u/West_Environment8596

AAA youth hockey has already been a comical s***show with families "willing to travel" (translation: move, billet, online school) for the "right fit" (translation: any team that will take us).

With the NDL, it's going to get even crazier to make those teams. There are some pros and cons to this:

On the upside, it will (hopefully) crush the dreams of the delusional parents whose kids play outside of the top 30 AAA teams.

• Realistically if you're not on a Top 30 team, you weren't going to get drafted to T1 juniors, and were facing a multi-year grind to work your way up. Just look at the draft lists. The vast majority of the players are from the Top 20 or so teams, and MAYBE 1 from each of the remainder (many teams just strike out completely).
• The vast majority of these kids outside T1 fail to "work their way up." That's just the reality. Coaches will try to sell you that one success story to try and convince you to gamble on very low odds with your life because they are financially incentivized to do so. But you have a very low chance of success. You will probably end up playing ACHA or club hockey at some college, if you're lucky.
• But these kids had pursued online school and billeting. Online school students do exceptionally poorly on the SAT, something like on average 250 points less on a 1600 SAT (duh, because you used AI and tutors to do your assignments). That means when the vast majority of them flame out, they can't get into a good college. Many end up in community college, or they end up going into the trades or selling shoes. None of them dreamt about going to community college or being a plumber when they were 14 years old, so don't give me that crap about "you don't need to go to college."
• Don't get me started on the hordes of parents who take out second mortgages to pay for their kid's "career" at #100 AAA team. Or all the quality family time and vacations that you replaced with "car rides" or "sitting at airport" or "sitting at rink in Buffalo NY". That's not quality family time. It's not a meaningful family memory. The first few times, sure. But not when it is every week, week after week, year after year. It's the only and singular memory you will have with your family. Until you ship them off to get billeted. Then you're just squinting your eyes trying to catch games through LiveBarn. For what? So your kid can end up paying to play T3 juniors.
• If you are on a Top 30 team, congrats, you actually have a legitimate shot at T1 juniors. In this case if you are passionate, then online school and billeting can be worth the risk and sacrifice.
• Hopefully this translates to an end to online school and billeting for kids outside of the Top 30 teams and those kids and parents can finally chill the f out and treat it like the hobby it is, and not like a profession or career.

Downsides:

• It will be even crazier to make the Top 30 teams with every kid in the US, and many from Canada, Europe and Asia willing to immigrate to play hockey.
• Sure there are residency requirements, but it's easy to bypass these requirements through workarounds.
• Because NDL is such a critical milestone, youth hockey will be even more "professionalized." It already is comically bad. Billeting rarely occurs for football, basketball, baseball, soccer, yet it is extremely prevalent in youth hockey. Why? Why are hockey parents willing to do so much more to let their kids play hockey than other sports? To make the NDL teams, parents will now be even crazier at the younger pre-NDL years, to "prep" their kids to make the NDL team. Things were already crazy enough at the U10 level. Now that's going to trickle down to U8, U6, U1.

Hi all, so I thought this deserved a separate thread lol.

I posted earlier about how I sucked and couldn't progress because of the difficulty.

I want to like this game but it's too hard : r/stellarblade

Anyways, I practiced dodging and parrying with the practice dummy. And now I can beat the bosses and progress the story!

I used to just blindly dodge left or right and try to perfect parry in between and just get killed. Now, I tried NOT dodging nearly as much, and focusing more on just parrying (without obsessing over achieving perfect parry all the time), and it works!

I also put points into the perfect parry and perfect dodge, and beta recharge for parry skills which has helped a ton.

In fact, I don't know if there's a delay or something, but I find that parrying early actually results in more perfect parries than normal.

Super excited, thanks for all the tips!