2K Doesn't Teach You How To Play Their Game

[jyoung]

Re: 2K Doesn't Teach You How To Play Their Game

IMO the biggest consequence of not having proper education and practice tools embedded within 2K is that:

If you don't teach people the right way to play your game, then they're just going to learn the wrong way to play it from the people at the top of the search results on YouTube/Twitch, who usually are just entertainers with loud personalities and not a lot of basketball knowledge/experience.

I watched a dude play a park game for an audience of 10,000+ people the other day and he was asking his chat how to throw a fake pass.

I'm never surprised at how little the 2K community actually knows about this game when you consider how little 2K requires its players to know in order to have on-court success.

As long as the game continues to reward braindead basketball with positive on-court results, people won't be forced to better themselves and learn how to do anything more than left-right zig zag cheese to get open and press X to score.

There are so many complex systems in this game (post moves, dribble moves, freelances, series, defensive settings), yet 2K has given its players zero incentive to learn those advanced tools because people can easily succeed without them.

Necessity is the mother of invention, and if 2K took away people's ability to score consistently with all the dumb videogamey stuff that we see online, it would force the community to dig deeper and come up with more complex solutions to scoring the basketball. Until that happens, the 2K community is always going to take the path of least resistance to getting buckets, even if that means exploiting bad AI or glitchy animations.

A videogame at this large of a scale on this short of a production schedule is always going to have exploits of some kind in it (which usually change from year to year), so I think that 2K should have someone on their staff whose sole job it is to identify all the cheese that the community finds in the game and have an engineer work with him/her throughout the year to solve gameplay exploits as they come to light instead of how it's been the last couple of years where we're just stuck dealing with major exploits for the entire 2K cycle until the new 2K comes out.

[mcdowell31]

Re: 2K Doesn't Teach You How To Play Their Game

Great topic!

I miss College Hoops 2K8 halfcourt practice. You picked offense or defense; you set specific plays for both sides or set both sides to random. The play was over when the defense secured a rebound; that was how my high school team practiced.

This simplicity allowed you to run the play as it was drawn to enable learning. After about three repetitions the AI would adjust and try stopping you: Jumping passing lanes; getting around screens; I think this feature could be on/off in practice setup. It was great because you could see the AI work like a human trying to stop you in realistic ways. It forced you to run the second and third options and really learn.

The real beauty was "breaking" the play or running it wrong on purpose to find other options in the play as well. College Hoops was attribute driven so breaking a play was not the same as exploiting a glitch: It was more like forcing an opponent to "pick a poison". There was even a little psychology involved: You could get some idea of how an opponent might respond to the play running correctly several times, then you could throw a curve using a particular set to score a different way than what was drawn. The reverse was true also: Improvise on the play early in a game; late game when you really needed a basket, you would know exactly how to run the play as drawn to get a really high percentage look. NFL 2K5 had this as well.

The present halfcourt makes you run a play as it is drawn. If you improvise, the play is "broken" and stops: Great for learning initially, but basketball does not work like that.

The College Hoops practice really acted like a mini-game: If I did not want a full-blown game right before bed, I could practice 5 or so minutes and get a little basketball out of my system and then sleep well.

The "Free Style" practice mode is mostly a waste: Practicing moves with no defender is not much help.

The last console generation 2K's had a nice 2-on-2 practice that allowed work on pick and roll/pop, and post moves. I think I remember being able to play a drill where you were either offense or defense only so you could get reps and really get competent quickly.

Basketball is really simple and beautiful. Often times success lies in repetitions in simple but effective drills. Here's hoping we can get that across to the development team some day.

I too wish for an explanation of badges, so I might actually appreciate whether or not they add to realism or make players more distinct. Right now I do not use them in MyLeague: Every year I test one file with them and they seem to distort basketball reality.

[ILLSmak]

Re: 2K Doesn't Teach You How To Play Their Game

You're right that they need to teach you how to play basketball for people who don't understand basketball. 5v5 basketball is deeper, but in a different way, than a fighting game. Learning moves is simple enough you either go on YouTube or set up a drill. I mean u can play 1 on 1 still right?



Of course I've been playing that gm for so long. I don't recall ever struggling to learn a move except the drop step haha. Which I was like how do people keep doing that stuff. But i was just inputting it too fast. It's like a lot of moves In fighting games that seem harder than they are.



