Tweaked Rosters

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Tweaked Rosters is a term that refers to a roster patch that has been specially modified for the purpose of correcting gameplay issues. While most current roster updates strive to improve gameplay, tweaked rosters would make mass changes that would often ignore the consequences in simulation for the purpose of counteracting prominent gameplay problems. They were prominent during the time of NBA Live 2001 and NBA Live 2003, with many roster updates featuring both normal and "tweaked" versions.

Tweaks[edit]

The tweaks involved globally modifying certain ratings to achieve the desired results, such as lowering offensive rebounding ratings or raising passing and field goal ratings. The 'MegaModifier function in the NBA Live Toolkits aided greatly in this process and allowed formulas to be developed and implemented before a new version of the roster update was released. Different formulas were sometimes devised for different positions allowing big men to be tweaked so that they were poorer ballhandlers while point guards were less turnover prone. Global changes to speed and quickness ratings were used to lower the pace of the game, particularly with NBA Live 2003.

The main drawback of this practice was that the tweaked ratings caused problems in Franchise Mode for simulated performance as well as generated rookies, whose ratings were assigned based on the default rating scales. The latter could be corrected by reapplying the appropriate formulas using the MegaModifier. For this reason, tweaked rosters were usually released alongside a "normal" version so that anyone who could tolerate the issues that the tweaked rosters attempted to fix could play a Franchise game without worrying about any of the problems that the tweaked rosters themselves caused.

Decline in popularity[edit]

With the introduction of gameplay sliders in NBA Live 2004, the demand for tweaked rosters dwindled as gameplay could be fine-tuned to a user's liking without making sweeping global changes to player ratings. Tweaked rosters soon went out of vogue as custom slider sets became the chief means of adjusting gameplay for a more desirable performance, particularly as they could (theoretically) be used with any roster update.

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