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NHL 13 News Post


In NHL 13,we approached Be a Pro and EA SPORTS Hockey League in two ways: change the way you play the game and address what the community wanted to see improved.

The biggest change you’ll see with both modes this year is how your AI teammates play around you. We spent more time working on AI this year than across the past three years combined. The result is EA SPORTS Hockey I.Q., a completely overhauled A.I. system where players are now fully aware of every other player on the ice, resulting in quicker, smarter and more true-to-life decision-making. It also delivers the deepest and most customizable set of real-world hockey systems and strategies ever for the franchise.

The introduction of EA SPORTS Hockey I.Q. into Be a Pro and EA SPORTS Hockey League means smarter teammates and a better gameplay experience for you. Let’s dig into the community requested improvements that we made.


Be a Pro Improvements

NHL 12 introduced Be a Pro Revamped which gave you the option to start your career in the CHL and forced you to earn your ice time. The better you played, the more time on the ice you’d receive. This was all made possible by the EA SPORTS Action Tracker which tracked your performance and allowed you to sim to your next shift, drastically decreasing the time you spend waiting on the bench for your player’s next shift. All-new coach tasks were introduced as you worked to progress through 18 career levels to take your pro to the top.

In NHL 13 we’re building upon the success of Be a Pro Revamped with the addition of some of the EA SPORTSNHL community’s most frequently requested features:


Trading
  • Users can now request trades from their NHL Teams (requested on My Game Idea)
  • If a user requests a trade they will be placed on the trade block if they are of high enough trade value.
  • If the user does not meet the trade value requirement the user will be warned for requesting a trade and not being good enough.
  • If the user continues to ask for a trade they will get demoted from the line they are currently on and can even end up being sent down to the minors if they continually ask for a trade.
Retiring
  • Once a user feels that they want to end their career they can simply retire.
  • The user can view their career stats once they have retired.
EA SPORTS Hockey League Improvements

Regional Matchmaking:

In NHL 13 we have revamped some of our matchmaking parameters to help find closer matches in skill and location. When creating a club or while in the GM Settings screen, the user has the option to set their Club Region to best suit their current location. We will also show you which region is recommended by pinging all three of our game host centers to determine which is closest to you by the response times received. Since we now only match within the region you’ve selected, we increased the search timers to a maximum of 4 minutes to help find a closer skilled team with a similar number of players within your region. We do have the ability to adjust some of these depending on community response from different regions.

6-Player Leaderboards:

One of the most requested EASHL features on the EA forums has made it into NHL 13. We now track 6-player club games on their own leaderboards alongside the other leaderboards that are currently in-game. Not only will everyone know who the top 6-player club is during the season, but we will also be giving out in game awards to the top 6-player club and the clubs that finish within the top 10 and top 100 respectively. To qualify for the 6-player club leaderboards you must start and finish the game with 6 players on your team. The team you match up with does not have to have 6 players, however if you attempt to drop players when losing, you will still be ranked on the 6-player leaderboard with the loss.

Performance Points Multiplier:

To encourage teams to play with more human players, we have adjusted the performance points multiplier to be determined by the number of human players on your team. A two player team will always receive a multiplier of one, whereas a 6-player team would receive an approximate multiplier of 1.6. For example, if a team had 25 performance points, and was playing with 6 players, their total performance points would be 40. The multiplier value can be tuned server side if the community finds that it is becoming too unbalanced.

Club Captains:

In NHL 13, you will be able to assign captains and alternate captains to players in your club. Club GMs will have the ability to assign one captain and up to two alternates, or no captain and up to three alternates from the Club Roster screen. Captains and alternates will display C’s and A’s respectively in gameplay, however goalies will not have a C or A on their jerseys.

Club Matchmaking Settings Saved to Server:

Regular Season and Playoff Captain’s Options settings can now be saved in the GM Settings screen and will be automatically loaded when you enter the Club Dressing room. Players are still able to modify the search options from within the dressing room; however, they will only be saved from the GM Settings screen.

Club Join Request changes:

The naming of Public and Private club options have been changed slightly to better include the addition of the GM Friends option. Public/Private club is now called “Auto Join Club” [Yes/No] but it also has an option to only allow GM Friends to be able to auto join. A similar option exists in the “Accepting Join Requests” option where you can set it to GM Friends Only to only allow join request from friends.

Back-out Penalty:

Over the years we have read posts about teams cherry picking their opponents, and ducking teams when they are not the home team. Users have mentioned that nothing is more frustrating than winning an Elite Championship the month before and having half the teams quit out on you once they realize this in game.