But Yea 2k needs to teach people how to play basketball, how to pnr. How to drive to a spot, get help d and pass to the open shooter. That's why people play so trash at the game and never make good passes, and everyone plays the same, even the "good people."



You're never gonna teach people to learn to read how each individual player will react and do the right thing, but you can teach them what to look for when they get the ball at certain spots. Like if u get the ball here and your teammates are here (or if your teammate gets the ball here and you are here...) this is what options are available and this is what a smart teammate will do, what a smart defense might throw at you etc.



But just individual stuff I think that's out there. YouTube 3pt gawd or post gawd. Haha.



-Smak

[El_Poopador]

Re: 2K Doesn't Teach You How To Play Their Game

I dont think 2k wants or cares to help make people good at their game, i could get in depth, but think about it, if everyone mastered the game/mechanics from playing tutorials and practice modes etc, then playing online they could hold their own without having say, better cards in myteam, better upgrades for their myplayer, stuff like this, as long as people stay bad that may keep them frustrated enough to buy more VC for things in the game, as opposed to a 2k veteran who knows the mechanics and can hold his own with a team of lower card players in myteam, or lower overalls in myplayer.



I dont think things like this go unnoticed by take two/2k when the majority of revenue comes from people purchasing their microtransactions.

I don't think that has anything to do with it. The people who want to be good right out of the gate aren't going to spend time with a training mode anyway; they're still going to just buy their way to a better team.

[MrWrestling3]

Re: 2K Doesn't Teach You How To Play Their Game

IMO the biggest consequence of not having proper education and practice tools embedded within 2K is that:

If you don't teach people the right way to play your game, then they're just going to learn the wrong way to play it from the people at the top of the search results on YouTube/Twitch, who usually are just entertainers with loud personalities and not a lot of basketball knowledge/experience.

I watched a dude play a park game for an audience of 10,000+ people the other day and he was asking his chat how to throw a fake pass.

I'm never surprised at how little the 2K community actually knows about this game when you consider how little 2K requires its players to know in order to have on-court success.

As long as the game continues to reward braindead basketball with positive on-court results, people won't be forced to better themselves and learn how to do anything more than left-right zig zag cheese to get open and press X to score.

There are so many complex systems in this game (post moves, dribble moves, freelances, series, defensive settings), yet 2K has given its players zero incentive to learn those advanced tools because people can easily succeed without them.

Necessity is the mother of invention, and if 2K took away people's ability to score consistently with all the dumb videogamey stuff that we see online, it would force the community to dig deeper and come up with more complex solutions to scoring the basketball. Until that happens, the 2K community is always going to take the path of least resistance to getting buckets, even if that means exploiting bad AI or glitchy animations.

A videogame at this large of a scale on this short of a production schedule is always going to have exploits of some kind in it (which usually change from year to year), so I think that 2K should have someone on their staff whose sole job it is to identify all the cheese that the community finds in the game and have an engineer work with him/her throughout the year to solve gameplay exploits as they come to light instead of how it's been the last couple of years where we're just stuck dealing with major exploits for the entire 2K cycle until the new 2K comes out.

This is a very good point; the general tendency amongst the great majority of people is to seek out and take the path of least resistance.Right now the way to do this in 2K is to take advantage of mechanics which tend to be weighted towards video gaming skills rather than Basketball IQ.I believe that by doing this it forces the game into a state of repetitive and depressingly shallow gameplay.

But all in all, it depends on what audience they are trying to appease "the most" which means some of us will always have to sacrifice. They seem more devoted to the online demographic, as well as making the game more accessible to newcomers.

I think this is the crux of it; right now 2K is not designed for people that want to get deep into the "game inside of the game" level of basketball; it designed for people that want to just sit down, pop the game in, and be immediately rewarded with ESPN style highlights.

[UnbelievablyRAW]

Re: 2K Doesn't Teach You How To Play Their Game

I think its too late. Even when 2ku was a lot more robust and they had practice drills for almost everything with legend players acting as your trainer, people just went to the internet to look up ways to best cheese. Add onto it that 2k is now as much as a staple as COD, Madden, Fifa etc so the large portion of the audience is yearly buyers who somewhat already have a grasp on your game's controls (and cheese tactics like the "call PnR wait for your defender to get sucked into Earth's only man made black hole called a screen then shoot a 3")

I think ironing out exploits and unrealistic cheese tactics will push people towards actually learning how to play the game properly and that's where a robust tutorial comes in

[olajuwon34]

Re: 2K Doesn't Teach You How To Play Their Game

I don't think that has anything to do with it. The people who want to be good right out of the gate aren't going to spend time with a training mode anyway; they're still going to just buy their way to a better team.

