Last night I played a little OTP because none of my clubmates were online for EASHL. (For the record, while the NHL 11 demo is awesome, there are only so many third periods one can play in a row.)

I play left defense so finding games is not a problem since most OTP players just jump at a chance to play forward and rake in those awesome points. Of course, they usually do this by holding on to the puck and making sure that they never pass it around, thus making playing D easy if not a little boring at times.

Here is a brief summary of the games:

• The first game we scored two goals in the first period, and the game was looped.
• The second game the opposing center took a stupid penalty in the second period, looped. The game was tied 0-0 at the time.
• The third game our left wing called for a couple of unwise passes from the AI goalie, down 0-2, looped.
• The fourth game the opposition was down 0-3, then they tried to loop the game but somehow the loop got reversed after about three minutes, and those of us who stayed in the game managed to finish it.

Four games in a row looping was attempted and there was a success ratio of 75 percent. Now, for those unaware of what "looping" is, basically it is a glitch that causes the game to crash and (usually) ends with it not counting. There are a couple different types of looping glitches, but probably the most popular one tends to occur when someone pauses the game, and then via sneaky ways gets the game to get caught in a faceoff loop once everyone returns to action on the ice.

I also have to say that my random OTP games are not always that bad. In my experience, maybe one in five OTP games gets looped at the moment. In the EASHL, maybe one in 10 ends with a looping fiasco. Four games in a row was just bad luck I suppose, but even if the loop rate is 10 percent of games, it is still too much.

The thing that makes loop glitching so much more annoying compared to the usual cheese on the ice is the fact that there is nothing you can do about it. If someone is trying to score goals by abusing the game mechanics, you can adjust your defense and take those opportunities away from the cheeser for the most part. It's not fun, but it can be done.

With the faceoff loop, there are tricks you can try to avoid being looped. The problem is that, short of not playing the game, nothing works for sure. You can try and dump the puck over the boards, score a goal, score an own goal, take a penalty etc. But still, the loop will usually keep on looping.

The only thing that reduces your chances of being looped is the "Never Press Resume" rule. Whether it is a cut scene, intermission or a pause, never press a button to resume play. Never.

Following this rule makes the games last about five minutes longer than usual, and you have to obediently follow the rule. One innocent press of a button and wham, you just wasted 30 minutes of your life because someone could not handle the inevitability of a loss.

And since using this glitch has spread like a Russian wildfire over the past six months, people are starting to use it for the most ridiculous reasons. Get a penalty, loop the game. If people do not pass to you often enough, loop the game. Not enough points scored, loop the game.

You get the picture, right?

Then there is the minor detail of EA not addressing the problem.

The loop glitch, as far as I know, has been around for a while. In other words, this is not just an NHL 10 problem. However, I have to say "as far as I know" because I did not get into online hockey until this year. There had been promises that the glitch would be fixed in NHL 10, but the same glitch is obviously still around. Maybe it is slightly evolved, but it still results in the game not counting.

So how can EA ignore our cries of frustration without either fixing the problem for good or acknowledging the problem and talking to the fans about it?

Every single EA NHL forum is filled with threads about this glitch. People are complaining about it, or they are trying to find counter measures to fight the phenomenon, or people are talking about using the loop glitch to fight other glitchers.

Even reporting the glitching teams in the EASHL to EA directly is too difficult, and even if you do report the team, it does not usually lead to the team in the wrong being punished. And because of EA's terms of service agreement, we cannot even post the offending team names or Gamertags/PSN IDs to EA's own forums, thus making it harder to avoid teams that are known to loop.

And here's the real catch. Even if EA decides to ban a team from the playoffs after numerous complaints about the team, how does that help the non-playoff teams who have had to suffer the consequences all year? Plus, if EA deletes a team and their record, the loopers will just start another team and hope that they get away with cheating this time around.

Looping is essentially a get out of jail free card that can be used over and over again. Knowing how easy it is to get out of a loss in the EASHL once you have mastered the art of looping also makes me wonder about the validity of the rankings. When I look at the top teams in the EASHL, I can see a couple of teams who have looped us, and we are ranked just behind those teams in the top 10,000.

Simply put, I sincerely hope that this issue will be fixed in NHL 11. There are over 500,000 people who play in the EASHL alone, and the frustration of playing games that will not finish or count is just too much sometimes.