ICYMI: More MyGM & MyLEAGUE information

I wanted to gather some posts Dave Zdyrko and I have been making on OS responding to people's questions about MyGM. A lot of it applies to MyLEAGUE or to the game at large too, so enjoy these snippets. Feel free to ask questions and I'll try to answer to the best of my ability, as long as it's related to things we have announced already.

Pretty much everything in MyGM is in MyLEAGUE, as well. The main difference between the modes is that MyLEAGUE has the full customization and MyGM has the RPG elements (XP and upgrades), Conversation system, and Team Finances.

When you level up, you will get to select one of six upgrades -- you can't choose to not pick any. However, we know some people may not like to play with "cheats", so we do allow you to turn the GM Upgrades and Facilities on or off once you've unlocked them. With Persuasive Pitches, you always have the option to not use any free ones you've unlocked.

Yes, injuries will impact attributes based on the body part affected and the severity of the injury.

We still allow custom draft classes in both MyLEAGUE and MyGM.

In MyGM, you can only play and SimCast games for the team you're controlling.

The celebrity owner pictures thing going on on Twitter are simply photoshop jobs.

For MyGM and MyLEAGUE with default slider settings, you'll see about 300-450 total injuries per year.

We found some data on NBA injuries over a 10 year span and tried our best to model our system as closely to the data as possible with respect to which body parts gets injured the most and the frequency of each type of injury. Though, it's worth noting that the 300-450 is about half of what the per year average was for that 10 year span. We just felt this was enough.

If you're not happy with the tunes, MyLEAGUE has sliders to tweak these (MyGM does not). Both allow you to start with existing injuries on, however...

The Coach Gameplan has some options for Bench Depth and Bench Utilization that should help give you more control over how the CPU rebuilds your rotation when you automate things.

We did a lot of tuning to try and improve the simulator stats, so I feel they're a lot better this year (the league leader will often actually get double digits in assists per game, for one).

We don't have one for severity (good idea for 2K16...). But, we do have ones for CPU Injury Frequency, User Injury Frequency, Career-Ending Injury Frequency, User Injury Effects, CPU Injury Effects.

Both modes start with an "approximation" of the real life draft picks. Since we don't support conditional picks, we made our best guesses on how these would play out. Also, we only allow trading picks up to 4 years ahead, so if there are any traded picks beyond 2018, those won't be in the game.

The press conferences are a part of the conversation system, so they're just in MyGM and not in MyLEAGUE.

We only show the stats for the international and college prospects that will be available in the upcoming draft. So, it's still just one draft class at a time.

No Summer League in either.

Our entire art department and front end engineers definitely did a great job this year. I'm really happy with the look of the menus, as well.

Custom draft classes will get the storylines and related social media messages, as well. Though, they get added by us and are not something we allow you to edit (we didn't want to expose these)...

We don't have the rights to use people not in the NBA (except for Legends that we've made deals with).

No 3-team trades yet.

Social Media, Transaction Report, and Injury report are available in both.

It's fairly robust and takes things into account such as the player's real attributes, the storylines, and the teams that they play against on their schedule. So, you will see things like a player getting better stats than someone he isn't as good as because the level of his competition was weaker.

It's simulated. Not all players will choose to attend the Draft Combine. For the ones that do go, you will get to see results for things like their real height/weight/wingspan (which may be different that what they had been listed at), as well as results for 3/4 sprint, lane agility, vertical, bench press, standing 15 footer, moving 15 footer, standing college 3, moving college 3, standing NBA 3, moving NBA 3 (we opted to not do all the exact drills so we could tailor these to the attributes we have on the backend).

We haven't made changes to the display of the potential rating once a player is on your team, but we have added things that make whether the player reaches or exceeds his potential less binary. For one, injuries could pile up and make the player never reach his potential. Additionally, the players may peak sooner or later or have a shorter or longer peak period (we did a lot of work analyzing the current NBA players looking at advanced stat trends such as PER or GS over their careers to try and model this better). In-season training, as well as the quality of your staff (or GM in MyGM), all will also impact this.

Yes, players can exceed their potential. The quality of the staff, your GM (MyGM), the badges he has, and how you train him will play into this.

Depends on your quarter length, but with default settings and a quarter length of 5-12 minutes, the balance we're trying to maintain from both played and simmed games is 1 injury per 4 games. You can adjust the sliders, of course, if you disagree with that ratio or just want to adjust your experience.

Draft Classes will be fully editable and sharable.

You have multiple slots for editable rosters and draft classes this year. You're not forced to upload the roster anymore. You can keep working on it locally, and if/when you decide to share it with the world, you can opt to upload it. You can keep editing it and using it locally, no upload/download. This should help both minimize editing delays as well as using others' rosters. With that, you can create a local copy of another user's roster that you like so that you can keep using it and also make your own edits on it. No more downloading the roster every time you want to use it.

