This tutorial will help you to completely remove/blank out the career stats (the ones seen on their player card) for players in NBA 2K11's rosters using REDitor II. I've put together both a full tutorial that explains the process in-depth and includes some screenshots, and a basic step-by-step. Experienced roster modders probably only need the step-by-step. Please note that I have no plans to create a video tutorial for this, as it's a very simple process (literally loading and saving rosters, and changing one attribute to a new value and back).
Contents
- Background/Why Do This?
- Important Notes
- Full Tutorial
- Quick Step-by-Step
- Background Info/How I Discovered This (In Case You're Interested!)
When a player is set as a Legend/Special Player and their age isn't hidden using the Hide Age flag, any career stats they have are irreversibly wiped when you view their player card; even when you change them back to being a regular player. This means that by changing a player's Player Type, we can completely wipe their career stats from their player card (aka the view player screen). So, why would we want to do this?
NBA 2K11 has a limited amount of Create-a-Player slots, specifically 200. When it comes to larger roster projects, that might not be enough, requiring you to overwrite existing players. Although you can completely replace any player in the roster, if they have career stats, they will continue to be shown on their player card. While this is purely a cosmetic feature and won't impact how they perform or what they look like, you may want to improve that aesthetic by not having any of the original player's stats show up when viewing their replacement. As there are a limited number of players without career stats you can overwrite, the rest you may want to blank out. This may also be useful for retro and special roster mods.
2. Important Notes
A couple of things to keep in mind:
- ALWAYS keep a backup of your roster save, in case something goes wrong. You don't want to lose all your hard work, as you'll have wasted all that time. I take no responsibility for any lost data or damage caused!
- CHECK to make sure everything is working once you've made any changes. You don't want to put more work into a roster file that's buggy or corrupted, as that too will be a waste of time.
- REMEMBER that this is permanent. You can't restore career stats once they're wiped!
- NOTE that the only option is to completely wipe career stats. REDitor II doesn't give us access to modify them, delete a single year, or anything like that. This method is all or nothing.
- PLEASE follow every step in the tutorial! It's not a particularly in-depth process on this occasion, but if you don't follow the steps as instructed, I can't guarantee the results you want.
What you'll need
- NBA 2K11 PC (Obviously!)
- A saved custom roster you want to edit
- REDitor II
- Patience, care, and attention to detail!
STEP 1: PICK A PLAYER AND SAVE YOUR ROSTER
Note: You can have NBA 2K11 open and Alt+Tab back and forth between it and REDitor II while you do all this. Just make sure that a roster file isn't open in REDitor II while you're loading or saving in-game, as issues may arise.
First of all, you need to pick a player (or multiple players) that you want to blank the career stats for.
Once this is done, save the roster. I recommend saving an additional copy of your roster (remember, always have backups!) while carrying out these steps, just in case anything goes wrong. For this example, I'm just going to call this roster "Blanking". The name you give it doesn't matter, and is only for your reference. The save menu is of course accessed by going to Options, then Load/Save, then Save Roster.
STEP 2: CHANGE THE PLAYER'S PLAYER TYPE
Open your saved roster in REDitor II, and locate a player that you want to overwrite and blank out career stats for. The easiest way of doing this is to search by first name or surname. Please refer to REDitor II's documentation for a guide to basic functionality, but you should see the Search bar at the bottom (press Ctrl + F if you don't). There, you can type in the name to search for, and the field you want to search in.
Once you've found a player, the field to change is PlType. You can either type 0 (that's a zero) in this field, or select the Bio tab on the right, and choose 0/Legend/Celebrity from the dropdown next to Player Type. If done correctly, you'll be changing this number from 4 (regular NBA player) to 0 (special player).
At this point, the player will be set as a Legend/Special Player, while still having their age visible. Do not make any further changes to the player at this point. Repeat the process as necessary if you want to do this for multiple players.
Once this is done, Save and Close the roster file in REDitor II.
STEP 3: LOAD THE ROSTER AND CHECK THE PLAYER
In NBA 2K11, load the roster (Options -> Load/Save -> Load), and select the saved roster you've just modified.
Go to Manage Roster and locate the player(s) you just modified. When you view their player card, their career stats should now be blank.
Save your roster again, and go back to REDitor II.
STEP 4: CHANGE THE PLAYER TYPE BACK
Open the roster once again in REDitor II. Find the player (or players) that you've modified, and change their Player Type back to regular NBA player. Once again, you can either do this by typing in a new value (change the 0 back to a 4, or select 4/Regular Player in the dropdown next to Player Type on the Bio tab over on the right).
Once this is done, Save and Close the roster once more.
STEP 5: FINAL CHECK AND SAVE
Back in NBA 2K11, load up your roster and make sure that everything is working as normal. The career stats should not have returned, and there should be no crashes or changes to any other player that you didn't modify. If everything looks good, save your roster. You may now proceed with further edits as you work on your roster project, with blanked out career stats for the players of your choosing!
4. Quick Step-by-Step
Experienced when it comes to roster modding? Then this quick step-by-step guide is probably all you need! I would of course still recommend having a backup/saving a copy of the roster to work on, and making sure that you close any files in REDitor II before loading or saving them in NBA 2K11, in order to avoid any data being lost or corrupted.
- Pick the player(s) you want to blank out career stats for, and save the roster.
- In REDitor II, find the player(s) and change their Player Type (PlType) to 0 (Legend). Save and close.
- In NBA 2K11, load the roster, check to make sure the stats are gone. Save the roster.
- In REDitor II, find the player(s) again and change their Player Type (PlType) to 4 (Regular Player). Save and close.
- In NBA 2K11, load the roster, check to make sure the stats are definitely gone and that everything else is working fine. Save the roster, and then proceed with your project.
Some final notes for those who are interested in how and why I came to discover this. The CAP limit and need to overwrite players with existing career stats are issues that I've encountered while working on a current roster update for NBA 2K11 PC. I've been looking for a way to resolve this, while doing my best to overwrite players with no career stats in the interim. As the number of such players has been running low, it's been difficult to add the last few players to the roster.
As it happens, while working on the Kobe Tribute roster, I noticed that somehow the career stats for the historical players I'd moved to the active rosters had been blanked. Retracing my steps, I deduced that it must've occurred when I changed their Hide Age attribute so that their ages would be displayed, without first changing their Player Type to being regular players. Repeating this process with original active players in the Free Agent pool proved that this was indeed the case. Quite accidentally, I'd stumbled upon the solution I'd been seeking. Sometimes, it's worth taking on a couple of projects at once; you never know what your assorted tinkering will lead you to discover!
Naturally I wished that I'd discovered this earlier, as there would be no need to overwrite some of the other players that I did. On the bright side, it's not that hard to restore players if I absolutely need them, and this has future-proofed the current rosters as now there are hundreds of retired players who can be overwritten moving forward. Serendipity is very underrated! In any case, hopefully this will be helpful to other roster makers moving forward. I haven't found any other method of doing this using REDitor II or the in-game tools, though I've been told there's a Chinese trainer that has a "blank career stats" option. So, consider this a fairly safe alternative method to that, using a familiar tool!
