by Lamrock on Wed Feb 16, 2022 4:51 am
Not a super active thread but it is surprisingly hard to find a lot of discussion about myNBA Online. I have some thoughts.
As some know, I was part of an NBA 2K20 online myLeague that ran for 17 (!) seasons. It wasn't perfect - most of the league was in Australia and so the team that hosted the match would have a tremendous advantage - I probably had about a 20% win rate in international matches where I was not the host, versus roughly 85% when I hosted. Some offseasons were marred by strange glitches. The AI controlled teams were easy to exploit via trades, and it literally wasn't until the last seasons of the league that we had a set of restrictions that worked for everybody. Even so, it was by far the best experience I've ever had with a 2K game and online gaming in general. I reconnected with a couple old friends from this site, and made several new ones. Highlight of the pandemic for sure....
We're doing another league in 2K22, albeit with less people this time. They've added some features that are legitimately great, but unfortunately this mode has been neglected due to its lack of popularity or microtransactions.
The best thing about myNBA is that it allows for smaller leagues. There are 14 teams in our league, half user controlled and half CPU controlled. This is great because the regular season is no longer mostly against CPU teams. Targeted individual training has been added to the online mode and the player progression system as a whole is quite good with the boom/bust mechanic. (Player mentorship is there too but doesn't seem to work) mySTAFF is also a nice addition. It generally works the same as it did in 2K20, but there are some new glitches that really hinder the experience.
The biggest issue is PvP results not saving. Roughly half the time, PvP games don't save, requiring us to manually force a winner. This undermines statistics, and can lead to injuries (which we remove but still can have lingering effects on morale and future injuries). We've tried just about everything to get them to save consistently, but there doesn't seem to be a rhyme or reason for why it won't save half the time. We also had an offseason where every player's contract advanced a year, leading to a tricky situation with guys hitting free agency prematurely and punishing players who built through the draft. Three team trades have been removed. We've also had players experience difficulty entering the league at times. Issues like custom rebrands not saving and certain features not working have been resolved, but the games not saving bug is the main one and something I haven't been able to find any information about.
Issues from 2K20 return as well. The lag is as bad as ever. Offensive and defensive settings need to be set for every game (admittedly a feature that inexplicably plagues every mode), and trying to set gameplans for specific teams still causes the game to crash. The CPU GM's are still dumb, though setting trade difficulty to 70 and forbidding trading for draft picks after the lottery has made them a lot harder to cheese. It's still by far my favorite mode in the game and the issues aren't dealbreakers, but the experience could be so much better if these issues were addressed. It's obviously not that simple, but given how little discourse exists about the mode, I feel inclined to share my experience.
Five seasons in, I'm still having a lot of fun with the mode. It's my favorite thing that 2K has to offer. I know it's unrealistic to expect all of my gripes to be addressed, but I do hope that the issue with PvP games not saving can be fixed.