Welcome to another edition of The Friday Five! Every Friday I cover a topic related to basketball gaming, either as a list of five items, or a Top 5 countdown. The topics for these lists and countdowns include everything from fun facts and recollections to commentary and critique. This week’s Five weighs in on five contentious basketball gaming debates.
When you’ve been around a while, both in terms of a gaming community and life in general, a couple of things usually happen. You may well lean into that curmudgeonly aspect of aging, becoming the proverbial old man yelling at clouds. At the same time, you also realise that certain things aren’t as important anymore, if indeed they ever were. Leaving high school is a liberating experience, as problems that once seemed all-important and dramatic now feel like petty non-issues (because they often were!). The flipside of this is dealing with all of the new challenges that come with adulthood.
Of course, being an adult doesn’t necessarily mean avoiding petty drama, especially in hobby and fan communities. As the saying goes, growing older is mandatory, but growing up isn’t. Fanbases have strong opinions that make them prone to contentious debates, and the basketball gaming community is no different. As with any other gaming community or group of fans, there are popular and unpopular opinions, issues that are divisive, and a selfish desire to be right and get what we want. We’re not all going to get along one hundred percent of the time, but there are some basketball gaming topics that are often contentious. Here’s my take on five of those matters!
Alright, so I’m stepping back in time for this one, but picking the best NBA Live title out of these three has led to some contentious debates among basketball gamers. All three were fantastic games, being among the last all-around great releases in the NBA Live series. Just to clarify, I’m referring to the PC/PlayStation 2/Xbox version of NBA Live 06 here, which in our community was generally as well-received and certainly as heavily modded as NBA Live 2004 and NBA Live 2005. None of them are perfect, and each has a key flaw that caused us some frustration. They each have their strong points though, so weighing up the pros and cons doesn’t lead to any easy answers.
For example, not everyone is a fan of Freestyle Superstars in NBA Live 06, but if you disable FSS movesets, suddenly it’s NBA Live 2005 with some fixes and a far better Dynasty mode. NBA Live 2005 is graphically superior to NBA Live 2004, but has weird fast breaks with spotty logic and too many chasedown blocks. NBA Live 2005 and NBA Live 06 have the All-Star Weekend, whereas NBA Live 2004 doesn’t. NBA Live 2004 has deeper CustomArt functionality, but unstoppable pro hops. Ultimately, all three games are fun with or without slider tweaks, they all have great mods, and none of their key flaws are fatal. I favour NBA Live 06, but there’s no wrong choice.
Elitism, gatekeeping, and zero-sum thinking is what makes this a contentious debate in online basketball gaming circles. In NBA 2K16, NBA 2K17, and NBA 2K18, it was possible to play with three users per side in team Pro-Am, with AI Players filling in for the two absent users on each side. It worked out quite well, facilitating games and not forcing undermanned squads into the toxicity of The Rec. However, it wasn’t a popular solution with gamers who wanted team Pro-Am to be the home version of the NBA 2K League. That’s who the games are currently catering to, as 5v5 team Pro-Am requires five users, with a 3v3 Pro-Am spinoff that utilises Playground rules.
There’s a solution that’d make everyone happy, one that I’ve frequently advocated for: proper matchmaking, with full squads only ever facing each other, or games with AI Players being optional. Instead of supporting this however, debate rages between two sides who just want to get their own way. “Go play MyCAREER if you want to play bots!” or “That’s what The Rec is for!” some will sneer, all the while contributing to the wretchedness of the online scene. In saying that, they do have a legitimate point about online team play, but shutting down a solution that would cater to everyone is selfish and childish. Again, I say expand matchmaking so that everyone is catered to.
Speaking of elitist gatekeeping and childish attitudes, have you ever seen gamers taking part in the contentious debate about the best shooting mechanics? The term “Skill Gap” gets thrown around by people who are, quite frankly, making being good at a video game far too much of their personality and identity. I’ve previously written about the myopia of mastering mechanics. Just because you can master controls that are wonky or broken, it doesn’t mean that they’re good, or that anyone who refuses to adjust to a questionable design choice is unskilled. A true “Skill Gap” is also difficult to achieve in a game that relies heavily on canned animations and dice roll mechanics.
As I noted when I discussed shot aiming in a previous article, even if you want to make the argument that a skilled gamer should be able to master it, then you still have the potential issue of it being too easy and exploitable. That doesn’t result in a healthy competitive atmosphere, either! Green Releases also have their problems, as does the percentage-based mechanic in NBA Live 16, as does the old school approach of no guaranteed makes. Each of them has their strengths, too. It’s not a matter of skill, but rather that shot aiming isn’t a markedly better solution. Moreover, the game isn’t just about the competitive scene. To me, shot aiming is a failed experiment at this point.
Most of us aren’t very old when we’re first told that “two wrongs don’t make a right”. We learn more nuance as we get older and experience the wider world, but it remains a solid basis for morality. It certainly applies to the contentious basketball gaming debate surrounding hacking in MyCAREER and MyTEAM, and the anti-consumer practices in those modes. We can all understand how the latter seemingly justifies the former. I’m all for advocating for gamers over defending the greed of video game publishers, so it may seem hypocritical to wag a scolding finger at hackers. It’s not about sticking it to a big corporation, though. It’s about the effect on other gamers.
I completely understand wanting to give Take-Two a middle finger over the pushy recurrent revenue mechanics that NBA 2K is riddled with. Still, cheating to have an OP MyPLAYER or MyTEAM isn’t fair to everyone who is playing by the rules. “I’ll do what I want with my game; I bought it!” doesn’t just misunderstand the concept of software licenses and Terms of Service; it also ignores that the gamers who don’t want to deal with hackers also bought the game, making their stance just as valid! It’s not that we don’t comprehend the complaint or taking a stand. It’s that such a stand ruins other gamers’ fun, too. I loathe microtransactions, but I can’t condone hacking, either.
Unless you are actively ruining someone else’s good time, or playing in a way that is agreed upon to be unsporting in a competitive setting, there is no wrong way to play basketball video games. They are designed as both single and multiplayer games, thus catering to different ways of enjoying a virtual representation of basketball. I say this knowing full well that pointing out this very obvious fact will not put an end to the eternally contentious debate between online and offline basketball gamers. It’s the same reason that console fanboys are taking shots at one another, and why PC vs. Console (or for that matter, PC vs. Mac) remains an ongoing debate after all this time.
In fact, calling this a “debate” might be too kind! “Pointless posturing” would be more appropriate. It usually comes down to who’s the most skilled: the offline gamer or the online gamer? Not only is that of secondary importance to “Are you having fun?”, but I guarantee that there are elite online gamers who would struggle mightily with the hardest AI difficulty and its cheap tricks. Likewise, there are offline players who can easily handle the AI at its toughest that would struggle with the less predictable nature of a human opponent. Once again though, it doesn’t matter! Play what you enjoy, but don’t act as though yours is the only correct way to have fun with basketball gaming.
Have I thrown some more fuel on the fire here? Perhaps; I’m not exactly a neutral party in all of these contentious debates! Nevertheless, we should recognise that some are just a matter of opinion, while others are highly unnecessary, and we’d be better off supporting each other. With that being said, debate can be healthy, so as always, have your say in the comments, and feel free to take the discussion to the NLSC Forum! That’s all for this week, so thanks for checking in, have a great weekend, and please join me again next Friday for another Five.
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