I'd like to see better Communication and Transparency from 2K in 2K18

[LorenzoDC]

Quote: Originally Posted by Smirkin Dirk

There has not been enough communication. I am still puzzled by why OG and Czar's blogs were muzzled. But let's not forget that this forum has become fairly poisonous this year. Whether caused by frustration or perceived weaknesses in the game, any developer would have 2nd thoughts about heading to an online space that has too many immature and emotional posters. It's one thing for a poster to point out thhat help defense isnt strong enough in situations A, B and C. But the torrent threads about the game being 'broken', or devs being lazy and greedy and trash is not helping building any bonds between the devs and this forum.

There has been a lot of negativity, but here's the thing:

First, OS moderators do a good job, especially this year, in moderating this forum. That's especially true in threads where Beluba or Davez or Leftos show up. The ban hammer is real and never rusty.

Second, it's just not true that they don't listen and respond to negative stuff. Twitter, unlike this forum, is not moderated and is a sewer of abuse and negativity. But those guys get relatively more reaction and response. Negative stuff is virtually all of what they respond to.

If 2K wants to say that they won't respond to negativity, it's just not empirically true. So if they avoid these forums, it really can't be because there's too much negativity. This place is a British tea and scones party compared to twitter.

Based on that evidence, it seems inescapable to me that if they avoid engaging here with sim heads, it's just because they choose not to, for whatever reason.

I think it mayhave to do with their business model and definition of "community engagement" as being equivalent to marketing and PR, as the OP points out. Doing reactive brand management and rehabilitation on twitter is authorized and in the mission as currently conceived.

On the other hand, communicating in a more positive and information sharing back and forth to explain and improve the game with the power user community is not in their model, and largely discouraged if not forbidden.

Or maybe it's just that this forum is too niche and small, where twitter has more blow up potential. They do point out, and Czar just commented this weekend, that negativity and shouting generates video views, etc. You've made that point as well, and that is the nature of unmoderated, mass social media.

But if they say the power users who want to be constructive aren't around, that's wrong. We're here. As 24 points out, our ranks are thinning because they neglect to engage us. They just don't talk to us where we can be found, and the nature of being positive and constructive is such that we won't go viral.

If the only people who get attention from 2k are the ones who go viral, then 2K is like the drunk who's looking for his lost keys under the lamp post, because that's where the light is. . . even though he dropped them away up the street. And if that's the only place 2K looks and responds, that's all that people will do.

[ILLSmak]

My POV is different. We all know I am disappointed w/ 2k this year, so I won't go into that.

I do think that they may not be used to this sort of haven of fans becoming more 'toxic' to them, but I also think that they get it now. I really do. They get it. They made a game that wasn't liked.

Did they get more sales? Are they at a crossroads between appeasing their base and making money? I tend to think they probably didn't get their best sales ever... or if they did, they should know by how everyone is acting that they could have made much more.

I just hope they pay attention to suggestions going forward. Feedback isn't huge to me, nor is accountability. For instance, it seems they have tried to fix some things (like the double team) and haven't succeeded.

I am cool with saying 'they get it', by now. They don't need any more videos or threads. Of course, it's a joke for me to say that cuz I like to post the same thing over and over (hoping someone will listen...), but the issue is, to me, they're not gonna admit that their game isn't going to live up to what you want. They probably don't have good answers to a lot of the issues.

We can hope they are working on their game for next year, and even more hopefully, that they will listen to some of our awesome suggestions... because, one thing you notice from gaming is that the gamers somehow know the game better than developers, always. Just like I could have told you sharpshooter was gonna be ridiculous (and did, haha) as soon as they released the archetype ratings.

So, yea... I don't wanna be the crotchety old gamer, but I just hope that 2k can succeed and make a game that will simulate basketball.

All of the noise about VC and microtransactions will disappear once people are back into being immersed in the game.

A misstep is not unprecedented; it's how they recover.

-Smak

[NoLeafClover]

I'm curious as to if there were recent changes in the power structure at Take Two Interactive etc. in the past couple of years in terms of a new marketing exec being hired or something similar whose directive was to switch time and staff purely towards sales oriented targets vs. QA, service and other "less profitable" tasks.

Would go a long way to explaining the somewhat bizarre shift the company has taken in recent years going from the sim-heads and realism experts closely knit to the community into being as mainstream and capitalist as possible.

Will be interesting to see if they continue on this path or if NBA Live can actually come out with something decent to create competition and steal market share, although good luck on relying on EA for similar reasons...

Sent from my SM-T810 using Operation Sports mobile app

[Smirkin Dirk]

The marketing for the game is geared at casuals.

