2K16 MyLeague is Very Good, but Needs Improvement for Long Term Playability (Last updated 12/16/16)
Overview:
In my biased opinion, MyLeague is the best mode in the game and the best mode in any sports game available. After the major makeover the game got a couple of years ago, giving a full on sandbox mode with deep user editing options, the mode improved last year in some welcome ways.
Those improvements include expanded league expansion and brand sharing options, multiple commentary teams, ease of navigation for multi-team control, player editing options from the team roster screen, draft class editing options, enhanced draft pick trading options, off season trading, and game plans that allow a user to specify substitution patterns. There are more but those are the ones that stand out to me the most.
Nevertheless, MyLeague in 2K17 failed to address a number of long time fan requests, and in one unintentional way,
broke the multi-year player development algorithm out of the box. The net result, to me at least, was a mixed product for the mode in terms of needed advancement.
Development Philosophy:
The MyLeague/MyGM development team has been focused in the last two years on user immersion, mostly by way of creating new feature options for team rebranding, moving franchises and expanding the league
. What has been lacking is an application of that immersion philosophy to the nuts and bolts of playing a league save file across multiple years, emphasizing the little things that are not new features.The ideas listed below come from this perspective, which I hope will prompt a renewed emphasis on updating the mode's creaky fundamentals for 2k18.
Create A Player
Player models have arguably been the weakest part of MyGM/MyLeague outside of any game play issues for years. The game simply does not do well with variety and realism of player models and body types to represent what looks like an interesting, dynamic, ongoing league experience over multiple league years. I appreciate that this year the Neanderthal head model with the mullet hair was (mostly) gone, but it's just too common to see near identical twins on teams once you get four or five years into the mode. That's just not good enough, and well below what other games have implemented with character models.
I'm hoping that 2k18 will be the year the game offers robust CAP features, allowing for greater facial customization, more hair types, more customizable body shapes and types, and body types that match player's listed weights. I'm hoping also that CAPs can be added to any game save file at any time.
Draft Classes
This is a huge area for league replayability, because as things now stand, generated draft classes do a C- job of creating players that approximate the living, breathing player types and variety of the NBA. Typically, attributes, tendencies, hot zones, play types and badges are poorly or loosely aligned. I recommend 2K take a look at the
work of the SimWorld team and the
draft class generator program developed by turty11 for ways to improve. It takes many hours to work around generated draft classes and their limitations every year. This should be the year 2K takes a leap forward in making draft class players more realistic through attention to the details of player attribute/tendency/hot zone/play type/badge assignments and alignment.
Another obvious area to fix with draft classes for next year is the
player training bug that overdevelops shooting if you don't fix the team fundamentals training sliders for every team. The draft class algorithm also brings too few A+ potential players into the league over time so that there are not enough stars rated 90+ to star on teams and give the league sizzle and interest.
I know 2K knows about this and I created a work around fix for it (see the link above), but obviously this needs to be fixed. And more to the point, 2K needs to schedule the development time to test and retest draft classes as they enter the league across several years to optimize the mode. They must not have had time to do so this year or this error would have been caught.
Player Progression, Training and Badges
Progression/Regression/Training: Player progression and regression curves, working in tandem with peak start and peak end ratings, do a pretty good job of sustaining a league with various levels of talent of multiple years of game saves, in my opinion. I've done some testing with changing up the progression and regression sliders in my attempts to improve the league talent pool and in the end I've found that the defaults for those at 50 and 50 have been best. To overcome the problem of not having enough true league stars over time, my best solution has been to add more high level, high potential talent into the draft classes manually. Otherwise, raising the progression or training effect sliders will create too many 80+ players for each team and skew the league so that no stars really stand out the way they do in real life.
What I would say is that player progression overall is a bit too predictable. What the mode lacks are those surprise breakouts or people who pop up every year. Peak start and peak end settings do a pretty good job of approximating high potential draft busts, so I don't have a problem there. However, I would suggest some algorithm that users can adjust with a slider that can randomly select a handful of players under 28 who have not reached their peak start yet and who take unexpected, larger than normal leaps forward in progression.
Every year 2K has to adjust real life rosters and ratings because some 21 or 24 or 26 year old guy who started the year rated at 67 ends the year playing well enough to be ratings boosted to 75, or maybe starts out at 78 but ends up at 84. That is not replicated in MyGM/MyLeague at default progression and training slider settings.
It might be cool if the system could keep track of the players selected for those random boosts and give them a slightly higher probability of regression for the next year, because some of those players end up becoming the NBA equivalent of one hit wonders. I would base that regression probability on player's age and time remaining to reach peak start. But even if that's too much to add in one cycle, I'd gladly settle for the random breakout players, not all of whom are stars.
