markalla2

That's a fair and great point! That could easily be taken into account in the lower divisions by allowing rescheduling to like Sun-Thu 19-22 CET while keeping the other reschedule tool updates I suggested. It would make the process so much smoother for everyone.

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

Couldn't agree more with both @MartindalexC & @Janikka. This year player height & weight affect way more than before but I've seen like 2-3 guys using a bigger forward build. For a few weeks I've been rocking a 193cm 81.5kg TWF at center and highly recommend giving it a try, also comes with some broken ass animations while puck protect + L2 For me this conversation is all about removing the RNG/unpredictable outcomes all over the ice that XF abilities cause like @Janikka described in detail. I also understand @Kenu's approach that we play the game as EA has intended but in 6s EA's intentions aren't catered towards competitive play at all. SG announced that there will be new tournament concepts during this year's cycle and I really hope we try playing without abilities at some point. I can imagine it being as fun as NHL10-14 EASHL was. The only downside I can think of is finding games during the transition phase, I'm afraid teams without abilities would often match up with teams still rocking all 3 ability slots. There are 10 loadout slots so maybe creating duplicate builds with & without abilities is a quick fix.

Niinno joo täysin totta kun alustapalvelusta kyse, sillon twitch tarvis ne oikeudet 👍

Valikkomusat ei oo EA:n omaa musaa ja vaikka oliskin niin sulla pitäs viel lisäks olla levitysoikeudet kyseisiin biiseihin. Eli valikkomusat pois päältä ni se o siin

Great post and my previous comment still stands: whatever SG decides, please consider doing it at the beginning or end of the competitive season cycle. For NHL25 it probably is too late now unless there's a summer season next year.

After giving it some thought and reading others' takes on this... I'm also team BanThemAll. And here's the reasoning why: The whole X-Factor ability shenanigans were added to the game in order to highlight superstar players with their superstar abilities. I totally understand that concept from an offline mode or online versus point of view, it's a great addition and does what it's supposed to do: recognize greatness. But in WOC game modes, we don't need that at all - everybody can already spend their XP however they see fit under the ruleset of preset builds and be the superstar they want (even though I'd love to see the return of the old custom build system). In WOC the X-Factors don't make anyone a superstar in the way they were intended in the first place if evvvveryone on the ice has them. What the X-Factors bring in 6s especially is instead lower skill gap RNG to a vast variety of in-game scenarios an even stronger meta for each wingers, centers, defencedudes & goalies where everyone exploits weaknesses in the game Therefore a competitive setting with no superpower abilities would balance not only the meta but also the dreadful RNG. EA made the decision on our behalf to remove EE from WOC, which, if you think about it for a second, is actually is a huge step towards the direction I'm suggesting here. And absolutely nobody is complaining about it. Now it's all about finishing what EA started this year and play without the honestly quite unnecessary X-Factor abilities in 6s.

If you decide to restrict builds on a team basis, please don't test it mid-cycle of the competitive season. IMO would be test to try it in a summer league next year or early NHL26. Now it's too late. But as you said it's reeeeally hard to implement to the whole ECL structure.

I really think Furyan is on to something here with the pure entertainment value caused by the variety of playstyles. Now, in all honesty, only the off-ice twitter shit creates a strong brand in top leagues. That isn't the case with real hockey leagues where teams play hockey in a variety of strategies. I know the same approach doesn't apply 1:1 to ehockey but it does to some extent. +1 for one build style per team AND banning Big Tipper

100% agree with the matchmaking settings mentioned earlier. Maybe they have done some updates to servers and network code but still EU and NA shouldn't match up unless it's 4am here in Finland and after 15mins of searching no-one else within 80ms ping shows up. What I also don't like at all is the hip check auto-locking to opponent, it is far too OP. Otherwise LT feels really good and controls feels smooth and responsive. Quite similar to 24 but very good QoL changes.

I think a great feature on this website would be a list of free agents where a player can add their own xbox/psn id. Add a couple of required multi-choice questions like division / position / language / role (starter/backup), a single-choice like closest server, and a long free text field for additional information like availability and contact details. On top of that, show the divisions the player has played in the last few seasons from your own database. And while you're at it, create the same feature for teams looking for players too Heck, even add an 'Alert Me' setting when a team/player matches with your filters 💆 And ohhh baby when a free agent is signed, have it has a system-assisted process which automatically creates a forum post of a signing so we can all cheer on that! I think this would greatly reduce the time teams spend to find suitable players and vice versa. It would also give new players a better chance of being signed when their 'post' is displayed similar to the community legends.

The bans have been proven to work towards a more balanced gameplay experience. IMO unless EA states these op abilities are either heavily nerfed (doubt) or removed from the game (more doubt) it's not that likely the gameplay updates in 25 balance those out. We've been here before.

Wait so when two teams from different regions match up the skill based onetee becomes a ping based onetee

Salary?

Since we don't know how they've tuned the abilities or if they've tuned them at all it's very hard to decide. However, there was a reason why certain abilities were banned and it was done in a rather successful manner one might say: players could still use abilities, just the most OP/fun-killing abilities were banned. My thoughts on the banned abilites and what's to come: I don't see a scenario where Truculence wouldn't be a pain in the arschloch come NHL24. Based on beta, hitting is already OP once you learn the slapshot type of hit. l also don't see enabling Big Tipper gaining popularity among the community. Apart from positioning, deflections aren't done manually. Close Quarters was annoying for goalies from the very beginning of NHL22, but the goalie skill gap has increased (at least on paper) and good goalies can actually outplay CQ with the new guessing system? Time will tell, but silver CQ will most likely open later in the skill tree and will we have enough time to make a conclusion before ECL starts?