2K19: Return of The Sim Roster

[ch46647]

YAK- Did you end up making changes to the movement sliders after the patch?

[youALREADYknow]

Quote: Originally Posted by dnikafoeno

Hey guys, long time lurker here.. I mainly mess with things in the shadows to see if I can get CPU players to do incredible things or play a certain way. I've been testing this game for a few days, I hope they do fix the ACE or something cause I think some players may have "glitched" edits where certain play types are attached or needed to players no matter what which only makes the CPU run only those plays for those players whenever they're on the floor.

So much to unpack here, but first off THANK YOU for taking the time to test and post this! Any issue with ACE feels like a black box issue that requires reverse engineering the game and we need more people who are able to consistently reproduce it so we can report it accurately to the 2K team.

Quote:

Like you, YAK, I've been messing/testing the Rockets and Warriors (Cpu/Cpu and Player Lock) for the 1st quarter for a few days, I've noticed for the Rockets that no matter what you changed if Carmelo is on the floor and he has "Post Up High/Low" as his play types they will constantly run those play types along with 21 Delay.

I've seen three combos since release for the Rockets and they are ONLY based on Play Types, not the Touches tendency for AI/CPU controlled teams because ACE is always ON for the CPU.

1. Harden w/ Iso, CP3 w/ Iso, Melo w/ Post (2K Defaults): In this situation, Melo's Post Play Type will win out as the default playbook call and the team will run the Point Series as their base Freelance set.
2. Harden w/ Iso, CP3 w/ Iso, Melo w/o Post: In this situation, Harden and CP3 take turns running Iso plays from the team's playbook and the team will run 21 Delay as their base Freelance set.
3. Harden w/o Iso, CP3 w/o Iso, Melo w/o Post (My v0.1 Roster): In this situation, the game does not run plays out of the playbook and only runs the 21 Delay Freelance set until Harden/Melo are subbed out of the game.

I'll retest the above scenarios post-patch since it's important to know whether anything has changed.

Quote:

I went back to the original roster with no changes/edits/etc. I created a new player and used the "Player DNA" and imported Melo's DNA to the created player without changing anything and placed both of them on the Rockets. When the "Cloned Melo" was in the game, it didn't matter if he started or came off the bench, the Rockets started running their playbook even things such as Cut Point, Quick Point, Fist Point, and Quick Point 2 which aren't in the playbook! When the 2k Original Melo came in.. they reverted back to what you see for 5 minutes straight.

This is strange and interesting so let's find a way to test this further.

One thing I'd like to correct is that those Point plays you saw were the Point Series plays that the Rockets ran with the default 2K Melo in Scenario 1 above. Those plays have nothing to do with the roster or playbook, but there is clearly some logic in the ACE system that connects Melo to the Point Series. That's the strange behavior that I can't figure out.

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Makes me wonder do we even have full control of how teams run their plays especially to star players or whoever we want? Does "Touches" Tendency even work? How does ACE exactly work at all?

We have control over whether a player looks to take a shot out of certain play actions.
We have control over what mode of attack a player uses to reach the basket.
We have control over removing iso-heavy Play Types (Iso, Guard Post, Post High/Low), but it comes with the consequence of taking away some of the default ACE play selection.

Having said all that, we have absolutely no control over play diversity, play selection, or primary/secondary scoring options as long as the game uses ACE as the default strategy system for CPU teams.

I'm not going to give up on this yet, but it's starting to become obvious that only a few people understand how ACE works and it's a black box system for anyone outside of the VC/2K team. Czar himself has said there are thousands of configurations within ACE and that would be a huge red flag for a system with no front-end in any development shop that I've ever worked in. We're not getting a new front-end for ACE in 2K19, so the best I think we can hope for is some transparency and maybe updates/patches to change the default play calling logic. I'd be happy if they just cut ACE play calling to 20-30% of the game (i.e. start the game with a series, end of quarter sets, and end of game sets) and let the playbook shine for the rest of the time.

