Janikka

Finnish Roosters (formerly known as Children of Ice) is looking for a forward to its main opening lineup in ECL 11. We are heading into yet another season of ECL Pro, and prior experience from the Pro level is a requirement. Despite the team name, being Finnish is not required as long as you are willing and able to communicate in English. That said, the current team consists mainly of Finns along with some Latvian and Austrian flavor thrown into the mix.

Donning the C I’ve never seen myself as a leader. This goes for any context, not just EASHL. I was never the type for it, and so I’ve always looked for leadership in others. Having caused my share of problems on teams in the past, I was more of a guy you needed to keep in check. You needed someone like Johtaja to tell me off when I would deviate from what was best for the team. I feel like I have matured and am no longer the erratic person I once was. This didn’t really make the idea of stepping into Johtaja’s shoes any easier for me, though. I still would have liked to just sit back and play, letting him do the rest. Upon hearing the news about him, my first thought was to transfer to another team and play under someone else. I still have my doubts about whether I have the authority for this role. There are different tones of authority, of course, and I’ll never be another Johtaja, but it’s still a learning process and I think will be that way for some time. The necessary qualities don’t come naturally to me, so I need to look within and bring those qualities out into our WhatsApp group and our PSN parties. I have already had a taste of how it feels when things start to click, though. You put together a lineup and point out some things about how you’d like your team to play, and when you see it actually starting to work out, the feeling is extremely rewarding. I can definitely see why some people like to assume this position from the outset. Amid the questions and uncertainties, I’m lucky to have the wisdom of people like my official video coach Pakis (a.k.a. Pakjiz) and my trusty assistant captain PSChibra advising me on how to proceed in all this. And whenever things get too dire, I shall look up into the rafters of our home arena. From there, the guiding light of Johtaja shall shine upon us and illuminate the way forward.

The evil Telia corporation decided to disturb the universal balance by disconnecting the internet connection of Johtaja the Great, our one and only leader. This is because he lives in the middle of nowhere, and the local customer base for the ISP consisted only of him and some farmer whose tractor could often be heard in our PSN party whenever Johtaja went out for a smoke on his balcony. Johtaja refuses to play on a 4G mokkula which is really unstable where he lives, and the area just recently got 4G coverage so 5G is a ways off over there. This means the end of his illustrious EASHL career, at least for now. It also means that I am taking over the captain duties. Shortly before this situation occurred, Johtaja reverted the team's name from Children of Ice (an allusion to his favorite band, Children of Bodom) to its original name of Finnish Roosters. I am adhering to this change, and so we are continuing under the name that was first used by Johtaja for his team more than ten years ago. I intend to stand guard awaiting the return of Johtaja. While I am assuming the official position of team captain and all the related duties, Johtaja is an honorary captain and the only true leader of this team. Finnish Roosters will devote all its wins to Johtaja and ask his forgiveness for all its losses. While the situation is bleak, we will not lose faith that one day, somehow, he will come back to us and reclaim his rightful position as our leader on and off the ice. Until that day comes, I hope to do right by his name. Meanwhile, the legendary defenseman JParola will also not be continuing with us. Further changes to the roster will be announced.

Let's not leave out the hopelessly erratic download speeds and the dreadful PS Store with some of its content sometimes not loading at all. Not only can the Xbox do better, it has always done so. Maybe Sony will fix everything in time for PS5 and bring the PSN up to 2020s standards, but I highly doubt it.

NHL is pretty much the only game I play on consoles. I will determine my decision solely by which console the NHLGamer scene moves to. I'm hoping it'll be the Xbox, but I bet it will be the PS5 since Europe has always favored the PlayStation over the Xbox. My experience on the PS3 was already considerably worse than on the Xbox 360. I've never owned an Xbox One (seeing as how competitive NHL was always mainly on the PS4 during this generation), but PSN overall has remained far worse compared to Xbox Live back then. Also, I vastly prefer the Xbox One controller over the DS4, although the latter is admittedly a big improvement over the absolutely terrible DS3. I have a couple of Xbox One controllers for PC use just because they suit my hands really well. I don't really care about which console will be more powerful as that is so inconsequential with regard to NHL. Cross-platform play for NHL would be the dream because then I could just get the next Xbox and not even have to consider the PS5.

I think it is impossible to determine some ultimate truth about a top 3, so all we can ever have are subjective opinions. There are too many variables. Opinions are fun, though, so it's okay.

Fun idea!

I was hoping we'd still get to play for something in NHL 20. Thanks, gang!

Children of Ice @PSchibra didn't want to speak Latvian to himself so we salvaged @xLVxRitchey from the rubble of SSG. We are planning no further signings. Here, then, is our full roster at this point: JohtajaTheGreat (center and Dear Leader) nikmes7 (winger) Pikkardz (winger) JParola (all-rounder) PSChibra (all-rounder) Janikka- (defender) xLVxRitchey (defender) Bloodymess_666 (goalie)

Children of Ice In: @PSchibra Out: @Nagyttaja Straight from the Latvian streets, PSchibra returns to the team from a little break. Welcome back! 😍 On behalf of the entire Children of Ice organization, I would like to thank the gifted young man Nagyttaja for everything he did for us and wish him success in the future and good times for the remainder of his service with the Finnish Defence Forces.

