Hello everybody, Andy here and I just wanted to let everybody know we are working hard on finalizing this week's first roster update and some of the things we are working on for this one as well as future updates.

We are planning on doing roster updates bi-weekly. This will let you fans have a more up to date picture of the NHL during the season.

For the first time this year long term injured players will not be in the lineup as they will be scratches for their teams. So Montreal's Andrei Markov who is now out for 4 months will be a scratch when you play online with the Montreal Canadiens. This is true as well for players like Phil Kessel for Toronto who is expected to return in November.

So be prepared as some teams will have a different look each and every update just due to injuries this year.

As we are moving forward this year with more roster updates we will be evaluating players at different intervals during the season to determine if anybody need to be tweaked up or down in their attributes. This will be for players who are having a breakout year or a major drop in their talent. This is only to simulate what is going on this year and next year the player will be reevaluated so their numbers might go up or down depending on their career path and overall skills.

The first update has 18 new players on NHL rosters. These players are:

Atlanta Thrashers - Evander Kane
Buffalo Sabres - Tyler Myers
Colorado Avalanche - Ryan O'Reilly, Matt Duchene
Dallas Stars - Jamie Benn
Florida Panthers - Dmitri Kulikov
New York Islanders - John Tavares
New York Rangers - Michael Del Zotto, Matt Gilroy
Ottawa Senators - Erik Karlsson
Philadelphia Flyers - Mika Pyorala, James Van Riemsdyk, Johan Backlund
San Jose Sharks - Benn Ferriero
Tampa Bay Lightning - Victor Hedman
Toronto Mapleleafs - Viktor Stalberg, Jonas Gustavsson
Vancouver Canucks - Sergei Shirokov

So I hope you like the first roster update. We are working on starting to get the PHPA agreements for the players that are new to the AHL this year and start to put those prospects into the game as well.

Hope you all have fun with the new roster update and following the real NHL season. I think it's going to be a great one. Till next time.

Andy

Feel free to continue the discussion in our Roster and Ratings Forums

Andy Agostini here wanting to drop a quick note about Be A GM and the new GM Tracker in NHL 10.

Everything you do in the mode is being tracked in the tracker but one of the things we also did was set up tasks so that a GM can be given tasks points when completed which in turn allow you to improve your staff. All these tasks do not have to be completed so you can pick and choose what you do or just play the mode the way you want and when something happens that triggers a task you will be rewarded with the task points. Also depending on your teams success you will be given tasks points. We want you to manage your team your way and those tasks are there to let you know what you have accomplished or done during your career.

One of the best ways to become a Legend GM is to work through the NHL entry draft and draft your young players and build a team around youth. With the Assistant Coach staff you will notice your players will grow faster the higher the assistant coach level is. This will allow you to build teams like what Chicago and the LA Kings are doing currently drafting their core and then adding the odd free agent or trading for a piece to help put them over the top.

For the complete article with accompanying videos, check out the In the Crease blog:  Be a GM - GM Tracker

There's been a lot of talk about the upcoming release of NHL 10 and with less than two months to ship, the team still has a lot to show and tell about the anticipated game.  Earlier this week, Andy Agostini touched on the new Be a GM mode as well as provided some info on the Fantasy Draft in the game.  With the community wanting to hear more about the Fantasy Draft, in particular within Be a GM mode, we invited Andy to pen a blog to discuss both modes that gamers will be able to use the Fantasy Draft:  Season Mode and Be a GM. 

As you may have heard in the last couple of weeks the Fantasy Draft is now back in NHL 10. We are very excited about getting this feature back into the game. With that being said we want to give you an idea on how the logic of this feature works in the background.

When we worked on putting the Fantasy Draft back into the game we wanted it to be smarter than in years past. When we sat down and saw other sports games fantasy drafts we decided to try something different and it’s something that worked very well.

We have two different logics for our Fantasy Draft.

One is the Season Mode Fantasy Draft logic. This mode will have the fantasy draft pick the best players overall and put them on their team and battle for the Stanley cup over 1 year.  So this is much like every other Fantasy Draft on the market.

The second version of the logic is our new Be a GM mode Fantasy Draft logic actually takes into account many factors in the CPU’s picks. In other sports games it can be quite easy to select 5 top young players when the draft starts and the CPU will be picking by which player is the best overall. This makes it a bit tougher on the user at the beginning but in the long run the CPU will start to see a ton of retirements as these great older players start to retire and the user’s young team grows and becomes unstoppable until the salary cap starts to bite them then they just trade away their stud get more youth and start all over becoming a great dynasty.

Now with our new logic the CPU actually takes into account five things: the players overall, his age, potential, what players he has already drafted and his contract. This changes the dynamic of who is selected in the draft. So with the new logic Nicklas Lidstrom is being drafted around the third round as he is 39 years old and on the end of his career. Does this mean that all the older good players don’t get selected in the first round? No, overall is still a major factor in the fantasy draft but now they consider what their team will look like in 2 or 3 seasons in past years they kept taking that older veteran that was at the top of his game with no foresight into the future for their franchises.

With the new logic we are seeing that the game is much more balanced when going into Be a GM mode and a lot more challenging as the other teams have emerging superstars just like you do.  So we hope everybody enjoys this new/old feature that is back in NHL 10 we think it is the best Fantasy Draft ever in our game.

Andy Agostini here to tell you about an all new game mode that we're featuring in NHL 10.  Another year has come and gone in our development of the NHL series and this year we have added so much to my areas of the game that I almost don’t know where to begin.

