European Summer Cup

[vSilenttio]

Hello gamers!

I've been wondering this whole summer thing here and there sometimes, since we had some very tight hockey played on NHL14's offseason mostly between HC Sika and OODAP's Summer Inc, months before NHL15 was released. This also happened on NHL13's offseason but in smaller scale (less players to take part). Could there be official cup/league gaming played during official hockey offseason? How easy it would be to make it work, by this I mean amount of admins etc. needed. Would people be interested? How many teams there would/should be? Obviously summer is great time to get some fresh air from whole hockey genre (watching/playing/living it). But I love playing NHL, plus I was in the military service from 2015's July till March 16th so yeah, personally I have missed alot compared to you guys!

But surely this is topic to talk about, right? Lots of questionmarks tells pretty much about the whole summergaming, that could it work etc. About the whole Cup, amount of games and so on, I'm just going to throw something here what could be talked about...

• How interested NHLGamer's staff see this whole Summer gaming? Any interest at all from the management?
• Secondly, how many NHLGamer's moderators it could need. Obviously you can always have new assistants for this, but still.
• Which would be better; longer basic kind of league (regular season + playoffs) or Cup format (play through brackets, step by step)?
• Make sure that ESC (or ESL) is totally different thing than original ECL, but still have something to motivate players. Dont know how to say this better than this but hey; it's not shame to win official league even though it would be just summer gaming and there wouldn't be that many teams to take part.
• Pace. How many games per week? 2-3, or just "get these 10 games played in next 3 weeks, and then we'll have playoffs", for example.
• Perhaps most important thing; is our community interested to play some hockey during summer against friendly, well-known teams/players?

I know that time to talk about this is not perhaps the most great one, but atleast I got it out from my mind so community can discuss about it. Sorry if there's some mistakes, I'm trying!

Have a great spring and even better ECL!

Edited April 19, 2016 by vSilenttio

[gzell60]

To kick off a discussion: So far there are no plans for a Summer Cup due to the feedback we originally received from a lot of players, and the long break was supposed to be used for developing on the website.

But that really depends on you I guess. Moderation and administration are likely available.

[Daigle_]

Sounds good Silenttio from my part anyhow.

[Heksaa]

It's always a bit hard to get people to play during the summer time, but no doubt that some organised cup/tournament would gather more players to play. With a huge community like this, it shouldn't be a hard task to do. The key is to keep it as simple as possible. For example like Silenttio wrote, to get X amount of games to be played in few weeks - every one of us have a lot of things going on during summer, but this way it would be in players own hands how to schedule the games. Also a bit easier to take part of the cup/tournament knowing that you don't have to play on particular day, and it would also be easier for staff to organize. I prefer  "summer cup" is kept far away from the original ECL - this way there could be more like mixed teams playing just for fun during summer. There wouldn't need to be anything same, except the players. Would there need to be anything else about the games than just the scores? Not sure how people would feel like not marking their personal points as there might be some who wants to take this more seriously than I am. Just making some new contacts for the upcoming leagues and have an option to play hockey instead of football.

This seems to be my way to wrote a simple answers as a long and unclear essay.

[BUM3R]

Sounds awesome! Surely will take a part on it if I would be at home. Just for example we get 16 teams on the ESL, 2(4) groups by 8(4) so in total 14(6) games each team should play on the group stage. if you give them a free 2-3 weeks to play all games without a pressure by schedule rules, I believe everyone will manage to play all games. The playoffs are a bit harder or I dont have a clue how to manage them

[Heksaa]

13 minutes ago, BUM3R said:

The playoffs are a bit harder or I dont have a clue how to manage them

Just like the regular season - week or 10 days for one playoff round to get it played.

[Billy44205]

So here's my take on this Summer Cup thing. I think teams are not active in Summer because a few guys are away and even if like half the team is still willing to play it's not enough to play 6's. I also think Summer Inc was a great thing which allowed my clubless ass to play with Oodap, Supremski, Terasniska etc. Basically I really enjoyed playing with new people (especially the excellent ones) even if games meant nothing. Lastly, I know it's Summer and no one wants a tight schedule in Summer damnit!

With all that in mind I came up with this concept:

- I need a small-ish amount of team captains, like maybe 4 or 8 individuals. So that would make for rather big teams. Maybe those guys are tournament admins.

- Instead of teams, individuals sign up for the Summer Cup.

- Teams are devised by snake draft, to add a dimension of mixing teams up.

- Every team makes the playoffs. The goal of this tournament being less about competing and more about killing time and fun, I think it's ok.

This is very much a work in progress and I have not addressed any of the boring techincal rules shit, but you get the gist of it. It's something fresh, not too bothersome, admittedly not so competitive but... I dunno. But you're on to something Sile, I think.

[vSilenttio]

Well it's good to see atleast that we have some interest on the topic! I'm pretty sure that whole Summer Cup as an new idea could be too early for this summer but in the future having certain moderators, rules and pre-registered summer players/teams ready in lets say, uh May, this could work. Right?