We feel that with the matchmaking improvements we have done, there should be no reason to back-out on your opponents in NHL 13. The back-out penalty is intended to punish the quitting team whether they quit from the Side Select or prior to the one minute mark in game. Anything after the one minute mark of game is tracked as a Did Not Finish (DNF) Loss so there is no need for additional punishment.

Consecutive back-outs are able to stack, and the punishment results in a deduction of rank points upon the next completed regular season game if it results in a win. DNF losses post 1 min mark, and Playoff games will carry any back-out penalties to the next game. Side Select and Pre-Game back-outs can be weighted differently and we can choose to implement a grace number of back-outs before the penalty would apply. Penalty amounts per back-out, Max penalty amount, and free back-out amounts can all be adjusted server side per back-out type.

Source - NHL 13 Be a Pro and EA SPORTS Hockey League Improvements

Game: NHL 13Reader Score: 8/10 - Vote Now
Platform: PS3 / Xbox 360Votes for game: 23 - View All
NHL 13 Videos
Member Comments
# 1 jyoung @ 07/31/12 09:40 PM
Quote:
Originally Posted by EA
We feel that with the matchmaking improvements we have done, there should be no reason to back-out on your opponents in NHL 13.
Lag is a pretty valid reason to back out of a game, and it's something you aren't able to judge accurately until the puck drops.

I don't agree with punishing teams for backing out just because a game is laggy.

How about giving us a matchmaking system that shows an exact numerical ping pre-match like PC games do instead of displaying a vague and often flat-out-wrong 3-bar color-coded connection?

Under the current system, you can have the maximum 3-bar green connection on the position select screen, but once you drop the puck, the game can still end up being a choppy slide-show.
 
# 2 gator3guy @ 07/31/12 11:04 PM
I always have 3 green bars. Don't mean **** in-game.
 
# 3 ComaFaction @ 07/31/12 11:18 PM
I'm still curious how much time they've actually spent on the AI compared to past years...
 
# 4 Majingir @ 07/31/12 11:40 PM
Quote:
Originally Posted by Steve_OS
http://www.easports.com/nhl/news/art...e-improvements

In NHL 13,we approached Be a Pro and EA SPORTS Hockey League in two ways: change the way you play the game and address what the community wanted to see improved.

The biggest change you’ll see with both modes this year is how your AI teammates play around you. We spent more time working on AI this year than across the past three years combined. The result is EA SPORTS Hockey I.Q., a completely overhauled A.I. system where players are now fully aware of every other player on the ice, resulting in quicker, smarter and more true-to-life decision-making. It also delivers the deepest and most customizable set of real-world hockey systems and strategies ever for the franchise.
Did they mean more time on the AI for be a pro and EASHL, or just more time on the AI overall(meaning all game modes, from exhibition to online mode).
 
# 5 The Visualizer @ 07/31/12 11:42 PM
unsurprisingly these announcements are a disappointment, looks like they spent as little time and effort as possible on EASHL as usual...

Biggest oversights IMO

-3 game host centers, how is that different than now? I thought they were adding more regional locations to help with lag?

-matchmaking only takes region into effect, not club skill level, and also may take up to 4 minutes now to find a game, this is not much of an improvement. Elite teams will still frequently be matched up with cupcakes

-back out penalty still doesn't address a team conceding a goal in the 1st minute and still being allowed to quit and not take the loss.

-no solution for multiple dressing rooms?

-no mention of any improvements to team/jersey creation

-no changes to the broken attributes system that right now allows created players too much XP and flexibility to max out too many important attributes at the same time
 
# 6 goalieump413 @ 08/01/12 12:39 AM
Quote:
Originally Posted by Majingir
Did they mean more time on the AI for be a pro and EASHL, or just more time on the AI overall(meaning all game modes, from exhibition to online mode).
Just more time on AI in general. But it sounds like it's no different than GMC. For me, this is gameplay critical. If they didn't make the AI logic equal across all game modes, then gamers would love one mode, and hate another. Not good for product reputation.
 
# 7 voodoo_magic @ 08/01/12 12:40 AM
Quote:
Originally Posted by Majingir
Did they mean more time on the AI for be a pro and EASHL, or just more time on the AI overall(meaning all game modes, from exhibition to online mode).
For all game modes.
 
# 8 JezFranco @ 08/01/12 07:20 AM
Quote:
Originally Posted by ComaFaction
I'm still curious how much time they've actually spent on the AI compared to past years...
XD

Post of the year, and its just august.
 