So I will list out a few of the new features in our new Be a GM Mode.

Be A GM is our new mode this year where we took the idea of becoming a legend player in Be a Pro and associated it with being a Legend GM. Some real life legend GM’s are Glen Sather (Edmonton Oilers Dynasty), Toe Blake (Montreal Canadiens Dynasty), Bill Torrey (New York Islanders Dynasty) and Ken Holland (Detroit Red Wings). These men are famous for putting together franchises that had great success for a very long period of time.

To work your way to becoming a Legend GM you will need to complete GM Tasks. There are over 140 tasks to complete and they are wide ranging. Some are as easy as completing one trade and some are as hard as winning five Stanley Cups in eight seasons. Each task gets you task points which you earn to unlock the 6 different levels of your road to Legend GM. Another thing that the task points are good for are for upgrading your staff. New to this year we have 4 staff types that will help you in creating a dynasty franchise. These 4 types of staff are Trainers, Amateur Scouts, Pro Scouts and Assistant Coaches.

Each staff member helps in doing the following things.

Trainers help heal your players faster as well as help your players durability to long term injuries.

Amateur Scouts will provide information on the upcoming draft class.

Pro Scouts help you know about rumors around the league in regards to who is up for trade on the all new trade block and rumor mill.

Assistant Coaches will help your player development so that you can develop superstars thru the draft and your system.

So doing well as a franchise allows you to improve your staff. These staff members will be able to provide a lot of extra information and will make your franchise stronger.

Another aspect of the GM Tracker that is brand new to Be a GM is GM Reputation. Every GM in the league will have a relationship with you and depending on how you work with them when it comes to making fair trade offers they will have a relationship with you. Free agents also are aware of your reputation.  Nobody will want to come to your team if you sign players and then trade them away right away. This reputation is extremely important when it comes to one of our newest features. 

The Entry Draft and Trading Deadline this year are extremely important as you will now be able to trade on Draft day as well as on the Trading Deadline. Your GM Reputation plays a part on these days as the better your reputation the more phones you will have at your disposal to make deals with. This is one of my favorite features in Be a GM as you only have so many phones to make something happen during each round and if you can’t finish a deal then you have wait till the next round. The CPU teams are making deals during this time as well so the deal you thought you were close to completing with a team might not be available any longer, as that player might have been traded during the round and you will have to restart negotiations to get him with his new team. Also once a team gets a player it might take a lot more to get him now as the new team wanted him for a reason.

The screenshot below shows you one of the phones that will be available to you on the Entry Draft and the Trade Deadline.

To go with the new trading mini games we have also rewritten our Trade AI from the ground up. This AI now takes into account so many factors that we have been shocked at which players show up on the trading block. We had Ryan Whitney on the trading block in our game the day before he was traded to Anaheim. I was actually laughing at Pittsburgh’s trading block thinking I don’t think the Penguins would ever trade him. I was ready to make some minor tuning tweaks to the logic then the next day he was traded. Shows you how much I know about what teams will do.

The basic fundamental of the trade AI is every team knows what type of team they are. There are 5 types of teams.

Rebuilders

Playoff Hopefuls

Playoff Bubble

Playoff Contender

Championship Contender

Depending on where a team is in their development cycle they will all be looking for different things when it comes to making trades. This along with knowing its team’s strengths and weaknesses led us to trades that will actually make more sense.

So a rebuilding team is probably looking for draft picks and prospects over older veterans and a team who is a championship contender is more than likely willing to give up a prospect or pick for another veteran to add to their team for the final playoff run.

Now as the season progresses if a team is doing better or worse than their original season prediction for itself it will change its team type on the fly and will react to their situation accordingly. This makes our new Trading Block much more important.

The trading block in other games that I have seen were mainly about which players are you willing to trade. Ours has that as well as sliders which tell the CPU what you are looking for and what you are willing to give up in return. This makes it easier to get a lot of offers or very few offers if you are looking for something very specific. The screenshot below shows that the sliders are by position as well as what type of player or pick you are willing to give. This makes the trade offers be tailored to what you are looking for.

I know I have rambled on for a while but here are a couple of other things for you to chew on as you wait for NHL 10.

You can get fired and hired by other teams. You will have a contract that you will have expectations each year laid out for you, depending on how you do you will either get a renewal or you might be let go and have to find another team to run.

We have added contract buyouts to the game. I have read on some message boards saying we don’t have a way to cut a player during the year. So just to clarify the CBA rules says you are not allowed to release a player during the season. The only way you can release a player is to buy him out in the offseason or put him in the minors during the season but still pay his full salary while he is there. Attached below is a screenshot of our new contract buyout screen which shows you what the salary cap penalty will be for buying out a player.

Well that’s it for me right now. I am very excited about this year’s game and I know you guys will love the new features we added to this year’s Be A GM.  Good luck becoming a Legend GM.

In our continuing video blog series with the NHL 10 game Producers, Andy Agostini gives us a brief update on some improvements that the community has been asking about with regards to Dynasty and Be a Pro game modes.

In particular, Andy discusses rookie generation and having more variation with players in the game, trading AI and team management.  He also touches on the simulation engine and scoring, and continues with moving your pro up and down the ladder and tweaks that should address some of the weighting questions some people have.

Here are links to the other video blogs already out: David Littman Part One, Part Two, and a video from Sean Ramjagsingh on game play improvements.  Make sure you're also following them @NHL10 on twitter.