[sprague]

Pen is very correct in his assessment. The underlying structure of the game is flawed. And not just what he has covered, but especially the basic hockey stuff- who scores, why, what ratings matter, how hockey is presented, knowing why your team is winning or losing.

This was brought up back in the first beta period but was never addressed, and the usual forum answer was "they know what they are doing, its early, wait for the release...then wait for the patch, wait for the next patch...now wait for the new match engine..." not enough are saying its flawed, and not accurate reflection of the sport on and off the ice. It is not just how the game handles data, but what is being prioritized for the code setup. The actual hockey part was mostly ignored. It's a sports sim wo the sport presented properly.

OOTP should be looking carefully at this before they release their football game. Does that design team have enough knowledge of football? Has someone at least played at Oklahoma or LSU or UCLA? Because without an inside working knowledge of how the sport works, you will get something like this.

Yes most of the sales now are from outside NA. That should raise some eyebrows. If hockey-crazed Canadians aren't buying and playing it. The OOTP customer base will keep buying to support the company as a whole, but without hard-core hockey fans buying it won't have a long shelf-life. Everyone has seemed to miss that. hope will over-ride reality for a long time- but, seems reality check is coming.

Yes my comments are quite negative- but after two full yeas of design if a hockey fan still does not even want to play for 5 minutes, what else can be said?

I like OOTP. I like Marcus. I hope they take a long look at their football realism before that is released. I wish them well with this project- but hockey is the most unique sport to reproduce as so many "un-statistcal" elements go into why one team wins a game or loses. Until that appears this game's sales will struggle at best.