Eastside Hockey Manager: Early Access is Live! Official Feedback Thread

[Fmfan00]

Am I missing something or are there only 5 nations only in game as playable?

[podunkboy]

Am I missing something or are there only 5 nations only in game as playable?

I believe it was mentioned either here or on Steam's page that because it's early-access, they haven't got all the potential nations in-game yet. (Plus, they'd have to negotiate for all the league rights).

from the Steam EA page:

- Contemporary League Structures

EHM: EA includes 11 playable leagues (with more planned to be added during early access), each one featuring the up-to-date structure and rules from the current season.

[BoxToBox]

After a lot of poking around and reading up, I've dived in with a proper save. Still in pre-season.

The part that mostly has me slowed down at the moment is the squad, my FM instinct is telling me to ditch half the useless 24+ year olds in my farm club for draft picks or whatever, but there must be a reason that NHL teams keep so many reserves about.

EDIT: Also, I've read that anything lower than a top 10 draft pick is useless, which makes little sense as IRL lots of good players come in other rounds surely. Also makes my plan to stockpile draft picks a no go.

[smgers]

Just bought the game despite having limited to no knowledge of how the management side of hockey works! Apart from watching the odd game on the tv and playing NHL on the Playstation that is about it!

Have downloaded some rosters/facepacks/logos and read up on various things in order to make a start - if anything at least I will learn all about a new sport.

the game does look very in depth and has that familiar FM feel about it - may just take me a long time to get to the start of the season! Anyway if anything it will be a refreshing change from playing FM all the time and at that price I really couldn't turn it down!

[Sardaukar]

Started with Detroit and 4 games to regular season (plus pre-season), still unbeaten despite having AI to handle tactics & training. Looks good.

I'd like some more suggestions from e.g. Head Coach if team needs strengthening in some area. And maybe some more FM-style interactions with staff and players.

While familiar with ice hockey, drafts, waivers, salary caps etc....are bit more alien to Europeans, so it takes some time to get used to them. And general difficulty to trade players compared to FM.

[Jason the Yank]

Went to a shootout, but there wasn't a "scoreboard" like in FM (as in, I could see that the game went to the shootout tied 4-4, but I couldn't see where we were in the shootout, like me being up 1-0 or 2-1)

[kullipylly]

I noticed the Steam in-game overlay doesn't seem to work. It's not crucial, particularly with the game only running in windowed mode, but it's definitely nice to have.

Overlay is a must have, so you don't have to alt+tab everytime to chat with others.

[kullipylly]

Went to a shootout, but there wasn't a "scoreboard" like in FM (as in, I could see that the game went to the shootout tied 4-4, but I couldn't see where we were in the shootout, like me being up 1-0 or 2-1)

Shootout is tracked in Boxscore? I am not sure if it is realtime since i use fast forward xD.

[Redsea1689]

Head Coaches seemed to get fired a lot. I'm almost done with my first regular season and +10 HC got fired. Latest victim Quenneville with a 39-30-7 record:rolleyes:

[sluice]

Game is great. Already have pumped over 20 hours in, since it's release...

I'm currently playing my 4th career as the leafs...here are my notes as of yet:

(NOTE: I'm using TBL rosters)

Repetition?

I noticed quite often the same players get traded or waived. It's almost like you could predict the what will happened.

A, B, C, D are always going to be waived. E, F, G will always be traded.

Reconstruction VS Cup Aspiring

We need to somehow to differentiate the reconstructing team from the cup aspiring ones.

Teams in "reconstruction mode" should be really wary of trading prospects and draft picks. While cup aspiring teams are more keen to moving those assets in search of the missing piece of the puzzle.

For instance, there is no way the Rangers would get rid of St. Louis (like they always did in my 4 careers)

Buffalo 1st overall pick should be really hard to get.

Around the NHL trade deadline, these two groups always separate each other as buyers and sellers.... I think this important feature is missing in the game.

Scoring is really high

I'm halfway through my first year with the Leafs.

With a few trades and some tactics management, I've created a monster.

-I have 3 guys that are playing at(or over) 2 points per games. (Gretzky records are not out of scope..)

-Half of my team is player at 8.00 AVR.

-I keep winning by large margin (8-0, 7-0, 6-1, 10-3, etc.)

-I am by far #1 in the league in Goal For. (like 50% more goals than #2)

In all honesty I'm stocked about my team.. but It's somehow too easy.. and Kessel should not have 45 goals and 45 assists after 40 games.

Bozak should not have 20 goals and 60 assists after 40 games, lol.

