For thosing having slow loading times...

[mchakko]

Try getting rid of the .zip files of all your patches that you have sitting in the main nba live 2003 directory...

[Nick]

I've got none. Still get the problem though...

[neo_177]

That doesn't solve it for me too. 5 min for main menu. 5-10 min to enter the game. The same thing when it's over.

Therefore i play without patches

[mchakko]

maybe that's not it, it seemed to help me...but my computer was acting all weird in general at the time anyway

[Nick]

5 min for main menu. 5-10 min to enter the game. The same thing when it's over.

Exactly the same times over 'ere.

Therefore i play without patches

Me too...and i will be untill we solve this problem.

[LegoSHAQ]

sigh....

Me too...and i will be untill we solve this problem.

You will not "solve this problem" because there is no problem. As soon as you set the custom art value to 1 you WILL have slower load times. EA Sports told us this and it IS documented in the customisation tutorial. Its just a fact that if you have custom graphics switched on that the game will run slower because it has to check outside the VIV files for any additional graphics.... I think what EA Sports were trying to do with this custom art stuff was a good idea but is poorly implemented... I mean this is just an ussumption because I don't know the full details of in the background why the load times increase so much... The ONLY solution is to not set the custom art setting to 1. Which means you have to install any patch you want into the VIV file for patches to work... hopefully this will be easy and relatively error free with Don Dailey's new EAZIP tool... I personally use EAGRAPH to install any patch I have into the appropriate VIV file... and I have had no problems so far... So I get fast load times and patches .. ... If updating VIV files is too technical for you or causes your game to crash.. the only way you can play with patches is to have the custom art setting to 1 and have slow load times.... too bad... Hopefully EA will work on improving these load times with Live 2004...