Obviously, as pointed out in the previous section, 2K needs to fix the broken team training system that causes player type imbalance that I pointed out in the draft class section. I won't repeat all of that. When devs test for player development, please take a look at the variety of player archetypes that develop across the league and make sure there is enough variation and representation of different archetypes.
Dynamic Shot Tendencies: I'd like to see some adjustment by CPU teams/coaches in MyGM/MyLeague to assess and adjust player shot tendencies and maybe touches based on who their best offensive players are. Sometimes as years pass you see very good offensive players develop but their shot tendencies are low, because that's where they were when they were drafted. Maybe this can be partially addressed with better draft classes, but even so, CPU teams should not have more poorly rated or over the hill offensive threats taking more shots than younger, emerging offensive threats, just because of static shot tendencies.
So I'd like to see CPU rosters or coaches prioritize their top few offensive players by attributes and adjust overall shot tendencies and maybe touches to reflect offensive priorities, maybe based on head coach and assistant coach offensive ratings. That could mean adjusting some players overall shot tendency down and raising some others. Ideally, these CPU team adjustments could also adjust play types at some point, but that could take more years of development. I'm not even asking for shot tendency adjustments based on area of the court, just overall shot utilization stuff.
Badges: Let's talk about badges. For offline MyGM/MyLeague, the
community consensus is they have the potential to interfere too much with realistic game play, creating boosts and forced animations that make, say, poor post shooters become demigods of the drop step, or whatever. There seems to be some consensus in the community that badges for offline make sense when they capture some talents that attributes and tendencies can't replicate, like a dimer badge or the pick and roll badges (here's
my take fwiw). But badges can take over game play enough, especially when they effectively stack, so that some users like to
edit them out of the game entirely.
For MyLeague/MyGM, the developers don't control what badges are in the game, since badges are a primary engine to generate interest (and revenue) for the online modes emanating out from MyCareer. But I would say, if possible, create the player draft class and progression/training algorithms to be less aggressive with assigning badges than the out of the box real league rosters are. Players with 30 badges, half of which are gold, just become unrealistic cheese off line and they break the sim style of game play. For stars, a peak of 11-15 badges seems to be about right.
Practice and Scrimmage
The freestyle and scrimmage practice options in MyLeague/MyGM are a big part of the modes for players who dive into them. These are the places where we can learn to use our new players and learn to use our new teams, assign and practice plays, etc. That's immersion!
I'd like to see these little sandboxes expanded:
- Make the full menu of offensive and defensive settings available the way they are in played games. That way we can learn the new tools OG and Czar put in the game and practice them. I'm talking about the stuff in defensive settings pause menu, the quick options adjustments, and the time out menu options. Basically, replicate the game coding without the shot clock or time outs, but add some game play setting in the pause menu to optionally display hot zones.
- Make roster substitutions possible so we can pick different line ups to practice with in scrimmage mode.
- Add an option under Coaching for us to practice plays with our MyLeague/MyGM rosters
- Add a blacktop style option to practice one on one against a defender with your players in the mode, to enable practice for both ball handling/iso skills and on ball defense.
- Nuisance item: make the camera selection by the user stick for scrimmage mode, so we don't have to set it every time. Make more cameras available also?
D League
I get and accept that building out a full blown D League is not worth all the resources it would take to do it. But I would agree with others in the community who would be more than happy with a kind of text based simulator for D-League stashed prospects. If I'm greedy I'd like something like that for Euro league as well, since so many role players in real life come from there in their mid 20's. Give us the ability to scout the leagues for guys to sign and monitor the progress (or lack of progress) for our drafted second rounders. I'll mention this below, but give us the ability to draft and stash to go along with this.
Contracts and Free Agency
The 2K team put real effort into improving contracts for 2K16. There's more that can be done, even if recreating the full depth of the NBA's rules for contracts would be too much to perfect. For all things possible to improve on contracts and contract logic, the guru is
Mikelopedia.
This year, we have players signing for minimum, which we did not have before. The problem is there are too many good role players signing for minimum this year, and too many very good players accepting unrealistically low contracts. These contract amounts are rapidly changing in real life, so this isn't easy for the devs, I know.
My recommended solution for all of this involves building new logic and code for the free agent market. Right now, player asking prices are static based on some combination of player age + player OVR + player POT, modified by player contract preferences (play for winner, financial security, loyalty). They are also slightly modified by team staff ratings, like GM contracts rating, coach desirability ratings, etc. But they don't take account for the talent market beyond that.
Here are factors I'd like to see built into some free agent coding logic that determines player asking prices and what teams will offer:
- Team need: is the player that last piece that can make the team a real contender? Is the player the cornerstone of what the team wants to build around? How much of the team's cap is already allocated to that player's position (see roster construction logic below)?