[Jason the Yank]

Shootout is tracked in Boxscore? I am not sure if it is realtime since i use fast forward xD.

Maybe. I was watching the 2D game.

[Supertrooper]

After a lot of poking around and reading up, I've dived in with a proper save. Still in pre-season.

The part that mostly has me slowed down at the moment is the squad, my FM instinct is telling me to ditch half the useless 24+ year olds in my farm club for draft picks or whatever, but there must be a reason that NHL teams keep so many reserves about.

EDIT: Also, I've read that anything lower than a top 10 draft pick is useless, which makes little sense as IRL lots of good players come in other rounds surely. Also makes my plan to stockpile draft picks a no go.

Teams in the AHL, ECHL and such are *kindof* like feeder clubs in soccer. They sortof function as their own team like a feeder would but the NHL team usually has a lot of say over those teams like who the coaching staff is, where the team will geographically be located, they supplement some of those teams income, and these teams cannot gain promotion/relegationas as this is not part of NA sports. Having said all of that, NHL teams actually have contracts with most of the prospects on those AHL (and sometimes ECHL) teams and instead of thinking about it like they have a bunch of guys available for loan, they have a finite number of guys in the NHL (23 to be exact) and everyone else that is a young prospect is sent to the minors, and that minor team has little say in playing them. So, that might have been more information than you were looking for but the tl:dr version is the NHL team often doesn't have contracts with many of those 24+ none prospect guys cause the AHL team is technically a separate team.

Anyways, I have a few suggestions to offer and I'm not sure how practical or easy they are to implement.

Trade block. I noticed when I put someone on the trade block, I got offers from about half the league offering roughly the same value in draft picks. I'm guessing each player has a value attached to them based on stats and then any team that has their position/skillset as a need offers his value for him. Is there a way you can have a team rate their needs from maybe acquire at whatever cost to only acquire if it's a good deal for us? Basically, each team should have a different demand for a certain player based on what he brings to the table compared to what they need.

Along the same lines (and i haven't played to a trade deadline yet so this may already be in place) If multiple teams are trying to acquire the same player, you should be able to ask more for him as teams will be in a bidding war.

*EDIT*

Forgot to add this. I notice that when a coach is left to assign lines , its like he ranks the players 1-12 (for forwards) and 1-6 (for Dmen) and thats how they go into the lineup. Although this seems like the obvious thing to do, most teams that have 2 star players, rarely place both of them on the same like (Datsyuk-Zetterburg, Kane-Toews, Crosby-Malkin just to name some examples). I wanted to run the red wings like they are in real like, a puck possession team that tries to negate it's weakness and spreads out its talent. However, i feel like Since I have one of the best coaches in the league, he'll "exploit" the game code better than me and I'd be foolish not to let him take care of everything.

[Lucas]

We've updated to 15.0.2b now, changelist thread here: http://community.sigames.com/showthread.php/423940-Update-Changelist-for-EHM-EA-15.0.2b

[swede]

We've updated to 15.0.2b now, changelist thread here: http://community.sigames.com/showthread.php/423940-Update-Changelist-for-EHM-EA-15.0.2b

Great news! Looking forward to reading my scout reports without fear now.

[andda715]

Awesome, thanks for the prompt bug fixes!

[kullipylly]

In all honesty I'm stocked about my team.. but It's somehow too easy.. and Kessel should not have 45 goals and 45 assists after 40 games.

Bozak should not have 20 goals and 60 assists after 40 games, lol.

I agree that the game feels too easy

[pedersenk]

The only thing I'd change is adding coach stats. That's it. Other than that small addition, it's perfect. Thank you guys.

[umwoz]

The inconsistency between games is curious. I've seen games with guys getting 2 PPG, I've seen games where nobody reaches 100 points.

[Peter G]

AI Trades are my biggest gripe right now.

NYR just traded MSL for the rights to Nick Ritchie. That's it.

I think they see that they're over the cap so just trade the highest paid player instead of others.

[umwoz]

AI Trades are my biggest gripe right now.

NYR just traded MSL for the rights to Nick Ritchie. That's it.

I think they see that they're over the cap so just trade the highest paid player instead of others.

I don't mean to question you directly, but Nick Ritchie is a highly touted top 10 pick. Was a point per game over his entire junior career. I could see circumstances based on performance in which that trade would make some sense.

[Jason the Yank]

I highly doubt MSL would be traded straight up for Nick Ritchie IRL.

Ritchie might be the centerpiece of the haul for MSL, but there'd be other pieces going with him. I could see MSL for Ritchie and a 2nd or 3rd, something like that.