[youALREADYknow]

Quote: Originally Posted by ch46647

YAK- Did you end up making changes to the movement sliders after the patch?

Some slight changes, but nothing major.
- Increased Game Speed to bring animation speed back to where it was before the patch. I looked back at pre-patch streams and game speed looked to be much slower at the same setting level. The easiest way to spot it is how fast a free throw goes from hand to basket. I'm up from 64 to 66 Game Speed and it still feels a bit slower than before the patch.
- Very small changes to Speed w/ Ball, Speed w/o Ball, Acceleration w/ Ball, and Acceleration w/o Ball. There is a slight 1-2 point edge to User over CPU to make up for the All-Star difficulty boost. There is also an edge to w/ Ball over w/o Ball to make up for the animation delay lag in catch/finish animations throughout the game.

I'm not going crazy with sliders in this release other than the changes to get more perimeter ball movement and reduce the number of drives to the paint from non-scorers.

[STLRams]

Reading all of this and seeing it for myself when I play the game and watch every CPU constantly running the same plays over and over or just trying to force their way in the paint no matter what really has me disappointing with NBA2K19 this year. I don't see how the devs missed this with the problems with the ACE system and teams not even utilizing the playbooks/systems properly. I'm hoping they either patch this or provide a update to the playbooks and ACE system, but for some reason I have a bad feeling they are not.

[Barncore]

Quote: Originally Posted by youALREADYknow

Some slight changes, but nothing major. - Increased Game Speed to bring animation speed back to where it was before the patch. I looked back at pre-patch streams and game speed looked to be much slower at the same setting level. The easiest way to spot it is how fast a free throw goes from hand to basket. I'm up from 64 to 66 Game Speed and it still feels a bit slower than before the patch. - Very small changes to Speed w/ Ball, Speed w/o Ball, Acceleration w/ Ball, and Acceleration w/o Ball. There is a slight 1-2 point edge to User over CPU to make up for the All-Star difficulty boost. There is also an edge to w/ Ball over w/o Ball to make up for the animation delay lag in catch/finish animations throughout the game. I'm not going crazy with sliders in this release other than the changes to get more perimeter ball movement and reduce the number of drives to the paint from non-scorers.

Is there anywhere i can check out your sliders written out? Curious PS4 user here

[frank70]

Quote: Originally Posted by STLRams

Reading all of this and seeing it for myself when I play the game and watch every CPU constantly running the same plays over and over or just trying to force their way in the paint no matter what really has me disappointing with NBA2K19 this year. I don't see how the devs missed this with the problems with the ACE system and teams not even utilizing the playbooks/systems properly. I'm hoping they either patch this or provide a update to the playbooks and ACE system, but for some reason I have a bad feeling they are not.

It's really a shame.

How can you have a multi-million-budget and don't even get the most essential element of offline-gameplay right?

And this problem exists for years. The cpu never ever used the complete playbooks.

I love the insights Da Czar is giving us. I really do. But in the end all these ideas and plays are worthless, if the cpu doesn't run them

or

if those plays simply break down because a cpu player who wants to set a pick just misses is pick assignment because the individual defensive pressure is too high or too low.

A lot of good thoughts are already in the game but the execution of these ideas is really, really lacking.

Maybe it would be a good idea to concentrate on basic stuff first:

- implement a proper pick-and-roll logic. Picks aren't working, animations kick in all of a sudden and end the PnR-sequence, the ballhandler isn't turning the corner quickly and so the advantage of the pick is immediately gone.
This most basic play in basketball is implemented poorely. The collision detection/animation system isn't good enough and the complete logic of this important basketball action isn't advanced as well.

[Barncore]

Perhaps, since the Series feature is new and shiny, the dev team had some bias towards how active it would be. Maybe they were proud of it and subconsciously made it overactive so that it was showcased rather than hidden in the background.

A similar thing probably happened with the new steals system.

[youALREADYknow]

Quote: Originally Posted by Barncore

Is there anywhere i can check out your sliders written out? Curious PS4 user here

I'll update the original post with this today.