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Hey NHLGamers, On Friday I had the privilege to attend the NHL 19 press event in Helsinki and talk with lead producer Sean "Rammer" Ramjagsingh about the game. A couple weeks ago we asked you to send us your questions for the NHL developers and once again the community delivered! We had a bunch of messages on the forums, Twitter and Facebook and while I didn't get the chance to ask all of them, I'm positive that we got most of them covered. The event itself was very well organized and this time around EA had set up plenty of game units connected to the internet, so even the most serious gamers could play head to head without the disadvantage of playing down-screen. NHL Gaming World Championship 2018 winner Erik "@Eki" Tammenpää, who recently joined Sampi, was a very wanted guy for the press at this event and he was giving interviews left and right throughout the day. I also had the pleasure of playing my only game of NHL 19 against him and an exciting game it was! There were quite an amount of familiar faces at the event and you should be able to find at least @Dominointi, @Eki, @Hansulinho @MakezCR @Nieppii & @PleeMaker in this video. It was a pleasure to meet the guys, as always! « Huge thanks to all of the NHLGamer community out there for all your beta feedback! » -EA Sports NHL producer Sean Ramjagsingh extending a thanks to our community Rammer and the dev team was very pleased to see that our community had sent us loads of questions, we were even able to provide some ideas they haven't thought of previously. The producer and the whole team wanted to extend a thanks to all of you. « As the community knows, EASHL in my opinion is one of the greatest experiences we have in the game. By building out the World of Chel and the multiple different experiences, I feel like we can lower the barrier of entry into the EASHL ecosystem which is only going to make the competition better. » – Rammer on the development of World of Chel and EASHL We were very pleased to hear that the thought behind World of Chel wasn't just to bring out an enjoyable game-mode, but also to lower the barrier for new players to enter and experience the fun of EASHL. Hopefully we'll see a growth in the player base of EASHL and get even more skilled players into our community. « I think being able to practice is a big part of the learning curve in EASHL from a team-play perspective. This year we made a big decision to try and build out the experience around EASHL with the World of Chel. We think it’ll be an important tool for us to bring newbies and more people into the competitive EASHL scene. » – Rammer on Practice mode in EASHL Without further ado, check out the video below! What do you think? Did you like what you heard? Something we missed? Let us know in the comments.

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