[Ruh Roh]

I highly doubt MSL would be traded straight up for Nick Ritchie IRL.

Ritchie might be the centerpiece of the haul for MSL, but there'd be other pieces going with him. I could see MSL for Ritchie and a 2nd or 3rd, something like that.

The cap issue's supposed to be at the center of the Rangers moving MSL every game, but I think I remember seeing Jagr go undrafted in a fantasy draft so maybe really old players are undervalued too.

[Mars_Blackmon]

AI seem to be too trigger happy with firing headcoaches.

[BoxToBox]

Just after having my first draft. That could get addictive.

[Riz Remes]

Just a note on some issues mentioned above:

The AI for trimming roster when over the salary cap was earlier putting too many high-waged players on the block despite smaller cuts being enough, causing some odd trades. This has since been revamped to work a lot better in the future.

AI for trading has also been revamped for both evaluating pick and players, as well as the overall assessment of the trade.

These and obviously a lot more other tweaks and fixes are all included in the first proper update to Early Access (we have bi-weekly updates planned).

[monty99]

With the EIHL and EPL playoff finals weekend on this weekend, would love to have the uk leagues playable

[Mars_Blackmon]

Having 2 Goalies needs to be stressed more in this game, I as well as the AI can run with our #1 Goalie mostly all year because fatigue isn't really a problem. Also AI will use their #1 Goalie all preseason without giving their backup any games not even as a sub during the game.

Also it would be cool if Alternate Captains were shown in the game stats just like the Captain © is shown just so we can view who the 3 captains are for the AI teams or if the user chose to let the coach handle lineups we can see who he named as Alternates.

[Colorado]

Having 2 Goalies needs to be stressed more in this game, I as well as the AI can run with our #1 Goalie mostly all year because fatigue isn't really a problem. Also AI will use their #1 Goalie all preseason without giving their backup any games.

Agreed with this - a GK can literally play every minute of the season. Please can GK confidence/fatigue be looked at?

[tps4ever]

One little thing, what have annoyed me every version of EHM is that player value not stay same when you put bigger asking value, it would be nice, if it be like in FM.

[Sabres1986]

I was just playing ehm 07 and i thought of another possible idea to add to ehm EA which junior teams and NHl teams have...

NHL has those rookie tournaments before their training camp it would be interesting to be able to have those 4 regular season games and then playofff games in ehm 07 i believe the most games u can play in a tournament is 3..

Major Junior Wise maybe add in training camp to hold a rookie camp before their training camp begins... right now in ehm 07 what i do for my ohl team is August 25th 31st i schedule something like 4-5 games which i put together 1 or 2 different teams and they will play 2-3 games each to get a look and then the players who impress me get an invite to our main camp and the other return to their clubs and we still own their rights.

[BoundedCascade]

Could we get a load game without having to exit it?

[ricosuave]

I think that Tampa Bay is too strong in the game as a whole.

The goaltending AI needs to be addressed - should only ride streaks or alternate, but having one play almost the whole season is unrealistic.

Marquee players from the past rarely end up on the waiver wire, such as Martin St. Louis, and mid-high status players should get more of a return than a 4th and a 5th round pick.

If the trading AI gets looked at, it would be nice to see 'foolish' deals on deadline day, and draft day, deals where teams go all in more than they normally would during the season.

Would love to see arena name changes, and sponsorship deals

[Mars_Blackmon]

Barrage/high tempo tactics are very over powering in the game. You would think such tactics would result in less accurate shooting, stamina issue and injuries but none of the above are a problem throughout the course of a regular season schedule.

[necr0]

Does it is possible to have an increase of the salary cap in the NHL each season?

[kingofbrooklyn]

Miss having the "Actions" menu on the bottom left.

If you need someone to do Islanders attributes I'll volunteer, because having the guy (matt martin) who just broke the hits record (and has led the NHL in hits since he was a full time NHLer) have a pedestrian 13 bravery is a travesty.

Playing the game, almost exactly as I remember EHM 2007. I understand the changes are more behind the scenes but I'll put my thoughts in.

Positives

1. Trade AI is better overall (I'll get to the negatives later)

2. Regens are definitely noticeably more balanced in terms of their ratings compared to 2007

3. Financial/general NHL rules have been updated for the most part

4. It's hockey, it's EHM

Negatives

1. A lot of annoying things that existed in EHM still are there. For instance, if you wanted to find expired RFA players without a contract. You can't use the simple filters that are in the game, you have to do some crazy custom filtering Like Rights: Pro, Contract: UFA..bla etc.

