How many are using GM Connected?

[GlennN]

As a strictly offline franschise gamer, I was curious how many of you folks are using GM Connected versus BeAGM mode. Since I don't play online, I don't have XBox Gold (and can't use GM Connected even for single player). This leaves me only with BeAGM. Do any of my fellow offline gamers have XBox Gold just to do GM Connected solo?

[Reiny09]

Not sure if 360 is any different but the servers for PS3 GMC are awful. Games get dropped on a regular basis. Takes about 3 minutes just to get from the NHL home menu into the league and navigating the league menus takes forever. There is no way I would ever use GMC to play solo when I have the BaGM option.

[Taku]

I play both, GM Connected in a league with 30 players. Its great fun, we are playing on Superstar/normal settings which are not bad. There's just not enough fatigue on players...

[kyussmanchu]

I was playing GM connected but the constant game crashes, laggy menus and lack of options have led me to just give up. BeAGM it is.

[savoie2006]

Online sucks, if not for the people that play, then the lag and deathly slow menus. BAGM sucks because of poor Cpu GM's, which is if you go and look basically every team wants the same thing . The GM brain is hardly modeled after each team that's for sure.

[shogunofharlem3]

My 4 buddies and I have been itching for an online franchise since we've all gotten old, married, kids, moved away from the neighborhood block.

We play on 360 and it is working out well for what we want to do.

Now, as the GM (they are all "players" and can't make moves, we started off with ideas but......), I don't bother with the trade screens or anything because they just take WAY too long to load.

The other thing is, if I see we have 1 game left in a "block" I will play it solo or sim it, because, if I get the gang together, and need to advance to next block it takes a good 10 minutes before it is ready!

That is a lot of waiting and beer drinking and babies crying (not us, proper babies, in headsets to make a point).

Otherwise, as hockey goes, we enjoy it.

[NateAndStuff]

I run a GM Connected league with my girlfriend, my dad, and I all controlling separate teams. The menus take forever to get through but we've never dealt with any game drops or anything like that. We had a game once that was a little laggy but it only happened once.

There are a lot of things that I hope they fix with the mode for next year. We had to turn waivers off because anytime your team has an injury or a player returns from an injury (no matter how minor it is), the CPU will randomly use best rosters and send players down, bring others up, change your lines all around and it's pretty annoying. My dad lost his 2nd best Dman because the CPU felt like sending him through waivers for no reason.

Another terrible thing about it is the amount of time I've sat there staring at the Advancing the Period screen. As someone else has already said in this thread, it takes about ten minutes to advance any given period. This gets about a million times worse in the offseason. Last Friday, we wrapped up Year 1 and I started advancing through the offseason that night. I eventually went to bed in the middle of it and then spent SEVEN HOURS the next day advancing through all of the pointless offseason periods. There's a prep for draft period, a draft period, prep for resign phase, resign players day 1, day 2, day 3, day 4, day 5, sign free agents day 1, day 2, 2 weeks, 2 weeks, 2 weeks, 2 weeks, then there's the preseason blocks where no games are played because there are no preseason games. I don't understand why they couldn't have condensed the entire process a bit and cut down on the advancing times because if you think advancing in the regular season is bad, the offseason takes at least 3 times as long for each advancement.

The mode is really fun besides those things though. I love playing against my dad and girlfriend and it's awesome to see how our team's shape up and perform throughout an 82 game season. I just hope that EA gives this mode a little attention next year and some of this crap is fixed.

[BigH2k6]

I am really disappointed by the fact that one gamertag cannot control more than one team. It makes it impossible to have a GM connected with 2 people where you want to play with different team everytime. I guess it could be possible on the PS3 as PS online is free and several gamer tags could be created. But not on Xbox without having to pay for extra live memberships.

I think 2K had the right idea in NHL2k10 where you could invite anyone at anytime in any mode tomjoin a game online, including franchise.

The game is useless for me and it's going back to EB for a trade in. Had it a week.