FanPost

NHL 12 Information from EA Developers


Some threads and forums posts out there with the NHL 12 developers spilling the beans on some secrets on the NHL franchise and what has changed for NHL 12.  Here is a mashup rundown of what my team has collected today.

EASHL Club Challenges will be unranked this year.

http://forum.ea.com/eaforum/posts/list/ ... e#16470704

This is obviously to stop Win trading, more after the jump

Also FYI for NHL 12, we prevent you from playing a player type that is out of position. So you won't be able to play a Sniper on D, or in this case a TWF on D.

http://forum.ea.com/eaforum/posts/listB ... 97745.page

As a full time Defenseman I am not happy with this.  In NHL 11 the best Dman was built from a TWF.  In NHL 09 it was from a Playmaker.  Now I will be locked in to DFD OFD TWD or ToughGuy and that's it.  

 

I know pre-patch we scaled back the top end of Speed and Accel in a Tuner Set to combat some of the cheaters who were using the +15's from the Hockey Shop Boost. All this means is the top end of those 2 stats would make less of a difference. For example, from 85-99, the higher you are to 99 the more scaling takes place. A 99 may feel more like a 93 and a 90 may feel more like an 88. This would bring the upper edge of these values a lot closer, so it would be harder to tell the difference. I think we may have scaled it a bit more after we fixed that issue, but not entirely. Obviously the plan is to NOT do this for NHL 12 as it was only really implemented for cheaters who were having 99 accel and 99 speed and blowing past AI defenseman.

http://forum.ea.com/eaforum/posts/listB ... 97745.page

So instead of fixing their problems in NHL 11 EA was curving what attributes do.  This lead to the rampant checking builds we currently see right now but at least they identified it as a problem.

Believe it or not, but player builds were tuned in NHL 11, where they weren't really tuned previously. As I said above, certain player builds have advantages over others depending on your playing styles. On my team, our center is a grinder, LW a TWF, RW a PWF, and I was playing as a DFD, but I recently changed to TWD.

No additional tuning went into NHL 12 in this regard, however new gameplay elements might change the way you play the game. Perhaps you now want a grinder with great deflections and strength so you can engage in net battles and cause havoc that way. 

http://forum.ea.com/eaforum/posts/listB ... 97745.page

This would explain why playing Defense as a TWF I might have a hard time knocking Tough Guys or PWF's off of their lines.  

 

It's true, some of the effects are subtle, so it is sometimes hard to notice, but I think that mostly has to do with other factors that are in play as well. For example, 85+ Passing will give you an auto Saucer Pass. What's the difference from 85 to 99? Well that's up to you to decide. Being accurate where you're aiming the LS always is a factor as well as the other players around you. Yes you are more likely to pass the puck between an opponent and to your teammate if you have higher passing, but it also depends on the opponent's Offensive/Defensive awareness. Also the higher the passing rating the more likely your teammate will receive a clean pass where they can control it. It also depends on your teammate's Puck Control rating if they receive it cleanly or not.

http://forum.ea.com/eaforum/posts/listB ... 97745.page

85 for saucer pass, *sigh*.  I wasted so many points in passing this year.  

 

Just an FYI to get to Legend 3 level this year, you will need to play 350 games and have 200 wins, and have an A- . This was done to add more depth to the game. Many players are usually able to get to the 150 game mark within the first few months, this just adds a little more incentive to play the game for a longer period. Also Legend 1 is at 150 games, so there are an extra 200 games needed to earn an extra 340 XP. 340 isn't a lot of XP given that the cost of attributes go up as you add to them, so it shouldn’t be too much of an advantage.

Also the reason why certain stats cost more than others is because we scale them for each player type. We don't want a sniper to be good at hitting, so we make hitting cost a lot more for a sniper. People can still add points to the attribute if they wish, but it will be at the sacrifice of other stats that they could increase much more easily. 

http://forum.ea.com/eaforum/posts/listB ... 97745.page

First, This will encourage win trades in OTP Lobbies. Secondly 350 is a whole ton of games.  I play at least three days a week and have an active club and I just went over 900 games this year ranked. This now makes it so that you pretty much have to play NHL a whole truck load in order to reach that upper tier.  At least half of the player base has a problem reaching A- at 150 games.  EA just frustrated them a whole lot more by pushing the pinnacle even further away.... behind a maelstrom. 

 

99 attribute cheating. Every year there seems to be a new way to do it. Prior to our patch there was a way to do it within the Hockey Shop, which we fixed. After the patch there was still a way to boost yourself an extra 500 XP without being punished in gameplay. The steps to do this were never revealed to any of us until much later, so we were unable to fix this for NHL 11. In NHL 12, we have this specific issue fixed and we have implemented another cheat detection mechanism that will tell you that your points are incorrect and we automatically repool your points to the correct amount. For those that do not know, we previously had a mechanism in gameplay that didn't allow you to use those boosted stats, even though the Edit Attributes screen showed you as boosted. Really for NHL 11, an extra 500 XP wasn’t that much of an advantage since most of the top end stats cost a lot of XP anyway.

http://forum.ea.com/eaforum/posts/listB ... 97745.page

All I can say is.... FINALLY!  There is another means bound to be found but I'll give EA credit for going in and actually doing something about it.  

 

Match Club Size is only somewhat broken in NHL 11. The issue was that your team would have to set that option, and another team would also have to set that option for you to be able to match. In NHL 12 we have changed it so that if you change your option and you have 6 people, it will only match you with 6, even if the other team didn't set that option.

http://forum.ea.com/eaforum/posts/listB ... 97745.page

This is pretty much what I suspected.  Good to know it will be fixed next year.  

 

We have 3 game server locations or OTP/Clubs, Western US, Eastern US and the UK. The captain of the home team determines which game server is going to be used (closest to them), so if the opposing team isn't located near the home team, then they will see lag unfortunately. Usually West vs East isn't too bad, but West versus Europe would be pretty slow. East vs UK shouldn't be too bad either.

http://forum.ea.com/eaforum/posts/listB ... 97745.page

 

I already knew that home captain was the basis for host.  This means another season of rampant quitters who don't get the home side in a matchup unfortunately.  EA could to the world a favor by coin tossing between captains in the background so people didn't try to game this.  

 

OTP/Clubs isn't a peer to peer connection. Also the quit out time has been reduced to 1 min for NHL 12. The reason why we did this is because the server determines the quit out time, and it doesn’t know if someone has scored until the game has ended. There isn't really a good way to do it other than just decreasing the timer, which at least at 1 min it would be less likely that a team scores.

http://forum.ea.com/eaforum/posts/listB ... 97745.page

 

The drop from 2 minutes to 1 will have a few impacts.  It will make Win trading easier (quicker) out of OTP lobbies.  It also means that if you screen your Club match opponents for cheaters via EASportsWorld like my team does, you will have half the time to do so.

All in all some good and bad things.  The big thing is that Hockey Shop/profile boosting has been addressed which was my number one complaint.  Lets see if EA addresses the new way that is bound to surface this year.  Not happy about being forced to build a Dman from the weaker defensive builds but every year EA finds a way to discourage more and more people from playing the line.  

Finally a huge stick-tap to my RW Erick.  He found a lot of this information and brought it to light for our team.  

The content expressed in fanposts does not necessarily reflect the opinions of the staff here at Pensburgh.com. FanPosts are opinions expressed by fans of various teams throughout the league but may be more Pittsburgh-centric for obvious reasons.