@southpaw86
Thank you for the feedback. I absolutely mean that it's appreciated.
I know this community is disgruntled and everyday it's a disappointment. I've been playing this series for close to 30 years now. It's a very big part of me. So much so that it was the reason for my seeking employment here. So, when I say I understand, I truly do. However, my role is pretty limited. I don't decide what we can/can't communicate. I'd love for us to be more open and I'm regularly providing my own feedback on that. However, there is a big hesitancy because if we don't tell the community what they want to hear, it just makes things worse. We're not going to have all the answers and that's going to upset people more. We can't talk about what is coming, but I'm hoping we can give more insight in the future. I would like to see us at least try and if it does generate more toxicity, we'd probably pull back from doing that again.
Connections are never going to be perfect. Your neighbor could have an amazing connection while yours could be wildly different. I have said this more times than I know, but our servers are just one part of the equation that makes up a good connection. For example, my connection is great. I live in a home where there are many devices connected and there's either someone else gaming or streaming media while I play. I also stream music while I play. I regularly am in WoC games with friends on Northern servers when I'm in the US SW. Why is my connection so good when there are others with a much better proximity to those servers? It could be any number of reasons that we have no control over. It could be their equipment, the bandwidth being used in your home or neighborhood, your ISP's equipment, how your data is routed, etc. We don't have a way to test for this. The best we can do is monitor our servers for issues. When we get an influx of sudden reports about connections, it could be us. When it is, we see what's happening and get to work on it. However, when all is well and we have what essentially becomes a small part of the playerbase reporting connection problems, it makes it very difficult to find out what's causing that. We want you all to be able to play and we are constantly monitoring for issues. We can really only be responsible for what's happening on our end and when there's a problem, we know about it quickly.
Goalies have received a lot of attention since 2016. It hasn't been as well received though. It's a very difficult position to play. The more complex it gets, which should result in more authenticity, seems to cause more dissention. We hear of people wanting a more sim style game, but then say the game was better when it was more arcade-y. A lot has been added over the last several years. People say it's a copy and paste and nothing changes, but then they say NHL 14 was the best, which had a lot less, gameplay-wise, than we do now. I'm talking about game mechanics. Not modes and features. Gaming is in a different place than it was back then. We also need to change with the times. Player customization is a big part of that and many of the veteran players don't care for it, but we also can't build a game for a group that makes up a fraction of the community. That game really wouldn't sell. Without sales, there is no game. We need to try to make as many people as happy as possible so we're going to try to have a game that can be enjoyed by both hardcore and casual alike.
