So it's 82 games? I'm fine with trying that. hope everyone can hang with it.

Originally Posted by DestroVega So it's 82 games? I'm fine with trying that. hope everyone can hang with it.

Uh no, not if we want to play multiple seasons.

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Hell, I think I'll hop in on this... I'm not sure which of the leftovers I want yet since my Wings (dibs if he leaves lol) and a couple others are taken.

I'll pick a team Tuesday or Wednesday after I try to get a couple games in with the few teams I have it narrowed down to.

Here's my info for now. AttackingMVP - EST - Right now availability is any until I start work which then it will be pretty flexible since I can come and go. To be certain I'll say any time after 6PM est to 1 or 2 AM est.

Originally Posted by jza1218 Uh no, not if we want to play multiple seasons.

No I understand that.


HUT isn't available to play on the early release? I wonder why that is.

So I had a horrible experience last night. The boss got called into work, and the monkey went for a sleepover. While the punkin was sleeping soundly I was jacked that I was going to get a solid 4 hours of playing in before this old mans bedtime. Do you think that after all the luck I had up to that point would continue over... nope, the early release would not down load, and instead I spent the four hours with tech support trying to figure out why my machine will not accept the download.
Not a happy GAG.
I'll try again tonight. I hope everyone is loving it as much as I want to be.

Huh, and that's really weird. I hopefully you get up and running soon

I will take the Dallas stars if they are available. My Xbox tag is mn wild 22. I am in the central time zone and I am very flexible for game times.

I say shootouts. 1 point for a tie, no points for ot loss.

I know those options aren't availiable, but oh well. That's when hockey was real dammit!

Originally Posted by Panther1484 I say shootouts. 1 point for a tie, no points for ot loss. I know those options aren't availiable, but oh well. That's when hockey was real dammit!

I actually agree.

Originally Posted by Panther1484 I say shootouts. 1 point for a tie, no points for ot loss. I know those options aren't availiable, but oh well. That's when hockey was real dammit!

Originally Posted by jza1218 Out of curiosity, what are the options for regular season OT?

Reading Shady's post made me realize I misunderstood what you were asking, lol. Just too much to try to make sense of last night. I think my brain shut down at some point, haha.

Anyway, these are the full regular season options concerning OT:

Season Overtime Loss: 1 point, 0 points
Season Tie Break: 5 Min (4 on 4) then Shootout, Single OT (4 on 4), Single OT (5 on 5), No Overtime, Continuous OT, Shootout

So, there are options. Just depends if people want to stray from the current rule system at all.

Originally Posted by mvp828 Hell, I think I'll hop in on this... I'm not sure which of the leftovers I want yet since my Wings (dibs if he leaves lol) and a couple others are taken. I'll pick a team Tuesday or Wednesday after I try to get a couple games in with the few teams I have it narrowed down to. Here's my info for now. AttackingMVP - EST - Right now availability is any until I start work which then it will be pretty flexible since I can come and go. To be certain I'll say any time after 6PM est to 1 or 2 AM est.

Originally Posted by mnwild22 I will take the Dallas stars if they are available. My Xbox tag is mn wild 22. I am in the central time zone and I am very flexible for game times.

Glad to see both of you guys join. Welcome aboard!

http://nhlguides.net/how-to-guides/

grain of salt.

We've now got 24 of the 30 teams filled...which is awesome! It's just too bad that EA doesn't have a reasonable suggestion for how to actually complete a season. I'm really not loving our options no matter which way we go. Playing all 82 games is just unrealistic. It would be a miracle just to get through one season. If we don't plan for multiple seasons, then things like contracts, scouting, player progression, etc. are worthless.

