Looking Back -- What NBA 2K needs to do to step up its online game, Part One Of Two: Why I'm Keeping Pest Control on Speed Dial

I love basketball, and perhaps just as much, I love a good, competitive online game; in fact, when it comes to sports games, the online mode is about the only part that I spend my time with these days.

That’s why my body forced me to vomit up the stinky, moldy cheese that Visual Concepts tried to feed me when it came to NBA 2K8 ranked online games: as an online experience, it was neither good nor competitive –- at least, not in the "fair" sense of the word –- and while I came in expecting sustenance, I left with a bad case of food poisoning.

To be honest, I probably would have never noticed these issues had I just stuck to playing OSers and the A.I., but I just had to go and play random people in ranked matches.

Visual Concepts' most recent entry (until tomorrow), NBA 2K8, was particularly discouraging, in that, the series was beginning to show symptoms of a serious pest-control problem, making the game more or less unplayable for those of us who just wanted to hop into a lobby and play a "real" game of basketball without being bothered by the tireless squeaking of rodents.

Rattus Norvegicus, colloquially refereed to as “lobby rat.”

The Holy Trinity of Cheese:


Exhibit A) The Running Dunk Through Traffic

NBA 2K8 online: too much like Mike

Note to Visual Concepts: this is the NBA, not an AND 1 tour, or a Nike commercial.

And in the NBA, dunks like the exploit in the above video are exceedingly rare (I see two or three a year, max), not a source of easy points every time down the court online.

Exhibit B) Lead pass + Standing Dunk

Warmups, a.k.a., about the only time you’ll ever see a standing dunk attempted during an organized basketball game.

"Lead passing" – it certainly sounds like something that belongs in a basketball simulation. But that’s before you step onto one of 2K’s poorly spaced courts, and realize that “lead passing” is ridiculously difficult to defend against online.

As if your opponent being able to “lead pass” his way through traffic wasn’t bad enough, when you couple lead passing with the unblockable “standing dunk,” the feature goes from being moderately annoying to the key ingredient in an unstoppable, game-breaking money play.

Exhibit C) Constant Pressing and Double-Teaming

Apparently, the NBA 2K online fraternity only accepts graduates from the Rick Pitino School of Coaching:

Because Pitino wills it: full-court pressure on every possession, with double-teams coming constantly, one after another.

Considering how coach Pitino's playing style –- and thus, his professional coaching career –- completely self-destructed in the “real” NBA, I think it's no stretch to say that these kind of tactics have no place in a game that aims to emulate the NBA experience.

This is not to say that users shouldn't be able to choose from these defensive options, only, that they should be properly penalized for doing so, just like Pitino's Celtic teams were, accumulating 102 wins and 146 losses from 1997 to 2001.

Those losses came in part because Pitino’s brand of pressure defense gives up fast breaks, wide-open shots, and uncontested layups to teams who can find and hit the open man, which full-court pressure and double-teams naturally generate.

Note that when I say, "teams who can find and hit the open man…" this encompasses virtually every team in the NBA.

You see, Pitino's defensive system failed in part because NBA players can tear pressure defenses apart with a degree of speed, court vision, and passing skills that few college teams possess.

NBA 2K fails to live up to its end of the "simulation" bargain online, because it makes every NBA team handle full-court and double-team pressure like a bunch of high school underclassmen. Let's list the issues that occur in these aggravating online situations.

• Players run away from trapped teammates instead of running towards them.
• Ball-handlers get "sucked into" double-team animations and are unable to do much of anything while in the animation.
• Passes in general are slow and floaty when they should be sharp and crisp in the backcourt.
• On the few occasions where the pass actually makes it into the breadbasket of an open teammate, that teammate often stands there and lets the ball bounce off him like a bullet off the chest of The Incredible Hulk.
• Throwing long-intermediate passes is akin to playing a game of Russian roulette with a revolver full of turnovers.

These idiosyncrasies delight cheesers everywhere because they realize they can still cuddle with their copies of Success is a Choice and proudly salute the Double Team poster hanging from their parents' wall.

Even if Visual Concepts can fix all those pressure-related gameplay issues, there is still one other major factor that, after nine years of 2K basketball games, needs to be accounted for: Teams who play a “high-pressure” style of defense need to fatigue at a much faster rate than teams who are playing more "relaxed" styles of defense.

Going back to my "real world" example, part of what made Rick Pitino’s pressure defense so effective at the University of Kentucky was the fact that his teams would use at least a 12-man rotation to wear out the other team's seven- or eight-man rotation over the course of the game.

And yet, in NBA 2K, you don't even need a rotation online at all! I mean, why bother to take out your star players when they never get tired enough to warrant a substitution? Especially when a simple timeout or the end of a quarter/half will have those star players coming out of the huddle feeling just as fresh as they were in the first minutes of the first quarter.

But there is more afoul in the game’s online fatigue system than its failure to account for various styles of defense. There is also the issue of individual effort, specifically, how hard gamers choose to push the players who are under their control.

Even though the NBA is a much more deliberate game than what you will find on the average collegiate basketball court, most NBA 2K gamers push their players like virtual Bob Knights, making the players they control go all-out, playing at full-speed for virtually every second of the game.

The NBA 2K series continues to allow these speed freaks to run their players ragged online, and if NBA 2K wishes to better-simulate the sport of pro basketball, it must penalize these lead-fingered felons, and force them to exercise a modicum of restraint.

Sadly, sprinting, pressing, and double-teaming are but the tip of the iceberg when it comes to "things that should -- but don’t -- tire out NBA 2K players online.

In addition, there are actions like the repeated use of isolation dribbling, long three point shots, fancy dunks, jumping around like a team of jack-rabbits on defense, taking a lot of contact in the paint, etc., all of which should come with some kind of fatigue penalty, but do not.

But, if it is too much work for the developers to go through the game and program new fatigue values for all of the above actions, why not just incorporate the type of "turbo bar" that games like NBA Jam, NBA Hangtime, NBA Street, et al. have used to keep people from going overboard with the turbo, dunks, and special moves?

Why not give us a bar that partially depletes any time an "aggressive" move is triggered, then have the amount of "bar" that’s available impact the type/amount of "aggressive" moves that a player can do?

For example, if a player is expending all his effort on defense (example: Paul Pierce guarding Kobe Bryant in last year’s NBA Finals), it should make that player less effective on offense, such that he has a significantly limited ability to use "aggressive" moves while he's recovering energy on the offensive end of the court.

The opposite scenario could apply for someone like Kobe Bryant, who might -- as he was in those same NBA Finals -- be expending all his effort on offense, forcing him to play way off his man on defense so he could conserve "energy" by playing a kind of sagging, roaming help-defense.


But with that in mind, this is where part one of the journey ends. Join me Tuesday for part two, as we look forward to some of the new features that may enhance the online experience in NBA 2K9.