[dobbles]

most of my play has been eashl so thats where i am coming from in my requests. and jobo we have probably talked about most of this stuff over the past few months, but here goes:

fix the microphone issues. i still regularly can't hear certain people on our team. additionally if teams quit before the game starts or mid game, it often fubars the people you can hear and its all choppy. i know you are aware of this as you experience just as many problems as i do, but its something that needs addressed. the functionality is spotty at best.

don't allow teams to quit without any penalty in the matchup screens. there are too many 2 man teams that will only play 2 man teams so they can exploit the lack of defense for cheese type goals. so many times as a large team we are unable to find a game for a long time because teams wont play us.

revamp the dressing room. the inability to have more than 6 people is annoying. i can only imagine how hard it would be to coordinate our team if we didnt have our website. when we have more than 6 people online and need to split up, its insanely impossible to coordinate that in game. they need to allow everyone in there and then 6 people can ready up and go play then everyone else is still there. additionally, i would love it if the chat box would show past messages. if i want to tell people i will be around at 8 pm to play, theres no way to do that in game. if i put that in the DR chat, no one sees it as its not kept for later arrivals.

update the way stats are tracked. we have been manually pulling stats from the ps3 all year because there is no way to track eashl stats online. additionally, when in the setup screen for a game it shows the disconnect % of each player for 1 on 1 games and not eashl games. so many of the stats screen and rankings screens are only for versus play.

as far as the gameplay, i have enjoyed just controlling 1 guy. they have fixed a lot of the issues regarding gameplay in the patches. i would love if they could implement something i saw russic suggest a while back: have 2 checking buttons. 1 for a small nudge to knock a guy of the puck or off his line, and another if you want to crush the guy. right now when playing defense in front of the net and in the corners, your best option is checking. stick lifts and poke checks are just too ineffective against those cross crease passes. so you have to rely on the cross checks. and it just happens so much that you draw a penalty because you crush a guy when you just needed to brush him.

for fighting, i would love if they would allow a few seconds of scrum time after a whistle. so much of hockeys fights and emotion occur during post whistle scrums. yet those have never been a controllable part of any hockey game. i would love if there were a few seconds where you could mess with a guy and possibly start a fight. the current system of a couple seconds of useless free time is fun to try and hit people but has no bearing on the game.

last but not least, please do not rate chelios better than rafalski again next year!!! they did finally change that in one of the roster updates.