Regardless of this debate, I feel like there is huge untapped potential in the Swedish pool of console hockey fans. It would be healthy for the competition at the top to expand. We have some fantastic Swedish players as it is, but the elite playership is more Finn-heavy than I imagine it would be if we got more Swedes to notice the competitive scene. I know hockey is up against football in Sweden and football is more popular, but I'm not sure the current situation is an accurate reflection of the ratio between Swedish and Finnish virtual hockey players. I don't have the numbers to back up this hunch, though. Maybe I'm wrong and playing these games is truly an overwhelmingly Finnish phenomenon. I have no idea which way the high number of Finns in the eSHL will take the league's popularity in Sweden. @keranee said that around 70% of players in the league are still Swedish. That doesn't sound too bad.

The influx of Finnish players was a given at the outset where, based on the description in the original announcement, this league will apparently have the most professional setting we've seen yet in competitive EASHL. Many players will naturally be drawn to that. I imagine SHL at the very least had a say in the rules for this league? I suppose they didn't request a restriction on the number of non-Swedish players.

Great work, guys! Seems like a leap in the professional direction. How will this affect the future of ECL, I wonder?

Group 2 has two black horses. There's Black Horse, and then there's Kaupallinen Yhteistyo.

What about lag?

Teamless yet again. LD/RD. Update: nevermind. Not looking for a team anymore.

I like the latest tuner better than the beta one. The beta tuner has more randomness. I hope whatever middle ground they may find with a new tuner, it's going to be closer to the current latest one than the beta.

You're 6 games into the season already and I was looking at starting from scratch, as a backup against someone who secured the LD position while I was away from the regular games. Meanwhile, your RD spot is not up for grabs. But this is hardly the thread to debate the topic...

Rusty Blades saw a bunch of changes and I ended up an odd man out, so I'm looking for a team where I might have a chance to play or to at least compete for a starter's position. I play defense. ECL Lite is not an option.

Welcome back.

Everyone had better watch out for @pentsaa AKA "persereikä-Pena". He sure knows how to play. With a pretty potential offense and the brothers on defense, I think FCM are going to put up a show in the offensive zone. Meanwhile, we'll see if they've learned to tighten up their defensive play.

I saw an NHL 19 video from gzell60 which demonstrated a hockey stick going through an opponent's leg during a poke check. Last night, as I was playing EASHL as goalie, I had a puck rammed through my stick and into the net. I reviewed the replay multiple times, and sure enough: the puck found its way through my stick, a supposedly solid object in the context of the video game. But what if we, the players, have it all wrong? A few years ago, EA hired a physicist to help out with their puck physics for NHL 15. A Google search revealed the man to be one Michele Petteni. I don't know about you guys, but he seems qualified enough to me. It's probably safe to assume he knew what he was doing. I found no evidence that he's still part of the NHL team, however. In fact, it seems as though NHL 15 was both his video game debut and swan song. Maybe he didn't find the work rewarding enough. Maybe he felt as cheated and disappointed as the rest of us did when we found out NHL 15 was to omit a lot of the goodies such as EASHL. I mean, who would want to do all those calculations for nothing but HUT and a drop-in mode tacked on as damage control? Whatever the case, I would assume his work, or at least some of it, from that time has carried all the way over to NHL 19. What prevents an object from passing through another? You'd have to be pretty dense not to know the answer to that one. Density is a measure of the mass of an object relative to its volume. So if an object is small but has high mass, said object is very dense. When two objects meet that are both adequately dense, they will be unable to pass through each other. The air that we breathe is pretty sparse. We are able to cut through it because our bodies are far denser than air. Air is still dense enough to offer us some resistance, of course, which is one of the things hindering our ability to move fast. In real hockey you won't see sticks going through legs, or pucks penetrating goalies' sticks. All of those objects are too dense for that to happen. But as we've seen, it's not impossible in NHL 19. What if it's all by design? There's been plenty of talk on EA's NHL forums about incidental contact. The developers have written that they've tested full-fledged incidental contact and it didn't work too well. It bogged the game down rather than helped it, and the game got less fun. Now, you would assume that to not apply to such instances as on gzell's video or in my EASHL game last night. But I have a theory. No, a hypothesis. EA may be ahead of the curve. Maybe they're not only thinking outside the box, but they've taken the box and they've thrown it away. Because when you watch that stick go through that leg, or that puck vanish into that stick only to come out from the other end, one thing feels certain: there truly is no box. Or maybe Michele Petteni, bless his heart, was informed his services would not be needed beyond NHL 15 and decided to do a number on our friends at EA as a glorious last stand in the world of video game development. All we know is this: when you launch NHL, you'd do well to leave your conceptions of reality at the door. Because when it comes to reality, EA has a brand of its own.

Tagesson! Always returning, and I like it that way.

Ignore the little edgelords. Good luck with the team, see you on the ice.

NHL 99 intro with Heroes by David Bowie. Never forget.