But we have teams working to give us freestyle offenses, super deep playbooks, individual player and team tendencies, deep defensive options. Not to mention the deepest offline franchise mode in sports gaming history. We can debate how successful these have been so far, but let's not pretend this is NBA Jam.

We don't get marketed to, and havent been communicated with well enough this year, but judge them by their actions. Simulation basketball is part of the core of 2K.

[NoLeafClover]

Quote: Originally Posted by Smirkin Dirk

The marketing for the game is geared at casuals. But we have teams working to give us freestyle offenses, super deep playbooks, individual player and team tendencies, deep defensive options. Not to mention the deepest offline franchise mode in sports gaming history. We can debate how successful these have been so far, but let's not pretend this is NBA Jam. We don't get marketed to, and havent been communicated with well enough this year, but judge them by their actions. Simulation basketball is part of the core of 2K.

I get what you're saying, but them adding stuff for the sake of adding additional stuff and then not following it up with quality QA testing makes it worse than if they didn't add the new things in the first place, as you just end up with an additional layer of systems not functioning properly in conflict with one another.

A chief example is the "collisions" and "physicality" system they added in almost completely hindering all of these advanced plays from developing before the shot clock expires - it ends up as a waste of effort and cascades down to affect rotations, help defense, excess 3 second in the key calls as players get stuck, etc etc.

They need to take a "less is more" attitude if they can't cope with implementing things properly on a short dev cycle, especially if they release early like this year.

And of course, going back to the communication issue, we are all sitting here with no idea if we are going to get another gameplay patch and fix some of these problems, meaning I have no reason to not believe they will be back in the game next year, and so on...

[LorenzoDC]

Quote: Originally Posted by NoLeafClover

I get what you're saying, but them adding stuff for the sake of adding additional stuff and then not following it up with quality QA testing makes it worse than if they didn't add the new things in the first place, as you just end up with an additional layer of systems not functioning properly in conflict with one another. A chief example is the "collisions" and "physicality" system they added in almost completely hindering all of these advanced plays from developing before the shot clock expires - it ends up as a waste of effort and cascades down to affect rotations, help defense, excess 3 second in the key calls as players get stuck, etc etc. They need to take a "less is more" attitude if they can't cope with implementing things properly on a short dev cycle, especially if they release early like this year. And of course, going back to the communication issue, we are all sitting here with no idea if we are going to get another gameplay patch and fix some of these problems, meaning I have no reason to not believe they will be back in the game next year, and so on...

I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, I like that they are ambitious, and the stuff they are trying to pull off is not just srface, gimmicky stuff. . . even though they focus marketing and PR to the surface gimmicky casuals.

Czar has said a few times in the last year or two that the game is in a state now where the low hanging fruit of game play stuff that can be fixed or improved easily is all done. So now making real improvements involves root and stem level rewrites to very old code, and doing it in one cycle to deliver stuff. That's technically hard to do when everything in the game that gets changed on that deeper level by definition affects everything else.

One year is just not enough time to do root level systems work, test it and deliver it polished. This year proves that as well. The patched product out there now has basically rolled back a lot of the stuff intended to work at release in favor of a game that is a lot closer to 2K16 in how it plays. That stuff about respecting user input and dribble freedom they talked about at launch is gone, because the rest of the game and the collision systems could not balance and handle it.

What I do agree with though is they should spend this next 2K18 cycle cleaning up and nailing down what they tried to put into the game this year. I don't know where that leaves them for marketing items to feed Ronnie when the hype train has to run, but I hope they focus this year a bit more heavily on execution over new feature innovation, at least as far as game play is concerned.

[PPerfect_CJ]

Unfortunately, I feel like 2K's communication has dipped to FIFA's level. Not a good look. I just hope that this year will be a real eye-opener for them and they make an effort to improve.

[BA2929]

Quote: Originally Posted by LorenzoDC

If 2K wants to say that they won't respond to negativity, it's just not empirically true. So if they avoid these forums, it really can't be because there's too much negativity. This place is a British tea and scones party compared to twitter. Based on that evidence, it seems inescapable to me that if they avoid engaging here with sim heads, it's just because they choose not to, for whatever reason.

Every place on the internet is a tea party compared to Twitter replies. If you're on Twitter and you're a high profile person, you expect your mentions to be a sewer system of awfulness.

If we expect better communication in the future, we need to return that favor and be a little more respectful towards the people who make this game and come here to discuss it with us. They don't have to come here to talk to us about the game. It's not like they're going to lose massive amounts of sales if they just stopped coming to OS. We're a tiny little portion of this games community, yet we expect to be catered to like we're kings among mere mortals.