# 9 The Visualizer @ 08/02/12 10:49 PM
found this great news on the EA Forums...

Quote:
EASHL Pro – Edit Attribute Changes

http://forum.ea.com/eaforum/posts/li...87113F2ED25841

Hey everyone,

There has been a lot of good discussion about the EASHL recently so let’s keep that up. I recently realized that I forgot to mention that we did a few small tweaks to the EASHL Pro regarding player types and how you can spend your XP. NHL is always tuned using NHL players and teams and we do not have separate gameplay for EASHL specially.

This year we have decided that you can no longer be better than an NHL player in any stats for EASHL, that way we don’t see 99 wrist shot accuracy and power being able to blow shots past goalies as easily. You will no longer be able to have 99 of any stat. We tuned the values based on real life NHL players within their respective player types.

For example, for snipers, we have a hard cap at 95 for wrist shot accuracy. The cap depends on the player type and what they “Should” be good and bad at. A Playmaker for example, would be able to get up to a 95 passing, but not up to a 90 rating shooting. We feel that by adding a cap for each stat based on player type does remove some of the freedoms you once had, but also forces people to choose a player type that more or less suites their style of play. We want NHL 13 to feel different with the new skating system, and we do not want people to have unbalanced players by being able to have 99 speed and agility for example.

You will also notice the player overall ratings will be much lower. This is somewhat of an unwanted result of the offline player rating separation that happened, but really the EASHL Pro’s overall rating doesn’t mean anything. The individual stats are the most important.

Also note that these caps were set while using the Boost Slots applied so we ensured that even while using boosts you could not go over an unwanted level. This will result in some people thinking some of the caps are set too low, but you must factor in the +8 boost you would apply to your pro.
 
# 10 Fiddy @ 08/03/12 11:12 AM
Quote:
Originally Posted by The Visualizer
found this great news on the EA Forums...


that was for the dev team capping the EASHL Be A Pro Attributes..

FINALLY..

i had been asking for this since they started this stuff.

with that said, being able to get to 95 in some categories IMO is still over the top. they should have capped those at 90. again IMO, the best times to play in the EASHL is within the first month of the game being out. guys are more leveled out, evenly matched etc. so much fun!!

i know guys know personally cap their players at 95 bc they feel its a waste to have anything higher (the exception maybe speed).

hopefully this is done right and there are no glitches to it where guys can get past the cap. (crossing fingers)
 
# 11 liberaluser @ 08/03/12 12:05 PM
I'm having a hard time believing the NHL series has truly changed its ways in regards to the brokeness of the EASHL. Maybe it's being promised real hockey all these years and not getting it has made me very jaded and skeptical of their game changer marketing.

The progression system has always been a broken mess and now they finally start doing simple stuff like level caps and spreading out ratings. With that track record none of it will be close to perfectly implemented the first time they fix it.

Ditto gameplay advances. This is the same team that didn't acknowledge how awful and floaty the skating engine was online and made worse with tuners, despite the fact with a few slider adjustments offline you could make it much better. Now it's perfect enough in a laggy environment to compete with the skill stick?

My point being that NHL's hockey revolution this year is more of an evolution to throw the fans a bone and we shouldn't expect a level of polish that the team has never, ever delivered in a timely fashion.
 
# 12 FBeaule04 @ 08/03/12 02:19 PM
I can't go over the fact they are advertising the fact that inception of "simming to the next shift" was such a great addition when someone who was an expert in how to build a tupperware was hired to program the line change.

If I see a D-Man teammates going to the bench for my player to get on when the play is behind our net, I swear I'm going to start training for Frisbee with the game disc.

BaP biggest problems last year was line change and bad AI. They said they worked on the AI, but no word on the line change.

I'll keep my fingers crossed!
 
# 13 bad_philanthropy @ 08/03/12 11:18 PM
I want to see custom period length for BaP when using sim to next shift. While sim to next shift is an idea I wanted, I don't want to play a full game of twenty minute periods and twenty odd shifts. Let me play with sim to next shift at whatever period length I want. I'd play the hell out of BaP if this were the case. I could burn through a lot of games quickly like in RttS.
 
# 14 plaidchuck @ 08/06/12 12:43 PM
Good stuff with the eashl caps. This is at least a band aid to the gushing wound if they were unable/unwilling to balance out the attributes more. Hopefully they've done that somewhat anyways, where each attribute is equally important instead of past years where balance/speed trumped all.

Dissappointed with the BAPs improvements. That's it? Ask for trades and retire?
 
# 15 [Icy] @ 08/13/12 09:08 AM
Good news overall but hope also that they have fixed the issue with "sim to next shift" and "text sim" had a very different number of shoots.

One option had very little compared with real life, and the other had way too much.

No mention to that, so i guess they haven't even noticed it.
 

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