Well I'm down to the last few teams and thank goodness.......
When they inputed 73 ratings this year I thought it was all just for show but I've tested nearly 55 of the 73 and they all do matter and some actaully have a direct attatchment to the sliders aswell.
They have this rating called Triple Threatt for every player and believe it or not for those who have the 360 version that rating actually transpires into forcing the CPU players on the wings to dribble much more fluid mainly because they are in a Triple Threatt position or upright position more often. For those that don't know what I'm talking about basically without touching this rating the players go into a hunch back mode while dribbling which looks totally silly.
But the Triple Threat rating when you increase it to a reasonable amount for each player mainly the perimeter oriented players PG's, SG's, SF's and few PF's that operate on the perimeter it programs them dribble upright more often and you see this best once you back off a guy and give him just a litle space on the perimeter.
The rating can be abused by the human player but the CPU players don't abuse it at all. It's kinda like the FSS moves the CPU doesn't abuse it and therefor having their FSS slider MAXED out actually gets them to animate much more when passing or shooting.
Anyway's I think the game plays vastly different as opposed to the way it performed if you didn't want to mess with all these damn ratings. It's very time consuming but the rewards are worth it in the end. To see guy's like KG, Dirk, Duncan, Gasol and AI actually being reprogrammed to respond like their real life counter parts is a thing of beauty. No longer will Dirk try to be a post up PF in NBA Live.......He'll actually back up away from you and look to shoot a three or come off a pick and deliver a nice mid range jumper. KG will fade away and look just like the actual KG plus he'll actually handle the ball. Gasol will use a variety of post moves in the paint to try and draw a foul. Of course you have to design plays around these guy's aswell because EA for some reason every year assigns the same simple QUICK PLAYS that don't allow the Star's to really shine in NBA Live.
Well I didn't mean to rant on so long but the game though not perfect has a ton of added good things to gameplay. It's just too bad that many people will only go by what they've seen and read based off of the DEFAULT gameplay released by EA.