HUT Quality of Life Improvements: Streamlining Menus, Packs, and Line Editing

I've spent a lot of time in HUT this year, and one area that could significantly improve the overall experience is menu efficiency.

The gameplay is great, but too much time is spent navigating menus, opening packs and sending to collection, rather than actually playing hockey.

1. Pack Opening & Reward Management

Currently, when completing objectives, moments, seasonal rewards, or event rewards, players often accumulate multiple packs at once.

The issue is that opening packs becomes extremely time-consuming.

Typical process:

• Open pack
• Reveal items
• Send to collection
• Confirm
• Return to unopened packs
• Repeat for every pack

When you have 10+ packs waiting, it can take several minutes just to process rewards, with load screen after load screen. 

Suggested Improvements

Open All Packs Option

• Open every unopened pack at once
• Display all rewards in a single screen EASHL has this, why not HUT? 

Send All to Collection

• One-button option
• No repeated confirmation screens

Quick Claim Mode

• Skip animations entirely
• Instant reward processing

Bulk Duplicate Management

• Multi-select duplicates
• Send all to collection, auction, sets, or quick sell in one action

The goal should be reducing menu time and getting players back into games faster.

2. Objective Reward Collection

Another time sink is collecting rewards one by one after completing objectives.

Suggested Improvements

• Claim All Rewards button
• View all earned rewards on one screen in order
• Automatically stack rewards into a single reward summary

Many live-service games already do this successfully and it greatly improves the user experience.

3. Lineup Builder & Chemistry Navigation

This is probably the biggest menu frustration in HUT.

When building lineups, players scroll through long lists of cards trying to find:

• Forward chemistry combinations
• Defensive chemistry combinations
• Goalie chemistry combinations

The current system requires excessive scrolling.

Suggested Improvements

Chemistry Jump Buttons

Map buttons to instantly jump between:

Forwards

• 3-player chemistry combinations

Defense

• 2-player chemistry combinations

Goalies

• Goalie chemistry combinations

Instead of scrolling through dozens of entries, players could jump directly to the section they need.

Additional Filters

Allow filtering by:

• Chemistry match
• Overall rating
• Team
• League
• Card type
• Position
• Special event cards
  
  Another feature, you select a line/chemistry combination and it brings you to another screen which shows all the players you could place in this line function in your collection. Then you can cross reference with your other combinations to have multiple chemistry setups, where you can stack the combinations. 

4. Faster Player Selection Screens

When editing lines, players frequently compare multiple cards.

A side-by-side comparison view would make lineup management significantly faster.

Suggested features:

• Compare up to 3 players at once
• Highlight chemistry impacts
• Show attribute differences automatically
• Display lineup chemistry gains/losses before confirming

5. Reduce Confirmation Screens

Many menu actions currently require multiple confirmations.

Examples:

• Sending cards to collection
• Claiming rewards
• Opening packs
• Managing duplicates

These extra confirmation screens add up quickly over hundreds of interactions.

An optional "Fast Menu Mode" would be a huge quality-of-life improvement.

Why This Matters

The average HUT player spends a significant amount of time in menus just trying to combine line chemistry combinations. Add on the sending rewards to collections in the 21st this becomes time consuming and annoying. 

Improving menu efficiency would:

• Reduce frustration
• Increase time spent actually playing games
• Make team building more enjoyable
• Improve the overall user experience

The goal isn't changing HUT itself.

The goal is simply reducing unnecessary clicks, scrolling, loading, and confirmations so players can spend more time playing hockey, building lines. searching the auction house and less time navigating menus.

Hopefully the team considers some of these quality-of-life improvements for NHL 26 and future updates.

One thing that makes these quality-of-life improvements particularly frustrating is that modern development tools, including AI-assisted coding, should make many of these menu improvements far easier to implement than they were even a few years ago.

I'm not suggesting every change is trivial, but features like:

• Open All Packs
  • Send All to Collection
  • Claim All Rewards
  • Chemistry Jump Buttons
  • Faster Position Navigation
  • Reduced Confirmation Screens

are relatively small interface improvements compared to building entirely new game modes or gameplay systems.

The return on investment would be enormous because every HUT player interacts with these menus every single day.

Saving even 120–540 seconds per session adds up to hours of player time over the course of a season well adding enjoyment to the user.

If NHL wants to improve the overall HUT experience, reducing menu friction may be one of the highest-impact quality-of-life improvements available.