ended the season with 12 wins and 2 OT losses being the hottest team in the second half of the season in Group 1. Best goalie stats-wise in group 1 was - the star goalie from SIKA - @SpiderRoyal with a 15-5-1 record and an 83.01 save percentage. Group 2 In group 2 the two favorites Unlucky Boys HC and Shameful Knights did not disappoint their expectations finishing first and second. These two teams and Nordic Stars - who finished third - managed to score more than 100 goals each in the regular season. In group 1 there was only one team that scored over 100 goals (107 Inter Iceland). Looking at the bottom of the table you will find Banterfield Battalion, GHETTO FIREBIRDS and Bellizzi. Baltic Sea Eagles started out the season very well, being undefeated for the first 10 games, before losing two straight games against Nordic Stars. Unlucky Boys HC started the season very well as well, by winning their first 8 games only letting in 9 goals in those games. The top scorer in group 2 was @sweatyfathoe99 from Unlucky Boys HC with an impressive 54 goals and 30 assists in 28 games. Hullued from Shameful Knights was the best goalie in group 2 with a 25-4-0 record and an 81.81 save percentage. Playoffs Round 1 I must say I was surprised when Shameful Knights lost in the first round against Falun Coal Miners as well as when SIKA lost in the first round against The United Knights. Apart from those series the other ones were very even; Pata Hellalla managed to turn around the series completely after being down 2-0. Sadly, after losing to Pata Hellalla in the playoffs, Lavetten decided to disband. Gotham Knights beat LITE up-and-comers J P T J, Inter Iceland won against En Hund, Evolution beat Baltic Sea Eagles in an intense series that went go game 7, Unlucky Boys HC beat Alliance HT and in the last series Nordic Stars beat White Trash. Quarter Finals In the second round, Falun Coal Miners kept on impressing by beating another top team, as Nordic Stars lost in game . Unlucky Boys showed how good they are by sweeping The United Knights comfortably 4-0. Pata Hellalla beat Gotham Knights 4-3 and Evolution won against Inter Iceland 4-2 Semifinals In the semifinals it was Evolutions turn to show what a good team they are by beating Pata Hellalla 4-0. In the other series Falun Coal Miners did not manage to beat a third top ranked team and Unlucky Boys HC won the series 4-2. Finals The finals in the ECL 5 Pro playoffs was something special. Evolution got the best start being up 2-1 in games. However, Unlucky Boys managed to turn around the series with two wins in a row and Evolution had a lot of pressure going into the last day of the final series being down 3-2 in games. After a 2-0 win in game 6, Evolution managed to win game 7 after a OT goal from their new super signing I_EKI_I. Congratulations to Evolution for winning ECL Pro! After the very exiting finals in ECL Pro where Evolution managed to win this thrilling series that went to game 7, I asked Evolution Captain @Crisu_rottis about their impressive season: Playoff stats I_EKI_I (@Erkki) showed what a good signing he was from the Elite team MUKIMIEHET, leading his new Evolution team to the title in ECL Pro. I_EKI_I had the most points in the entire playoffs with 46 points (20+26), Stefan_397 from Inter Iceland was second with 42 points (22+20) and Sweatyfathoe99 was third with 40 points (25+15). Looking at the goalie stats we find two goalies from the teams in the finals, @SepiDN from Evolution, first with a 80.09 save percentage and @eissi83 from Unlucky Boys HC, with a 81.44 save percentage. Summary: Synergy Hockey was relegated from ECL Elite together with Nordic Lightning. After losing many players to other teams Synergy are merging together with Dead End Kings. Lavetten disbanded after only two seasons in ECL. Relegated teams from Elite to Pro Synergy Hockey Nordic Lightning New teams from Lite to Pro Nordic Nosebleed Almost Famous Raging Monkeys Red Machine