Defensive issues and some others impressions

[Felipe]

Hi all,

I've been played during the weekend and I noticed some defensive issues.

CPU is not a great defender unless you let it doubleteam your players in the strategy menu. It's VERY easy to put the ball in the zone, your center or power forward takes it, fakes a couple of times then the CPU center jumps and let the highway clear for an easy dunk, and even sometimes you score and get a foul.

I tested it with Shaq and he got 46 points (17/19 FG), then with Jermaine O'Neal and it was also easy to score. Finally took Kelvin Cato (against Shaq!) and got 28 points (11/12 FG) easily. All games in superstar level.

In fact, this applies to every player. If you fake twice, the CPU defender finally jumps and your way to score is clear. No matter if the defender is 99 def.aware and your player is 50 FG & 50 off.aw. The CPU ALWAYS jumps when you fake.

If you go to strategy menu and let the CPU doubleteam your players, setting pressure high on them, the things change a bit. As soon as your player receive the ball, two computer guys run towards him. You still can fake and shoot open, but it's a bit more difficult as they can steal the ball.

This can be one of the things that help to the very high FG% problem, 'cause you can try a lot of wide open shots which normally go in. I tried to lower the FG and Off.Aw., raise the Def.Aw., but it didn't really help too much. Maybe dramatically lowering InsideScoring and/or ShootingRange may help.

I think this is the biggest problem of the game. Other issues like speed, steals and blocks are fixable through tweaking .dbf, so: I lowered speed and quickness by 50% and I get a very realistic pace; I lowered blocks and steals by 80% and they are now very realistic (well, steals don't at all but it could be due to the bad passing algorythm, maybe raising passing rating may help).

The offensive rebound problem is here too. I can grab 5-6 a game, but CPU is only averaging 2-3. After I make a shot, I send my players to jump, so I grab some, but CPU don't do this. Lowering Def.Reb and raising Off.Reb don't affect it too much, I think. Some people say playing in arcade mode to fix it, I didn't test it yet.

Overall, it's the best bball game ever made. I still hope that 2k3 will be better than Live2000 despite these bugs, because I think (and I hope) they are easily fixable (even with an early tweaked .dbf the bugs are 50% fixed, some of the patch gurus out there will come with the 99% fix soon!)

EA Sports did it (almost) well this time.

Regards,

Felipe
Spanish ACB patchmaker

[dilated]

this is true... the only problem is that they always jump. But unfortunately it isn't a minor problem. I think the only way is lowering insidescoring and fg. So bigmens can't score with those %. Shooting guards and forward can't take great advantage from jumps.