2. While trade AI has been improved overall now it's impossible to acquire draft picks now. I understand this was probably to prevent abuse in trading but if I'm trying to trade for the number 25 pick. #30, #40, 42 should be more than enough. It's almost like there's some kind of AI logic that 1st round pick cannot be acquired for 2nd round picks. It's not impossible but I have to go through 10 different teams picking between 20-30 before one bit. Value for players does not fetch picks. A second liner rental should fetch you a low first round pick. Not happening in EHM. Curiously, it seems really easy to trade anyone for 4th round picks.

3. Waivers are still screwed up. Computer will trade for a player than waive him. Or AI will claim a player than waive him.

4. The interface feels dated. It looks good enough but I can't help but compare it to FM 15 which is unfair as FM has nearly a decade more of development time (and even more before EHM was first sold) but FM is so much more functional in terms of linking, easy access.

Things I'd like to see improved in the short term

1. The transactional AI mentioned above

2. Stat tweaking. While you no longer see 120+ point players like you did in EHM 2007, there are way too many PPG players.

3. Fully capture the new CBA to include ability to eat part of a contract when trading (AKA Keith Yandle)

4. Screen resolution. Don't really need to say more about this.

5. Practice update. FM practice is fairly transparent with its star system now. Seriously without Malhotra's EHM's old practice guide, I would have no idea where to start with this.

Things I'd like to see improved in the long run

1. Interface, interface interface. Information should be easier to access.

2. Better player personality interactions. Right now it seems the only thing I can do is set player status or offer new contract.

3. Advanced stats

4. Customizability. FM makes it easy to change colors of text, window size etc. I remember in EHM to change this stuff you had to screw up with a cfg file and adjust the red blue green levels to get the color you wanted for attributes.

5. Visual game engine (this is a huge project so more of a super long term goal). Watching matches is not that important to me but I must admit FM's new game engine is so improved, it's captivating at times.

EHM 2007 was a very good game but it was much less immersive and polished than even FM 07. I understand it's unfair to compare EHM to even FM 07 as EHM only had a few years of development before it was put on hold to begin with and now it's even farther behind the curve. FM also has significantly more resources at its disposable (hey it had Riz doing just a portion of the game). I mention FM because it's so good it made me a soccer fan. It's not perfect but its hands down my favorite sports sim to play even though soccer is still probably only my 4th favorite sport overall. Hopefully EHM development continues and slowly approached such levels of sport sim goodness. It's probably more realistic to compare it to OOTP (probably my second favorite sports sim and has maybe 85% of what I want in a sim) in terms of development but I hope to see EHM to be so good it creates new hockey fans, like FM converted me .

i agree with all of this as well. i've been playing ehm since 2007 and since this game isn't exactly built from the ground up there's a lot of the same game breaking exploits you can do. here's some upgrades i think would be good

- acquiring waiver fodder players and trading them for the first overall pick or a star in quantity for quality deals should be WAY harder to do

- coaches NEED to be more relevant to this game. i can't remember one time in my entire 8 years of playing this game that i left the coach to his own devices for an entire season. i can't even put him in charge of practice because he doesn't do it optimally.

- more concrete definition of all of the attributes

- have advanced stats like the ones on the "enhanced" nhl stat page.

- a revenue based salary cap instead of a static cap would also be cool, but i don't know if you guys fixed the 10,000 caphit glitch yet.

- fatigue also needs to play a bigger part. you could run with 2 lines, 3 pairings and 1 goaltender for an entire season and not have any significant repercussions.

- never understood why i couldn't make my guys have off-season surgery for nagging injuries, i could only do it if they had that specific injury.

- scoring has to be adjusted as well. the scoring in the nhl has gone down in recent years (it's stable at roughly 5.5 goals per game since 2010).

- the berserk aggressiveness and encouraged fighting needs a tweak. you could have a guy get 3000 PIM in a season and average a 7.5 rating which is kinda dumb imo. penalties aren't a good thing. fighting and getting 22 more penalty minutes in addition to the 5 for fighting isn't good for the team. suspensions need to be lengthier as well, especially for repeat offenders. encouraged fighting doesn't mean you get into a fight every game

- it's also frustrating when you can't send a player down because there's no room on the echl team. i know there's a 20 man roster limit but as the GM of the parent NHL club you should be able to affect moves at all levels. speaking of which, you should be able to sign with different affiliates (unless your team directly owns the AHL/ECHL team like the islanders do with bridgeport)

- another neat feature would be if players at the end of their career (35 years old +) were more interested in non playing roles. i could never get a guy to become an assistant coach or a scout, etc while he was still playing.