Thats a smaller portion of players. What your saying is that the people who want to know how to play the game aren't going to go into the tutorials and practice sessions to learn how to play the game.


There's no excuse for not having in depth tutorials and info on game mechanics in a game series thats been going for 20 years and only gets more mechanics each year.

[Krucialist]

Re: 2K Doesn't Teach You How To Play Their Game

I think its too late. Even when 2ku was a lot more robust and they had practice drills for almost everything with legend players acting as your trainer, people just went to the internet to look up ways to best cheese. Add onto it that 2k is now as much as a staple as COD, Madden, Fifa etc so the large portion of the audience is yearly buyers who somewhat already have a grasp on your game's controls (and cheese tactics like the "call PnR wait for your defender to get sucked into Earth's only man made black hole called a screen then shoot a 3")



I think ironing out exploits and unrealistic cheese tactics will push people towards actually learning how to play the game properly and that's where a robust tutorial comes in

But what about the fact that there are core mechanics of gameplay that we still don’t know exactly what they do? Anyone care to tell me what the mathematical difference is between drop stepper bronze, silver, gold, hof? Or what the up and under badge even does? I’ve got a playmaker with gold dimer. What does that mean mathematically? What do hot spots do? What do cold streaks do? What does takeover actually do to your ratings and applicable green windows?

We aren’t going to get those answers from crowd sourcing. We can make educated guesses, but we likely would never know for certain. But 2K knows. They have the exact answers to all of those questions. They just don’t share it with us

[El_Poopador]

Re: 2K Doesn't Teach You How To Play Their Game

Thats a smaller portion of players. What your saying is that the people who want to know how to play the game aren't going to go into the tutorials and practice sessions to learn how to play the game.


There's no excuse for not having in depth tutorials and info on game mechanics in a game series thats been going for 20 years and only gets more mechanics each year.

Oh I 100% agree. My post was in response to someone saying they chose not to include better training options so more people would spend money in-game.

[MrWrestling3]

Re: 2K Doesn't Teach You How To Play Their Game

Oh I 100% agree. My post was in response to someone saying they chose not to include better training options so more people would spend money in-game.

It's probably more like they don't dedicate any resources to an advanced training mode because it's not something they can immediately make money from.

[olajuwon34]

Re: 2K Doesn't Teach You How To Play Their Game

Oh I 100% agree. My post was in response to someone saying they chose not to include better training options so more people would spend money in-game.

Why do you think they stopped putting in detailed tutorials and training modes?

[El_Poopador]

Re: 2K Doesn't Teach You How To Play Their Game

Why do you think they stopped putting in detailed tutorials and training modes?

Honestly, I have no idea. My best guess is that they felt not enough people were using them to warrant taking the time to do them. I'm sure they have data being fed back from each user on which modes they're playing, and take that into account.

Not saying I agree with it by any means, but that would be a likely reason for it.

[olajuwon34]

Re: 2K Doesn't Teach You How To Play Their Game

Honestly, I have no idea. My best guess is that they felt not enough people were using them to warrant taking the time to do them. I'm sure they have data being fed back from each user on which modes they're playing, and take that into account.

Not saying I agree with it by any means, but that would be a likely reason for it.

They take the time to track peoples data on their accounts but not simply go out on a limb and put in the practice tutorials, i guess with 2k this is normal.

[jeebs9]

Re: 2K Doesn't Teach You How To Play Their Game

They take the time to track peoples data on their accounts but not simply go out on a limb and put in the practice tutorials, i guess with 2k this is normal.

Isn't that hilarious!!! You tracking all kinds of things. But you can't simply see that people need a little IQ boost.


Here is my only defense for them though. I think 2K doesn't want to tell people how to play. One person's style is going to be different from another person style. But that's all I got lol.

[MasonOS95]

Re: 2K Doesn't Teach You How To Play Their Game

They literally show you how to do each move, you have 3 different practices

you can run plays vs air, if you dont know how to play basketball their's plenty of ways to learn basketball terms and concepts outside of the game, focus on this is silly.