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10 for 10: Dynasty Mode

10 for 10 is a series of articles written by Andrew and originally posted during the lead-up to NBA Live 10, discussing the ten most needed and/or desired changes in different areas of the game.

Welcome to the second instalment of 10 for 10, a series of articles outlining what I feel are the ten things we most need to see in NBA Live 10 in different areas of the game. In the first instalment, I covered gameplay with the ten items I feel would greatly improve the game this year. Today we’re moving on to a new list of ten, this time focusing on Dynasty Mode.

Ah, Dynasty Mode. For most players who prefer or at least spend a considerable amount of time playing offline, Dynasty is the premier gaming mode. A revamp in NBA Live 08 has breathed new life into Dynasty Mode and NBA Live 09 also added a few new features. However, there is still room for improvement and more features that could be added. With introductions out of the way, let’s take a look at the ten things I feel NBA Live 10 should do with Dynasty Mode. Once again, I must emphasise that these are not in any particular order.

Bring back the reorder roster screen

Once again I’m starting out with something small, but most Dynasty enthusiasts would agree that this is a must. The past few years, we’ve had to use the Player Rotation and Inactive List menus to reorder rosters and there’s a reason that the return of the more traditional reorder roster menu has become a staple of recent Wishlists: the new method just doesn’t get the job done. The reorder roster screen is straightforward and allows the user to set their lineup from the starting five to the bench order and right down to the inactive roster. The Player Rotation approach is a nice idea but it’s prone to weird lineup changes and having to use two screens to perform one basic task is far too cumbersome. Its return is long overdue and we Dynasty geeks desperately need it back.

That said, the Player Rotation function is a good idea for simulating or even setting a substitution pattern if it could be used for that purpose. But as a means of changing your starting five and reordering the bench, it’s not getting the job done as well as its predecessor.

Include different autosave options, or the ability to switch it off altogether

Unless I’m missing a setting, Dynasty Mode will automatically save your progress after you finish a game or make a transaction. The former is quite useful, but the latter is not as good an idea as it would first seem. The problem with an autosave following a transaction is an obvious one: it doesn’t give you the option to change your mind. On one hand that keeps players honest, but since there’s no way to see if a team would agree to a trade before completing it we’re left with the option of trying out different scenarios between re-loads then finally going with a deal we like. And of course, there’s always the possibility of doing something by accident and then being stuck with it, effectively messing up a Dynasty game that you might have progressed a long way into.

There is an easy fix to the problem of course: save two copies of your Dynasty so that you can restore from a backup. However, the user shouldn’t necessarily have to do that. Ideally we should be able to set the autosave conditions (because immediately saving after a game is finished is a good idea, even if we don’t want it to autosave at other times), though disabling autosaves altogether would suffice. And since we’ve broached the subject, the ability to propose a deal then be prompted to either complete or cancel it would be handy and save a lot of time by not having to re-load the game. It’s not cheating after all; it’s the virtual equivalent of negotiating a deal and deciding not to go through with it. To make it fair, Dynasty Mode could probably set a limit of three cancellations before a team refuses to discuss any further trades involving the same players for the rest of the season.

Clear “Injured” status upon entering a new Dynasty game

This was a big problem last year with NBA Live 365. In theory, it was a good idea to keep the rosters up to date by not only reflecting the current lineups and inactive list data, but also by designating players as being injured when they were listed as such in real life. In practice however, it wasn’t such a good idea as it caused problems in Dynasty Mode with players retaining their injured status.

There’s a few ways around that problem. The first would be to leave injured status out of NBA Live 365 updates and just place players on the IR as necessary, since we can always reorder the rosters ourselves. The second option would be to automatically clear injured status upon starting a new Dynasty game. The third would be to add the option of clearing injured status manually when editing the rosters, which would probably be best as we would be able to reorder the rosters as we see fit before starting a new Dynasty game.

Fix issue with injured players not returning to the lineup

Speaking of injuries, this was a problem in NBA Live 09 that definitely needs to be resolved in NBA Live 10. While virtual injuries certainly make a Dynasty interesting, the problem of injured players not returning to the lineup once they’ve recovered messed up a lot of Dynasty games. Aside from being unrealistic, it also removes a lot of the challenge of the game. It’s certainly fun (and hardly unrealistic) to take advantage of a weakened team every now and again, but when the best of the best continue to be benched despite being healthy, it ends up taking away the fun and the challenge of the game.

