Welcome to another edition of The Friday Five! Every Friday I cover a topic related to basketball gaming, either as a list of five items, or a Top 5 countdown. The topics for these lists and countdowns include everything from fun facts and recollections to commentary and critique. This week’s Five is a list of five frustrations that sadly didn’t have a good workaround.

We’ve been able to do some rather ingenious things in our community thanks to mods. Missing players have been added, mistakes in the default rosters have been corrected, and when we’ve discovered compatible files, we’ve been able to swap assets between different games to create our own fixes. This includes adding better net animations to NBA Live 06 PC, restoring access to the traditional reorder roster menu in NBA Live 07’s Dynasty mode, and even being able to access the hidden Player Lock option in NBA Live 08. Where official updates have fallen short, we’ve had good workarounds.

Unfortunately, that hasn’t always been possible. There are some frustrations that we simply haven’t ever been able to resolve. Even when a workaround has been devised, it hasn’t satisfactorily fixed the issue despite our best efforts. This is why I’ll always push back on the “stop whining” rhetoric that shuts down constructive feedback. Just because there is a workaround, it doesn’t mean it’s a desirable solution, and that the issue shouldn’t be addressed either in a patch or the next game. Additionally, one of these frustrations did once have a good workaround, but its disappearance suggests that it wasn’t ideal long-term. Whatever the case, these issues lack good solutions.

1. One Custom Roster Save in NBA 2K14 PS4/X1

This is a frustration that I’ve felt since getting on a massive retro gaming kick with NBA 2K14 for PlayStation 4. For those who are unaware, issues with the frontend design resulted in even worse problems in the backend. It’s the reason that there are only five save slots that can be shared between MyCAREER and MyGM. While that’s limiting, you can still make do. A far more annoying limitation is the single custom roster we can create. It’s become an annoyance for me because I’ve made my own updated roster in the wake of reinstalling the game after the server shutdown, which I have to ruin if I want to set up any custom roster scenarios for articles and videos.

There is a workaround. By copying your saved data to a USB or uploading it to the cloud to retrieve later, or by deleting your latest settings file so that the game loads an old one, it’s possible to restore an old roster. It really shouldn’t have to come to that though, and it would be very easy to lose that data. It wouldn’t be as big of an issue if the final official roster update wasn’t lost forever, but sadly, it is. NBA 2K14 left NBA Live 14 in the dust, but frustrations like this one that lack a good workaround are a knock on the game. Compared to the ease of roster saves – even if there were only five of them as well – it’s inconvenient if you want to tinker with the lineups.

2. Fatigue Bug in NBA Live 07 & 08

In the wider basketball gaming community, much of the criticism surrounding NBA Live 07 and NBA Live 08 is centred on the Next Gen versions and their shortcomings compared to NBA 2K7 and NBA 2K8. There are certainly legitimate criticisms there, and we can identify reasons why the series finally fell behind NBA 2K in sales come 2008. In our community however, we were primarily focused on the PC version, which was a Current Gen port. Those games were lower priorities to say the least, and were riddled with bugs that affected the most basic elements of gameplay. One of the most noteworthy was the bug with player fatigue, and subsequent substitution logic.

The fatigue effect slider was inexplicably removed from the PC and Current Gen version of NBA Live 07, which meant that fatigue couldn’t be turned on. The patch added the option to toggle fatigue on and off, but it still didn’t work properly. It wasn’t fixed in NBA Live 08 PC either, and different positions tired at different rates. The only viable workaround to these frustrations was to globally modify fatigue ratings. It at least allowed players to tire and sub in and out as they should, but it also affected Overall Ratings, and generated rookies ended up with normal fatigue, requiring them to be fixed as well. It was a workaround that many rosters used, but wasn’t at all ideal.

3. Gameplay Tendencies Pre-Sliders

Sliders are one of those features that are all too easy to take for granted. Before we had the ability to adjust gameplay to our liking through sliders, we only had three options: don’t play a game, play it and like it, or try to change the gameplay through massive global ratings changes. That third option led to the creation of Tweaked Rosters, which were in vogue during the eras of NBA Live 2001 and NBA Live 2003 PC. This usually meant adjusting speed ratings to alter game pace, rebounding ratings to balance the number of offensive and defensive boards, field goal ratings to adjust shooting percentages, and so on. It produced mixed results as far as desirable fixes.

Like the aforementioned tweaks to fatigue ratings in NBA Live 07 and NBA Live 08, they also had drawbacks. Overall Ratings were often skewed, which affected trade values in franchise play. Again, generated rookies were not created according to the formulas of the tweaked ratings, which meant they caused problems unless they too were fixed. I provided tweaked versions of my roster updates for NBA Live 2001 and NBA Live 2003, though I never really liked the idea as it felt like trading one set of issues for another. Fortunately, sliders came in NBA Live 2004, and tweaked rosters became obsolete. Better mechanics also made improvements that tweaks couldn’t.

4. Lost Dream Team Pre-Order Bonus in NBA 2K17

I’m critical of pre-order bonuses at the best of times. They’ve become an effective means of pushing the more expensive editions due to the bonus currency on offer, or content that really should be included in the base game. If there’s a silver lining here, it’s that the currency is no longer relevant once the servers are shut off, and bonuses are usually unlocked by redeeming codes through the platform’s store. In other words, it’s content that’ll remain unlocked, or won’t be missed past the end of support. One notable exception is the Dream Team in NBA 2K17. We activated that pre-order bonus through entering a Locker Code, a function that we no longer have access to.

If you installed NBA 2K17 and redeemed the Dream Team bonus when the servers were up, and that installation is still intact, no problem! As I’ve found out though, reinstalling the game on PlayStation 4 following the server shutdown does not give you access to the legendary squad. I also managed to lose the Dream Team on PC despite never uninstalling it from my desktop, as installing it on my laptop caused a corruption in my NBA 2K17 profile data that synced with my previous installation. The only workaround would be to activate the team through roster editing, and given the limitations with compatible tools and roster files, I may well have lost it for good.

5. Frustrations with Keys in NBA 2K9 PC

We were very fortunate to get NBA 2K on PC the same year that the platform lost NBA Live. Even though we’d resolved to update NBA Live 06 PC in lieu of a new release – and did just that – it was welcome news when we discovered we wouldn’t have to miss out entirely. The lack of online functionality and roster updates were drawbacks in that first PC release for NBA 2K, but those were minor frustrations compared to not getting a game at all. However, as I’ve previously discussed, it wasn’t an entirely smooth debut on the platform. A large number of copies of NBA 2K9 PC shipped without their keys, which meant that gamers were unable to install them.

Connecting the keys with Steam also meant that second hand copies were useless if their key had already been activated. This is what happened with my first copy of the game, though I was fortunate enough to find a sealed copy with a working key. Prior to support for NBA 2K9 PC ending, Steam provided their own workaround to the missing keys, allowing the game to be activated on the platform as long as the disc was in the drive. That workaround has long since been discontinued, so if you’re not as lucky as I was, then your only hope is 2K Support. They’re obviously no longer obligated to support the game though, which is tough on collectors and retro gamers.

Do you recall these frustrations, and the lack of a good workaround? What are some of the other bothersome issues that were never properly fixed? Let me know in the comments, and as always, feel free to take the discussion to the NLSC Forum! That’s all for this week, so thanks for checking in, have a great weekend, and please join me again next Friday for another Five.