Good idea from Billy, about mixing teams up. Throw every player's name into lottery and lets see what happens! Would be more interesting than having same teams or certain groups playing together, but I'll go both ways in this one. Also I'm with Heksa in that part where ESC should kept easy as possible, just like summer is! You dont want to cause stress with tight schedule or have pain in the ass about who's gonna make it and when etc. Btw, Skype groups should be a must in this one, to keep more "random" groups together. And like you guys said, ESC would be great opportunity to get experience with new people and even better players. Billy wrote well about Summer Inc and I'm with you on that, gave me atleast good experience even though there wasnt anything serious on the line except our names...

Maybe I'm too late with this when you think about upcoming summer, but having whole next year, building something new and fresh for this community, could be worth it if we get right and interested people working on it.

Nice to hear something from Staff too, even though I changed couple words with Janbo before I started this topic here as he said just go ahead and write about it and so I did. I'm going to add poll later about this that could we have bigger interest on this from whole community, hope so people just gives their voices on it. Also I'm going to write about it's regular season and playoffs, but now I dont have enough time for that.

Later and keep them words coming if there's something left!

Edited April 19, 2016 by vSilenttio

[Kenu]

I like the idea proposed here and we've tossed around the idea of a Summer Cup of some sort before. Like @gzell60 said, our understanding is that people don't want anything too serious in the summer at least, so we didn't have anything planned. Depending on player interest it could definitely be done.

I agree with the concept that it needs to be more relaxed than your average tournament and due to the summer it could indeed be a good idea to mix things up with different rosters than during the regular ECL.

Keep voicing your ideas and thoughts and we'll see what you guys think.

[vSilenttio]

33 minutes ago, Kenu said:

...our understanding is that people don't want anything too serious in the summer at least

I agree with the concept that it needs to be more relaxed than your average tournament and due to the summer it could indeed be a good idea to mix things up with different rosters than during the regular ECL.

Yeah this seems to be the most common opinion what comes to summer gaming. Great that Staff are open to this kind of discussion and support people. Gives me as an regular ECL player good feeling about management and future even though this might not be this summer's plan.

About schedule and pace of it, I'm absolutely voting for full regular season with not that tight schedule. I mean c'mon, offseason stats on June or somewhere there and next game will be released on mid-September so there's like three months time to play one tournament. Not so bad. @BUM3R red my mind about sharing 16 teams, well done. Then again on playoffs, they could be best-of-3 or best-of-5 instead of best-of-7 where you usually need two different nights to get longer series played. With best of 5, only one night should be enough as five games per night is not that much and takes like two hours, so one playoff round wouldn't be that hard to get over with in 7-9 days.

How many teams would be enough? Minimum should be like 10 teams, 8 into playoffs and thats it. @Billy44205's idea about playoffs that everyone should be in, I'm not comfy with it. I do understand though the point in it; #summergaming #offseason #play4fun #mixedteams #playwithbilly but still, it's a fight about Summer Cup! Well, lets ask this way; who wants to give free wins to Oodap and his henchmen? NOT ME! Well, perhaps not the best example but hope so you get the point.

Should there be some kind of language wall in the lottery? Lets say if there's two teams; A-team with well known guys from Sweden and Finland plus one swiss - and then B-team with four russians, couple french guys and one finnish brunkalainen. No offense but shouldn't this be fun? Like you can talk with people and stuff... Dont get me wrong people.

OFFTOPIC: @Kenu - have you guys thought about sharing your future plans to community? For example how many moderators you are going to add, what kind of tournaments you are going to have (1vs1, 2vs2?), possible awards and so on. Or are these kind of things too fragile to publish? Would be fun to read about your plans, even though you couldn't tell that much about them.

[Kenu]

20 minutes ago, vSilenttio said:

OFFTOPIC: @Kenu - have you guys thought about sharing your future plans to community? For example how many moderators you are going to add, what kind of tournaments you are going to have (1vs1, 2vs2?), possible awards and so on. Or are these kind of things too fragile to publish? Would be fun to read about your plans, even though you couldn't tell that much about them.

Absolutely have thought about it and will do that in the future, but I hate to disappoint people, so I'd rather work out an internal time-line before going public about the plans. 1vs1 and 2vs2 are definitely in the works and should technically be easier to pull off than the 6vs6 stuff. We love the 6vs6 community and the passion we all share for the EASHL and gaming as teams, so we want to make sure we get that working smoothly before moving on to the "smaller" stuff.

The 6vs6 stuff is working quite well at the moment, but as you may have noticed, there are still some bugs to fix here and there. We had to cut some corners in order to get the first tournament running on time and some of the functionality wasn't created with more than one season in mind. This is why you might notice some weird stuff going on in some parts of the website. We are working through these kinks and once we get those polished, we are confident that starting a third season - whenever that is - should be much smoother of a ride. Very happy about the bug reports we've received, as we've been able to squish quite a few bugs before the became a problem for more users.

[vSilenttio]

Okay, thanks @Kenu!

