One of my goals when tinkering with old favourites is to try and devise fixes for my fellow retro basketball gamers. To that end, I’ve been able to put together a fix for the bug/design flaw with training in Dynasty Mode in NBA Live 2004.
For those who may not remember, assigning less than 20% of the available training time to any of the four areas (Shooting, Defense, Offense, and Conditioning) in pre-season training camp or in-season training sessions would result in your players’ ratings declining. As such, the only way to see significant improvement in one area meant weathering a drop in ratings in another.
This issue was fixed in NBA Live 2005, but as it turns out, it can easily be resolved in NBA Live 2004 as well! The ratings increases and decreases relative to the assigned time are stored in DBF files, and it’s easy enough to remove all the negative values (and thus the nerfs). With this fix, training your players in Dynasty Mode in NBA Live 2004 will only ever result in ratings increasing, as long as you assign enough training time. Otherwise, player ratings will remain static until the offseason. Players will still improve and decline as normal as they develop between seasons.
Download the fix here, and find the support topic here! For the moment, I’ve left the default increases and thresholds intact, but it would be possible to make it easier (or indeed, harder) to increase ratings through training camp and training sessions, as well as change the size of the increases. It’s definitely satisfying to resolve this issue, even if it is going on twenty years later! I’m hoping to release more of these little mods and fixes throughout March Modness 2023, so stay tuned.
NLSC Your source for basketball video games.