- scouts should also be able to scout the entry draft permanently. it would be useful to let us filter for coaching styles and preferred tactics.

- i also never got why i wasn't able to change a player's role when i first offer them a contract until like a week later.

- it might also be time to update the peak ages as recent research has shown that forwards have their best years between ages 24-32, dmen 24-34 and goalies are mostly random (http://www.cbc.ca/news/when-nhl-players-peak-hockey-metrics-1.2646054)

- it should be easier to apply for a national team job as well.

- the khl should be a bigger threat to european players (especially russians) and ahl scorers

- conditional draft picks

- retroactive ir placement

- using the search bar to also look up staff

[Pedestrian]

I noticed when I go on Vacation (for example when I go from Draft Day to July 1st) my team resigns UFAs that I was letting walk.

My Vacation settings are:

Set how to renew contracts - None

Set how to handle status of players - Allow Changes

Set how to react to receiving an offer for players - Reject All

Set who to make offers for - None

Apply for manager position at higher reputation teams - No

is it the status part that is re-signing players? I thought 'none' for renew contracts was suppose to stop this?

[breich]

Bugs I've noticed:

-After placing a player on the IR on the roster screen, selecting 'ask the coach' merely fills a random player to the slot, and not a position-specific player. 'ask the coach' should completely re-work the lines, imo.

-Players habitually dump the puck in just short of the center line.

-There's no capability to call a timeout.

-Swapping players between lines is slightly tedious. Currently I have to select the player from the left roster screen, and then click the line I want to send him to. Instead, I should be able to click a player in their line slot, and click another player, performing an instant swap. Focus would then ideally be reset to no player so I can continue performing place-for-place swaps.

-With a couple seconds remaining in the entire game, a goalie covered the puck. A couple seconds later, the game commentary said 'and that's the buzzer' when the game still had a couple seconds left.

-The faceoff music is really annoying and tedious. The long pauses between plays should fast-forward, imo, like how football manager does it.

-The lack of an auto-continue button is rather annoying when I'm trying to power sim through a handful of days.

-A shootout score indicator would be nice.

-When using the blue line database for the current season, Patrick Kane had a three month surgery injury. Either the game messed up or his injury time was delayed, but he was listed as 'out for three months' from September through December.

[VonCurry]

1. Scoring too high, several bad teams let in nearly 300 goals in a season and the lowest scoring had 207 goals scored.

2. Coaches and GMs get canned too much. Literally half the league had coaching or GM changes DURING the season....

To be honest, the game feels like a roster update for a "stock" EHM 07, except that I have to put more work in via downloading real rosters, logos etc. I shouldn't have to wait for another modder to fix the scoring problem in the game, that's y'alls job.

[Lucas]

15.1.0b update has been released now, it's a big one: http://community.sigames.com/showthread.php/424644-Update-Changelist-for-EHM-EA-15.1.0b

Hope to hear some feedback on the changes and new features

[Cleon]

I preferred the old style or attributes it was less in your face and felt less cartoony. That's just a personal preference though

[Viking]

First off: Thanks for reviving this game. I really hope people will buy it. I'll do my best to spread the word.

I haven't had much time to play it yet, despite I bought it on release day. Most of the bugs and other issues I've found so far seems to have been reported already (or fixed with the latest patch), such as the high scoring in NHL.

I will provide more feedback when I get the time to play it.

So happy about this.

[lomekian]

I preferred the old style or attributes it was less in your face and felt less cartoony. That's just a personal preference though

Me too - the update hurts my eyes..any chance of a choice?

[BoxToBox]

I much prefer the new attributes. Easier to read too.

[mne2]

Only looked at the update quickly but I liked the look of the new attributes

[kullipylly]

I preferred the old style or attributes it was less in your face and felt less cartoony. That's just a personal preference though

Same here

[krownroyal83]

I happen to love the way the attributes look. A lot easier to see. To each their own though.

[Sabres1986]

when i look at that update that was posted it was hard to talk that all in, in one sitting... Has anyone played the game since and how is it since the newest update..

[Cometdude]

Loving the new update! The skin feels crisp and fresh and I love the attributes

[Viking]

Is there a way to loan NHL-players back to Europe? If not, it would be a nice (and realistic) feature. If it's already there, I can't find it.

[gareth_14]

I preferred the old style or attributes it was less in your face and felt less cartoony. That's just a personal preference though

Agreed. It was easier to pick out the high-end attributes (17-20) with the old scheme. Now the high and middle are just slightly different shades of green.