Continue to refine simulated stats, award winners and All-Star selections

Another staple of the Wishlist since the game moved away from DStats, but NBA Live 09 was a lot better in this regard. There are still a couple of players who score too much or too little in simulation but on the whole there was noticeable improvement last year. The upper limits for points, rebounds, assists, blocks and steals could all be raised slightly and players like Steve Nash and Jameer Nelson should be capped from achieving scoring averages in the top ten, but once again the results in NBA Live 09 were pretty good.

The selection of award winners and All-Stars still needs a bit of fine tuning as well. The results usually aren’t too bad but sometimes they are puzzling and the user sometimes seems to draw the short straw when it comes to picking up awards. It would also be nice to see more All-Star starters picked on the two guards, two forwards and one centre criteria so it wouldn’t rigidly be a player of each position in the starting lineups, since sometimes two shooting guards or two power forwards get voted in. Perhaps the process of All-Star voting could somehow be reflected in Dynasty Mode; I’d certainly like to see that.

Allow saving (and uploading) of boxscores

Here’s one from past PC releases. Since we’re now able to save screenshots and videos and upload them to EA Sports World, it would also be handy to be able to save boxscores and put them up on the web where we might download them for posterity as welll…and of course, our Dynasty stories in the Forum. Preferably they’d be exported as text files but even if we could save a snapshot of the boxscores screen which we could then upload, that would certainly be manageable. For those of us who like to refer back to some of our finest performances, it would be a really handy feature seeing as though the game does not keep boxscores past three days in Dynasty Mode.

Add multi-team trades (involving at least three teams) and other trade interface upgrades

The three team trade interface in NBA Live 2001 was a little tricky to handle at first and confused a lot of people since trades could not be suggested between two CPU controlled teams, but the option of involving at least a third team can be useful in alleviating the problem of troublesome contracts, not to mention streamlining situations where deals with two teams could be made in one transaction. It mightn’t be a bad idea to allow trades between two CPU teams involved in a deal with the user to be suggested, though both CPU teams would of course have to agree to the swap.

As I mentioned before, one of the disadvantages of testing the waters with trade offers is that you need to re-load between offers as all trades are immediately completed upon being accepted. If the user is prompted to complete, cancel or modify the deal – similar to the option given in NBA Live 2000 back in the day – it would give us an opportunity to effectively shop players around and then go for the best deal. And once again, there could be a limit placed on the amount of times you could cancel a trade before a team would refuse to “discuss” deals involving those same players for the rest of the season. On a similar note, it would also be handy if the CPU returned more detailed messages upon declining a trade, ranging from simply feeling the trade is unfair to being concerned that it would leave them too weak at a certain position. This could also be tied in with the direction that each team selects at the beginning of a year in Dynasty Mode.

One final note about the trade interface and it’s another functionality issue. With the “push” approach to Dynasty that strives to alleviate the need to go digging through a lot of menus to find information and features, I think we’d all agree that it would be handy to not only cycle between the level of interest in a player and their current salary, but also the number of years remaining on their contract. That way, we could see which players have expiring contracts or still have a lot of years left on their deal without leaving the Trade Player screen.

Options for shorter season lengths in Dynasty Mode

I must admit when it comes to Dynasty Mode, I am a complete geek. I still like to play as many games out of an 82 game season as I possibly can with 12 minute quarters and sim whatever I can’t play, especially since we can intervene during simulation these days. However, not everyone likes that approach and many would rather play a shorter schedule of 29 or 58 games. It’s definitely a handy and much-desired option that has been greatly missed the last few years.

Allow for multiplayer Dynasty games

This is another feature of previous games that is greatly missed. Although Dynasty Mode is a mode that bests lends itself to a single player, being able to control more than one team in a multi-season mode – and thus facilitating two player Dynasty games – has become another wish that’s very popular year-to-year. The EA Locker could then be used to swap Dynasty saves as well so that players could alternate as they play games on their team’s schedule, much like the “email play” options certain games offered back in the 90s.

And that’s just offline and what would essentially be email play. If Dynasty Mode was brought online using the existing league concept, I have to imagine that it would be even more popular with NBA Live players.

More management tasks, including the ability to hire and fire head coaches

That’s one of the big things still missing from NBA Live’s Dynasty Mode. Managing the finances of the club isn’t for everyone and just like the existing management functions it should be possible to automate those tasks if a user isn’t interested in managing absolutely everything. Being able to hire and fire new coaches is long overdue addition though and while it might not always be a huge factor in gameplay, it could certainly have an impact in simulation.

On the subject of team management, I’d also really like to be able to enter the NBA Academy manually instead of just once a month for training. Obviously it shouldn’t be too easy to raise player ratings in a single training session or even over the course of a season, but it would at least be handy to scrimmage with your team or run through a few drills (even if not every session will affect player development), especially when you acquire new players.