- Supply/Demand side market competition: are there many other comparable or good players at the same position also available on the market, and how many teams with cap space are bidding for them? BaeBae32 has some good suggestions for how to do this here, at least as a start.
- Note: this stuff can't be built without improved team roster construction logic, discussed below.
CPU Roster Construction and Trade Logic
This is an area, frankly, that still needs a lot of work. Every year, I basically take over total control of trades and start-of-year roster adjustments and free agent signings for all teams. Otherwise, you end up with teams too thin at some positions and too heavy in others. Team building logic should include rules like these:
- At least 5 legitimate front court players whose primary positions are either PF or C.
- At least 5 legitimate back court players whose primary positions are either PG or SG, AND at least 3 of those are rated playmaking B- or better.
- All teams have at least 2 players at each position whose primary positional assignment is that position. In other words, all rosters have at least 2 each true PG/SG/SF/PF/C's.
- No more than one third (or some other limiting proportion, I'm open on this) of total salary is allocated to a single position. Teams should not be maxing or near maxing out two players at one position.
- No more than 4 players who share the same primary position.
Just putting those rules in place would improve off season free agent signing and trade logic.
I would also beef up the ability of users to review and negotiate trades if those settings are turned on. With trade approval on, some trades just show you player name/position/rating, but you can't click through to look at the trade. We should also be able to access the team scouting reports from the trade screen, because understanding what a team's status is (see below) absolutely matters when reviewing or approving trades - especially when draft picks are included.
Some other trade approval occurrences actually allow you to negotiate the trades, maybe only for teams you control, either actively or passively. It's not clear to me why some trades can be negotiated with 30 team control but not others. Regardless, we should be able to have settings in place to fully review and negotiate trades as described above, with access to team scouting reports.
Finally, a lot of CPU trades seem to be generated based on what is possible given cap limitations. This is what CPU trade logic is best at. But when the CPU proposes a swap of comparable 82 rated SG's with comparable contracts between a contending team and a rebuilding team, where the contending team transfers a 26 year old player for a more experienced (and injury prone) 31 year old player, that makes no sense.
Teams don't sell off a building block for a veteran of comparable overall rating, except rarely when subtleties of play style of the veteran match the coach's play style preferences (or need to move a head case slasher to gain a veteran perimeter threat for court balance and spacing). Somehow team building logic needs to be better represented in these CPU trades. Too many CPU proposed trades seem like they are just about what's possible under the cap rather than what makes sense for either or both teams.
That level of detail may be too complex to tackle in one cycle, so at the very least, enhance optional user trade review and negotiation options.
CPU Team Status AI
First things first: please make team status (rebuilding, contending, buying, selling) editable by the user. That's the quickest fix for the problems in the logic.
Right now, the logic needs to be improved. Teams that are losing and ranked 10th or lower in the conference with an old roster half way into the season should not be buying. That's just one example. Teams with a young roster and a budding star half way into the season ranked 5th in the conference should no longer be classified as rebuilding. There are also common occurrences of poorly performing teams half way into the season that think they are contending.
I'd propose another status designation as well, a kind of combination of rebuilding and selling: tanking. We all know it happens. Some teams that are aging and middling will make the strategic choice to unload very good player assets and tank for draft position, that's just the reality of the NBA. Let's allow the game to try to replicate that.
Miscellaneous
- Give the ability to edit staff badges.
- Create some basic commentary for the mode that recognizes if a player is a recent lottery pick or top ten/5/number 1 pick during games. If that player seems to be playing higher/lower/equal to expectations, let the commentary reflect that. Likewise for 2nd round or undrafted players who play well or work their way to play, say, at least 15 minutes per game, add some commentary noting that. Enable this kind of draft pick commentary for players during their first two years in the league.
- Fix the little bug in scrimmage mode in the team stats comparison screen that says 2 pt shots instead of 3 pt shots.
- In the box score screen during the pause menu, let the pages that show each quarter or the half show the score for just that quarter or half, the way it used to be. Right now every page shows the overall score. Right now you have to go to the shot chart page during the game and scroll through each quarter to compare score by quarter.
- This year when you import a created draft class, the game asks you if you want to enable (I forget what it's called) some kind of storylines or randomization to the class. I admit I haven't tried it because I put so much time and work into creating the classes, I don't want them messed with. But I like the concept in theory. I wish you could have explained what that is and how it works, so if you keep that in place or expand on it somehow, please communicate about it.
- Include draft & stash capability (see above re: D League) and also, especially, sign and trade capability.
- I brought this up in last year's wish list thread and wanted to try again: please make the player card screens available to view directly from the pause menu defensive settings screens associated with each opponent team's player. That way we can check directly on attributes, tendencies, badges etc. when making decisions about how to defend opposing players.
12-11-2016, 01:15 AM
