NHL 24 Feature Suggestions

I’ve created a feature list that would be nice to see in the NHL 24. I’m a Franchise Mode only player, so these features are focusing on Franchise Mode and Roster features. I totally understand that Franchise Mode is not high on the priority list from a business perspective, as the money is made with the Online Modes. This is why all the feature requests listed here are something that are doable without huge resource needs and effort. But all these small tweaks would be a big positive difference on the Franchise Mode and managing user created players/teams. So not asking for a moon here.

Roster Updating & Player Creation:

• Let user created underaged players be moved over to the European teams and all the Canadian Junior Leagues.
• There are no restrictions for under-18 players to play in those leagues.
• This would save a lot of time when creating rosters and trying to move the players onto the right teams. Now you need to change their age, move the player and then again adjust the age back.
• When in the “Create A Player” list, give an option to sort and see the created players by position and alphabetically.
• As an example: Show only “Left Wingers” or players whose names start with the letter “H”.
• This would help with managing the user created players when there’s hundreds of them.
• Give a full player modifying rights to real players (Also in the Franchise Mode)
• This would help roster creators to modify wrong information that the official rosters sometimes have. As an example, earlier we had Arber Xhekaj’s height and weight wrong that could have been fixed by users themselves without waiting for an official roster update.
• Let us merge roster files with official roster updates without it resetting our changes.
• Basically, let us choose which file will be the master file when merging.
• This way we could get updates of the new official rosters (new players, player pics etc.) without cancelling our changes on the real players and removing the user created players from their teams.
• You can just have a flag that if the player has been modified, the merging will ignore it and move to the next one. The merging would only merge the players/data when the player hasn’t been modified or is a new one.
• I’m not sure if player pics could have another flag that lets the merge only update the pic. So I understand if that’s not really possible.

Franchise Mode:

• Add generated pictures for auto-generated players.
• The game already has this feature in Be A Pro-mode. So minimum resources needed for this feature.
• This type of system has been used as an example in the Football Manager franchise and brings a bit of extra life in the game.
• Have country specific name pools for auto generated players.
• Currently there’s random English names used for many European countries and it breaks the realism.
• As an example: Your FIFA franchise has proper name pools that could be just exported and used in an NHL franchise.
• Let us choose our AHL affiliate from the User Created Teams and also choose the AHL Division for the team when starting the Custom 33 Team Franchise Mode.
• This is something that can be a realism breaker, as if you create as an example Regina team, it will be stuck on the North Division.
• Also, we need to create the AHL every time when starting the mode is very time consuming.
• Let us relocate an NHL team and the AHL affiliate with User Created Team when we start the Franchise Mode.
• This would be a neat little option, as we don’t always want to play GM Mode on or custom 33 team mode.
• Add ECHL affiliates to Franchise Mode.
• This would give more options to send the players to the right level to develop.
• Would make more usage of those teams as well.
• Add a European loan option for signed European prospects.
• This would be as in real life, some European prospects plate their first and even a second of their contract years in Europe. First loan wouldn’t burn their first year of the contract.
• To make this simple, you could send an European prospect to their European team like you can send CHL prospects back to their teams currently in the game.
• Add LTIR and No-Movement Clauses to the Franchise mode.
• Would bring much more realism to the mode with not much effort.
• Small change, big effect.
• Add a Coach style “Youngsters”.
• This would be the same as current “Veterans”, but would just have an emphasis on skilling up the younger players.
• Add some more varieties on the generated Coaches.
• The tactics and preferred line tactics haven’t been updated for some time now and runs only a few different templates for each category.
• Make the players be able to adapt to the line tactics over time.
• This shouldn’t be fast, as every category has 3 options, but maybe one level per season or two. This would make it possible to plan for the long run and make players familiar with the scheme in the long run. Many times we just need to trade the player as he doesn’t fit to any scheme of the coach.
• Make the non-GM mode budgets for Coaching and Scouting optional
• Currently those budgets don’t matter when you are playing without the GM mode and would be nice to have an option when you start the mode to have a toggle switch that gives an option if those budgets are on or off.
• Make goalie overall matter when simulating the games.
  • Currently goalie performances seem to be almost completely random, 92 overall goalie usually simulates worse than 82 overall one and you can win a Cup with 75 overall goalie. 

In-Game:

• Tweak or give us a possibility to tweak CPU shot frequency
• Currently CPU do not shoot enough and when they do it’s 50-50 chance that they will score. This causes ridiculous issues with the goalie save percentages. When playing with 5 min periods, CPU usually has around 10 shots in a game and has scored 3 to 4 times.
• CPU shouldn’t be able to score with such a high rate and should shoot more from the less dangerous areas.
• If we could tweak this as we can do with the shot accuracy, I’m sure users could find more realistic sliders to help with the realism.

Beta testing:

• Please make sure that Franchise Mode is being beta tested by the testing team, or better yet, with Franchise Mode players. I’m sure they would do it for free. I definitely would!

I’m sure there’s a lot of other tweaks people would like to see in the game, but in my humble opinion this list would be definitely doable for the team to add to the NHL 24. To be honest, I would be ecstatic and I’m sure most of the players would be too only to see these updates and nothing else in the mode next year!

Finally just pointing out that I know most of these feature requests are all ready been requested one way or another in these boards, but I included them as think it's beneficial to have them all in same post, even if they're duplicates.