Hi everyone!
This is my first post here, although i've been hanging around NLSC for about 8 years periodically updating my NBA games collection, but especially my spanish version of NBA Live 2005 either with Andrew's packs or community contributions.
Today I wanted to talk about NBA Live 2005's rating system weighing between positions (since I haven´t seen any post talk in depth about this yet, please correct me if I'm mistaken), as well as how the evolution of the game throughout the years makes new roster updates harder to balance.
When talking about Live 05's rating algorithm, it sadly remains unknown to this day. Fortunately, I've found each position's stat weighing by testing with a fresh, 0 overall created player, so that may give a clue to anyone more capable than me with mathematics also looking for the formula.
All 20 different stat categories need a certain amount of points to add a +1 to the Overall rating, depending on the player's PRIMARY position (after some testing, secondary position does NOT affect at all the Overall rating). Stats can be divided in between two groups: 12-point stats or non-key attributes, and 10-point stats or key attributes, according to how we understood the game 16 years ago: While today's NBA requires almost every player to have some kind of outside game, back in the day that was not a priority but more of a niche reserved for shooting guards and small forwards mainly, excluding oddities like Dirk, therefore 3pt machines like Steph Curry or Dame Lillard tend to be harder to represent Overall stat-wise in older games, not to mention some notable PF/C 3pt shooters like Nikola Jokic or Joel Embiid.
Looking at the Point Guard position, we find 5 key attributes that help the Overall rating go up faster, these being QUICKNESS, SPEED, PASS, DRIBBLING and STEALING, the rest being 12-point non-key attributes.
For both Shooting Guards and Small Forwards, there's 5 key attributes in common, this time being 3 POINTERS, QUICKNESS, SPEED, PASS and DRIBBLING.
Power Fowards and Centers, however, follow a different path, prioritizing 6 attributes: DUNK, INSIDE SCORING, OFFENSIVE REBOUNDS, STRENGTH, DEFENSIVE REBOUNDS and BLOCKING.
By doing some testing with randomly chosen players, I found that swapping a player's primary position from SG to SF, from PF to C or viceversa has no effect in the Overall calculations. In case you wanna corroborate all of this by yourself, all of the 10 and 12 points calculations can be checked by giving a 0 Overall player the respective quantity of points in one particular stat leaving the rest at 0 (for example, 20 points in SPEED or 24 points in JUMP being a PG gives the same Overall points, this being 2) or adding points to stats from the same group (for example, 40 points in 3 POINTERS and 10 points in DRIBBLING, this time being a SG, makes a total of 5 Overall points).
Simultaneously adding points to stats from different groups makes the Overall formula change the weighings of each stat, making it impossible for me to solve since I'm not good at math, but at least we now know something about how the algorythm works.
Sorry in advance for any grammar mistakes, english is not my main language. Hope this helps someway. Have a nice day guys