So, we need to come up with some kind of system where we only play about 1 out of every 4 games...which would put us at around a 21 game season. The problem is deciding which of those games get played and which don't. We really need some brains working on this one. I'm thinking of trying to break down the NHL schedule in terms of division games, conference games, etc. so that it fits the length we want (gee...that sounds like what EA should have done ) This is how the schedule is built:

Each team in the NHL plays 82 regular season games, 41 games at home and 41 on the road. In all, 1230 games are played. In the 2008–09 season, the NHL regular season reverted to the format used before the 2004–05 Lockout, where each team plays six games (three at home, three away) against the other teams in its division (a total of 24 games). Teams play all ten non-divisional teams in their own conference four times (twice at home, twice away, 40 total games). The remaining 18 games of the season are inter-conference play, allowing every team in the league to play every other team at least once. Each team plays 12 teams from the other conference once and plays the other three non-conference teams both home and away.[1] If a non-conference team is played only once, next year's schedule will include at least one game between the same two teams at the opposite venue. The schedule is structured so that every NHL team plays in every arena at least once every two years. For the six Canadian teams in the league prior to 2011-2012, the extra three inter-conference games were always against the three Canadian teams in the other conference. This ensured that all Canadian teams played home and away against their Canadian non-conference opponents each season, and each of the non-conference U.S. teams once per year. For the American teams, the extra three games are rotated each season between the twelve non-conference U.S. opponents in a way designed to ensure each U.S. team will play five regular season games against each U.S. team in the other conference over a four season cycle (two games in one of the seasons and one game in each of the other three seasons). Following the 2011 relocation of the Atlanta Thrashers to Winnipeg, the league decided not to alter the season structure for the following season, meaning that the new Winnipeg Jets are still being treated as a U.S. Eastern Conference team for the purposes of the 2011-12 schedule.

The ugly side of playing less than the full 82 games is that for games that if we're simming 3/4 of the season...you have to question how much we're even in control. As I said, I don't really love either option, and I think it's pathetic that EA didn't think that this could be an issue. But I feel like we're basically having to decide between the lesser of two evils here. Figure out what the best option is, and just take the bad with the good. All input will be considered and is appreciated.

As I was messing around with the online GM mode today I had an idea as to how to handle the schedule...

If you set the games available option to 2 weeks that would give everyone 5-6 games to pick from. If you had a set day (every Monday for example) that the league advanced it would be up to the individual GM's as to how many games, of that 6 game block, they wanted to play for that week. This would give the GM the option because I personally would play the majority of my games but a GM that doesn't have as bad of a video game addiction could choose to play fewer if they wanted. This would cure the issue of how much control you have over how your team does.....the more games you play obviously the more you control your record.

Originally Posted by mnwild22 As I was messing around with the online GM mode today I had an idea as to how to handle the schedule... If you set the games available option to 2 weeks that would give everyone 5-6 games to pick from. If you had a set day (every Monday for example) that the league advanced it would be up to the individual GM's as to how many games, of that 6 game block, they wanted to play for that week. This would give the GM the option because I personally would play the majority of my games but a GM that doesn't have as bad of a video game addiction could choose to play fewer if they wanted. This would cure the issue of how much control you have over how your team does.....the more games you play obviously the more you control your record.

Except that's not an option when most of the league is comprised of human owners. It's not reasonable to expect anybody to schedule 6-7 games in a 2 week period...and even if we did...we'd STILL be following the real NHL schedule, meaning we wouldn't finish season one until June.

Originally Posted by n8rockerasu Except that's not an option when most of the league is comprised of human owners. It's not reasonable to expect anybody to schedule 6-7 games in a 2 week period...and even if we did...we'd STILL be following the real NHL schedule, meaning we wouldn't finish season one until June.

Can the GM's set their games to sim when they don't want to play? This way if you don't want to play all 82 you don't need to. And IF you have that addiction and want to play fifteen games in a three day span you can.

I still can't download it so I'm talking directly out of my ass right now. Is that even possible?

The more I think about it, the more I feel that this just won't work if we have to do a full 82 game season. If we have any goal of doing multiple seasons we gotta at least 3 or 4, maybe 5 weeks virtual ime in one week real time. I the only thing I can think of now is to play one we, and then sim 3 or 4 "blocks." Like Nate said, at that point, but we're only playing a quarter of a season, and so what's hhe point?

Originally Posted by Captain OBVIOU5 Can the GM's set their games to sim when they don't want to play? This way if you don't want to play all 82 you don't need to. And IF you have that addiction and want to play fifteen games in a three day span you can. I still can't download it so I'm talking directly out of my ass right now. Is that even possible?