As you can see, I added poll so we can see the numbers.

Edited April 19, 2016 by vSilenttio

[MovaaN]

I just was on my way here to make a suggestion for draft style summer cup, but @Billy44205 beat me to it. We could make it that people themselves enlist for summer cup from what point we pick/choose/nominate captains for teams. Preferably as much randomness and ofcourse when some people aren't so comfortable with some people, then draft should kick this kind of problems out of question  I'd say that when we know number of players ready to commit for summer cup, then we can think about amounts of teams and season structure

Edit: Also this kind of draft and "scrambled" teams would get people to know each other better and maybe find new community friends  

Edited April 26, 2016 by MovaaN

[l-Furyan-l]

3 hours ago, MovaaN said:

I just was on my way here to make a suggestion for draft style summer cup, but @Billy44205 beat me to it. We could make it that people themselves enlist for summer cup from what point we pick/choose/nominate captains for teams. Preferably as much randomness and ofcourse when some people aren't so comfortable with some people, then draft should kick this kind of problems out of question  I'd say that when we know number of players ready to commit for summer cup, then we can think about amounts of teams and season structure

Edit: Also this kind of draft and "scrambled" teams would get people to know each other better and maybe find new community friends  

Agreed. This sounds great.

[gzell60]

Just as a reminder: If you have some good ideas, feel free to team up and work out something together. Whether this takes places in this topic, in private messages or somewhere else doesn't matter. You don't require confirmation from staff for every single point, so if you want to work out a fleshed out concept on your own we are happy to consider it.

[Billy44205]

@gzell60 Who's "we"?

[Haldeem]

*Bump*

[Ranksu]

I like that Movaan idea about draft etc.

First we settle here reg. day (poll) and everybody who are interested will put reg. message on specific thread that they will join in Summer Cup.

After reg. we can create poll where community vote which are the captains (the number of captains will be depend how many players will participate in the tournament)

Questin is how many players on every team and how we 'do it' players draft (live on twitch etc.) or in here forum? 'Cus tbh it should be pretty fast so it won't take all day.

[Patzlaf]

12 hours ago, Ranksu said:

I like that Movaan idea about draft etc.

First we settle here reg. day (poll) and everybody who are interested will put reg. message on specific thread that they will join in Summer Cup.

After reg. we can create poll where community vote which are the captains (the number of captains will be depend how many players will participate in the tournament)

Questin is how many players on every team and how we 'do it' players draft (live on twitch etc.) or in here forum? 'Cus tbh it should be pretty fast so it won't take all day.

Good idea!

[loncelot84]

Looks very interesting 

[Jesus]

Agrred! Bring it on!

[Billy44205]

I promised myself I would stop trying to help this website only to end up more disappointed than all the guys who don't care about anything. Damnit. Anyway...

@Ranksu @Kenu @gzell60 @janbonator @Lurkins Stop the poll Madness. Even if only 25% of ECL players sign up for this Summer Cup thing, it will be enough. Right now among people who voted 80% are up for the Summer Cup. Just make a sign up thread or something already rather than keep wondering if we should do this or that or whatever. Wondering forever will never get this website out of its CH-esque mediocrity.

Make people sign up, make it so they have 15-ish members per team, appoint the team captains yourselves because those guys will be KEY in making this a good experience for everyone involved and you NEED to avoid troublemakers at all cost there. And then do the draft. I think I'll write something about the rules you may need for this sort of tournament a little later. Maybe.

@FINSeRe As for how to carry out the draft, here's an idea: Do it like the real draft (kinda), live stream an event with a bunch of panelists who will comment on the choices as they come up, and with a chatbox to have viewer comments as well so the panelists can also rebound on them. Maybe only do the livestream for an hour or 2, and then finish it between the team captains and the admins (if they are not one and a same). Just use a Skype group chat or something like that between the captains and admins (and the panelists, as long as they're doing the event thing) to make the draft choices. Nothing too complicated imo.

 

Also welcome back Jesus. Please don't blacklist me on your team, kthx.

[debi_85]

Billy go play fifa

[vSilenttio]

Aftermath starts here! I think SC was great add to summer for people who likes to play NHL during summer. 

It would be nice if we could get some opinions here that what was good in the whole Summer Cup and then again what Staff could do better next summer.

About the Draft-system: it was good. Main reason to have this tournament was to get players from other teams together, and IMO we nailed it.

Only thing I would want to fix in next SC, is the amount of games. I mean, people played NHL16 ALOT during summer and people mostly enjoyed playing SC so why not to play against every team in the tournament, and not just half. Maybe the main reason for having split league was the time, I dont know, but next time if theres like 10-15 teams, lets play bigger regular season.

Nothing else from me. I think SC was succees, and it should be played next year as well. Thanks to everyone who made the whole SC happen.

Edited September 7, 2016 by vSilenttio

[imosi]

IMO this year the Summer cup should end before NHL 18 Beta is released. Last year we saw that people lost their motivation to play NHL16 after playing the beta,