While most of its consumers were asleep, Visual Concepts quietly installed a server-side update on Saturday morning that changed the success rate of 3-pointers in NBA 2K16's 2K Pro-Am mode. These adjustments have allowed users to achieve a perfect "green" release from various spots along the 3-point line.

Earlier this month, Gameplay Director Mike Wang revealed that a "green" release in NBA 2K16 multiplies your shot's success rate by two. So if you take a jumper that's graded with a 40 percent probability of going in, and your timing is perfect, that chance of scoring increases to 80 percent.

Prior to Saturday, only close-range and mid-range shots were consistently capable of achieving a "green" release in Pro-Am, unless your player was "hot" and he had red rings of rhythm pulsing inside his white icon. Even then, one red ring (+5 to all shooting attributes) was usually only good enough to get a "green" release on a corner three, and two red rings (+10 to all shooting attributes) were barely enough to earn a "green" release on a wing or top of the key three. Before the update, I had hit only three or four "green" releases from the wing or top of the key in 100-plus Pro-Am games.

Now that "green" release 3-pointers can occur without heating up, and they can happen anywhere along the 3-point arc, there's already been a lot of talk in the Pro-Am community about whether or not outside shooting has become too easy. Based on the nine games I played during this weekend's Road to the Finals qualification tournament, I would say 3-pointers are definitely not as difficult to make as they should be:


In the game shown above, my team was able to make 19 of 26 shots from deep, tallying an insanely high 73 percent accuracy. Even if most of these shots were wide open looks, that's still a shockingly high percentage for an NBA team, especially when taking such a high volume of threes. The San Antonio Spurs and Golden State Warriors boast the best 3-point shooting lineups in the league, but they've only made 45 percent of their wide-open threes this season.


While my teammates were getting lots of "green" releases in that game, I managed to go six of eight from deep with the benefit of only one "green" release from the 3-point arc. That is because Visual Concepts has also increased the shot grade on open "yellow" threes, where your timing is considered good or great, but not perfect. Those "yellow" shots used to be graded as a B+ or an A-, but now they're showing up as an A or an A+. So even if your timing is off (like mine was in that 73 percent game), you can still sink most of your open threes in Pro-Am thanks to the more lenient grading system.

To me, the most unfortunate part of this update is that NBA 2K16 was producing some of the most realistic shooting percentages in the series' history prior to Saturday. Coming into the weekend, my team (whose mean 3-point rating is an 85) was averaging 42 percent from three over a span of 100 or so games. That's the same 3-point percentage as the league-leading Golden State Warriors, and only one percent lower than their second-best sharpshooter, Klay Thompson.

But if you read NBA 2K's Twitter mentions and Twitch chats, having realistic 3-point shooting percentages in the 40s has not been sitting well with many consumers. This is probably why Visual Concepts felt the need to make shooting more "fun" and "satisfying" instead of keeping it "sim."



Let us know what you think of this change. Maybe it doesn't feel like quite the disaster that "Green Release Patch Four" was in NBA 2K15, but it's certainly a rather large tweak.