The problem with this is that it ends up rewarding the people with the most free time. Those of us with jobs, wives, kids, school, etc. are going to suffer. IF the CPU was a reasonable replacement, and games weren't just an automatic win, then MAYBE we could consider that. I feel like that's what EA was counting on...it's just a tough sell for me. I feel like ultimately, making sure everybody plays the same number of games is the most fair thing.

Originally Posted by moojuice The more I think about it, the more I feel that this just won't work if we have to do a full 82 game season. If we have any goal of doing multiple seasons we gotta at least 3 or 4, maybe 5 weeks virtual ime in one week real time. I the only thing I can think of now is to play one we, and then sim 3 or 4 "blocks." Like Nate said, at that point, but we're only playing a quarter of a season, and so what's hhe point?

Yeah...that's why I'm really disappointed with this mode. For EA to not have the foresight to realize that the entire purpose of this mode is playing multiple seasons...and that thinking any multi-player experience is capable of playing 82 games is ridiculous. And when it gets to the point that you're simming more than 50% of your games, how much of an impact can you really feel that you're having?

I don't know. The best "solution" I can come up with is just that we only play division games during the regular season (which would be 24 games). At least that way, in theory, the division races should be decided pretty fairly. And if we're able to fairly determine who deserves to go to the playoffs, that's probably the best we can hope for. It would probably be kinda boring...as you'd only play 4 different teams. But then when the playoffs started, we'd all get new teams to play.

If somebody really wanted to break down the schedule and branch out a bit more, we could probably figure out how to only play half the division games and also include some conference games, but that amount of effort shouldn't be necessary. I'm starting to feel another EA Facebook rant coming on. It boggles my mind thinking that leagues may have actually been better as they were. Pretty sad.

And yeah, to put things into perspective as far as games played and advancement goes, the Official Madden league completed 5 seasons last year, playing essentially the entire year. That's a 17 week season and 4 rounds of playoffs (so basically "21 games"). They played a game every 3 days. For NHL, we've got the 82 game schedule to figure out...plus 4 rounds of best of 7 playoff series...to complete ONE season. How EA thought that was feasible, I have no idea. My only request is for people to scour the EA forums and Operation Sports to see if anybody comes up with a better idea of how to manage it. If the best thing anyone can come up with is simming 75% of the season...I don't know what to say.

Would splitting it up into multiple leagues help? Like an east and a west league, or go further and break into divisions? Something more realistic to finish while still competitive

The problem with multiple leagues would be coming back together for playoffs. Depending on roster moves, it will practically be impossible to recreate teams for playoffs.

Really hope the option to chose season length gets patched in. Just find its funny that there is a 25 season cap... Don't know how someone could get that far without simming

Originally Posted by wiz2020 Would splitting it up into multiple leagues help? Like an east and a west league, or go further and break into divisions? Something more realistic to finish while still competitive

If we're going to do that, we might as well just go all the way and do an "on paper" league, just creating our own schedule and doing unranked games. Of course, that would eliminate trades, contracts, free agency, scouting, drafts, etc. I appreciate thinking outside the box. I just don't know at what point if becomes stupid.

For that matter, I even thought of breaking up into "teams" and trying to do our own EASHL. Then, for our "hockey nights" we could play games vs the computer and whatnot, and possibly get through the season quicker. We could decide how many players we'd want on a team, nominate captains, and then even do a "draft" so the teams aren't too unbalanced. Hell, or we could do a random lottery to decide who's on a team together. Then, we could just use random rosters for the teams since we have to use NHL players instead of our created BAP guys.

I just can't believe that I'm getting the feeling that having so many users is actually hurting us here. You're either forced to play all 82 games, or you're forcing people to allow their games to be simmed. At least straight up games vs the CPU wouldn't be as big of a deal to sim. But if I'm available to play on Monday, but my opponent can't play Monday...do I force him to let me play the CPU? It just becomes a huge freaking mess. It took me 10 seconds to see these problems. EA should have figured this out months ago.