even if youre playing the computer, its never offline fyi. your rosters and everything are stored on their servers.

but at least there was notice this time, last time was just server maintenance out of nowhere at 2:30pm est, seems like a good time for that

Ya if I'm going to be building a team from cards I would at least like to like my team.

I also will not tell a false tale: I would pay a lot of money for a Dan Boyle-Douglas Murray d-pair. Or even Douglas Murray and Jason Demers since Boyle cards prob don't have much in the way of games remaining.

Leaving the odd game early doesn't seem to affect you're rating too hard.

Dog/Demers could probably be had for around 2000. Might be double that for Boyle/Dog. Boyle has 55 games left in his career.

Edit: I could probably recreate the entire Leafs roster for 2000

Is Demers that expensive? I could probably nab Crankshaft for as low as 500-700.

Both seemed to be in the 750-1000 range for starting bids.

hopefully someone won't mind PM'ing me an AIM name and walking me thru whatever the hell this HUT thing is with random trading cards and wtf I should do here??

just bought a demers for 700 buy it now

Your guide to HOCKEY ULTIMATE TEAM:

This mode combines everything that is awesome about the world, which is HOCKEY and TRADING CARDS. Your team is made up of cards, the most important of which is player cards but there are other types we'll get to later.

Player cards basically put the given player on your team. You can go to the Edit Lineup screen and arrange your players into lines, and then go play games with that team. But, that's not the only thing you do with player cards!

First of all, your players have two important figures to keep track of: career games, and contract games. Your players are signed to contracts which expire after a certain amount (usually 8-13 or so when you first get them) of games played. After that contract expires, you can't put them in a game again until you sign them to a new contract (by applying a contract card) or swap them for another player that still has contract games left.

Career games are the number of games that player has left in his career. Once a player runs out of career games, he's basically retired and can't play any more games for your team.

You may also notice that player cards have two numbers on them: the top (and usually lower) number is his overall rating, and the bottom number is his potential rating. You increase your player's overall rating by applying training cards to your player to increase his attributes and rating.

Contract cards and training cards are all "consumable" cards in that they are consumed by applying them to players. You'll see that term used in the game so keep in mind that's what it refers to.

To get more cards, you'll want to spend pucks on them. You earn pucks by playing games (you get like 200 pucks per game you play, plus a bonus depending on whether you win or lose and how well you play) and winning tournaments (which provide a bonus). You can then go to the store and buy packs of cards, or if you want to look for individual cards you can look them up in the "trading" section and participate in ebay-style auctions of cards. If you buy cards in the marketplace, be careful, as you'll want to make sure players still have lots of games left (people will try to sell cards for players that have like 3 career games remaining).

Depending on whether you played the demo and whether you activated an online pass, you may have "reward" packs awaiting you in the store for free when you first enter HUT, so check that out.

That should help get you started, feel free to post more questions here. It's probably best to have this info available for everyone.

my current lineup for anyone who might care

boogard (81) krejci (92) gallagher (94)
morin (82) skinner (80) caputi (78)
wick (77) datsyuk (92) vrbata (81)
scrub (71) scrub (71) scrub (74)

phaneuf (85) keith (92)
alzner (81) karlsson (88)
stuart (81) sutton (81)

cam ward (91)

my lineup is constantly changing though

i also have 26k pucks

to anybody just starting out, i would tell them to do this first, dl the demo, win a game, invite someone to try it out, and play the hut in there, u get bonus packs for each of these things

Your forwards seem kinda meh for having so many pucks, why don't you go spend more?

Okay, well after the 2 packs it comes with I have Fabian Brunstromm, a random 74 goalie from overseas, and everyone else from the WHL pretty much.

Guess I better start cranking out some games. Does difficulty matter? Like even with this crummy ass team (my team is the Milaukee Admirals for some reason!??!?!) I should be able to steamroll the random WHL team I got assigned against on Pro -- if I can win on all-star is that more pucks? Or should I just make it rookie and win every game 13-0?

all of my lower guys on the first few lines have a ton of training slots i still need to use and an assload of games played

also its a pain in the ass staying under the salary cap

I've been playing tournaments, in which you can't change the difficulty, so I'm not sure how regular offline games work.

Lol at Goofy calling someone else "a bunch of nerds" lmao

game 1: goalie lets in 3 unscreen wristers, faceoffs are hard, i lose 4-3 as "crash the net" must not mean what I think it means

That's not a bad deal. Spezza is somewhat rare too, just not as rare as Kopitar. You can sell Coburn for 3-4k and Spezza for 6-7, so in the end it probably doesn't make a huge difference.

I mean, there's nerdy like me, and then there are dudes who play D&D

i def believe my guys play better as a result of the chemistry boost. i've had lots of deflected goals, garbage goals and sick one timers.

i went for schneider because i'm going to build him up over time. buy some consumables pack, maybe get lucky with some goalie stuff, get lucky on the market place with some late night bidding.

also i'm a canucks fan, i have to have schneider or luongo on my team =p

gameplay is different, and better. takes getting used to that you cant auto assume the goalie will stop all unscreened wristers. but i think i like it? trucking guys is harder waaaay more fun too with the new animations

what kind of scores are you guys getting in 1v1 games? just wondering.

Or these guys

A way to buy online for Xbox 360>?