What does difficulty do?

[LongRoad19]

I don't know if that has been asked before, but what does difficulty do? I mean aside from the preset sliders.

I'm having a hard time with this game so I tried the different difficulty levels from Rookie to Superstar with all sliders set to 50 just to figure out how much the difficulty level matters. And somehow I have the feeling that it makes no difference at all.

I guess it makes manual shooting easier, but I put shooting on real player % for this test to eliminate mistakes from my input.

Is it really all about the sliders and do the difficulty levels not matter?

[m29a]

I recall there being complaints many years ago about "hidden" effects of difficulties. I think that what you see in the default sliders is pretty much all that the difficulty is changing. I still have the assumption that difficulty adjusts timing windows / penalties but I haven't tested it.

[Luke Skywalker]

Difficulty settings, in my opinion, is all arbitrary to the user. You can change any slider to make the game challenging. To me, my preference for a harder difficulty is having the CPU players move faster than mine: changing the Off Ball Movement Sliders. I don’t really mess with the shot timing or any of that.

[other]

In MyCareer it usually makes your teammates play worse. Not as bad this year though.

[Gotmadskillzson]

Da Czar explained it for NBA 2K19 what the difference was under the hood and probably still hold true today.