Same concepts apply to Draft Classes.

You don't even have to upload it, let alone download it for every quick game. Keep working on it, playing around with it, going into quick games and franchise modes, and when you think it feels right, share it with the world!

Let me take a stab at clearing up the confusion although Rashidi pretty much has it down.

Each Position has a set of Archetypes (or Player Types, if you will). All-Around, Athletic, Defensive, etc. A player has an overall per player type per position. So a player has (NumberOfPositions * NumberOfPlayerTypesPerPosition) overall ratings. Each Positional Player Type has its own overall formula (so PG All Around has a different formula than PF All Around has a different formula than C Defensive).

Whenever his overall rating gets updated, we calculate all the overall ratings for his position by player type. The player type that gives him his the highest overall is the one we determine "most compatible", so we assign it to him along with that Overall.

So yes, a player that might be C All-Around but as years go by sees his offensive attributes regress but you've made sure to keep him up to par defensively using (cheap plug but I'm a dev) our new in-season Training system, might see his player type change to C Defensive, and his value to the team will still be there.

As for team-building AI, we've taken some steps to make sure teams take into account specific needs as far as more specific skills go. So if that player losing his offensive ability means that the team lost their main source of points, they'll value players that can bring the team's scoring up more than players that might be contributing to needs sufficiently covered (such as defense, in this example). (Let me clarify that the examples of "offense" and "defense" are shallow and the "skills" teams look at go beyond that; there's 13 different categories actually.)

That said, Team Style is still a factor, so teams won't all "average out" by trying to cover skill needs, if a coach prefers to play a certain way. So if a team prefers outside scorers over inside scorers, it won't value inside scorers as much, even if it has more of a need for them than another team.

Also, we pay much more attention at position stacking which has been a problem for years in the franchise. Teams are much more aware of trying to build each position with a player of starter quality, a decent bench player and a 3rd string backup (less important but good to have). Not every team is going to be perfect, and if they were, they wouldn't be able to replicate my frustration with Detroit's roster all these past years. More than 3 players in a position starts making teams reconsider unless their skills and secondary position mean that they're of significant value to the team. No more "Oh, another 80+ point guard available? Never mind that we have 5 of them already, let's get one more since we can fit him under the salary cap!" I cringed so bad when someone showed me a screenshot of that and I made a point of starting to fix that logic that very same day.

You can see how a system like this gets really complicated. I'm very happy with our new overall formulas and logic this year, and along with the improvements to team-building (which isn't going to be perfect but we've taken strides in the right direction, trust me) gives us nice results and a nice base to continue working off of based on this year's feedback.

A lot of things have been changed this year, so I'm really looking forward to fresh feedback once you get your hands on the game.

If they have identical attributes they'll have the same player type. You can't customize it this year, it's dynamically determined by the attributes and the overall formulas.

Still doing our work for us. Still OurLeftos!

Thanks for the heads up.

Not sure if you can answer this, but is there create-a-team, and if so, can those teams be used in MyLeague?

No CAT this year, really want it soon though.

For MyGM and MyLEAGUE with default slider settings, you'll see about 300-450 total injuries per year.

We found some data on NBA injuries over a 10 year span and tried our best to model our system as closely to the data as possible with respect to which body parts gets injured the most and the frequency of each type of injury. Though, it's worth noting that the 300-450 is about half of what the per year average was for that 10 year span. We just felt this was enough.

If you're not happy with the tunes, MyLEAGUE has sliders to tweak these (MyGM does not). Both allow you to start with existing injuries on, however...

That's interesting to note. You'd think it'd be less, but then you add up all the minor injuries that players play through and the fact that only 29 players played in all 82 games last season (and including Ramon Sessions, who ended up playing 83 due to being traded), and it makes sense. I'm guessing to that end, a lot of the injuries will be minor, niggling ailments that affect performance, but don't necessarily put players on the shelf (or only have them miss a game or two)?

So are injury prone players in real life gonna be more injury prone in the game without changing a slider?

Andrew, we studied extensive data sets per body part and per specific injury over a 10 year span of the NBA and got the game so close to that that we all left smiling that day. Most will be minor, of course, and the relative ratios should be damn near perfect.

Injury proneness is determined by 16 different body part durabilities this year and we hope Mike's ratings should provide great OOB results. You can of course edit the roster and adjust the sliders to your liking.

This 2 modes is getting me psyched on the game that I lost interest soldiering on my current 2K14 association... got a question by the way regarding team staffs... can we assign the team's assistant coach to be the head coach if we fire/ not resign the current one? Adding to that can we promote players as team staff?

Assistant coaches can be promoted. Players sometimes decide to become assistant coaches, not up to the user which though.

Assistant coaches can be promoted. Players sometimes decide to become assistant coaches, not up to the user which though.

Holy shit, that's awesome!

Andrew, we studied extensive data sets per body part and per specific injury over a 10 year span of the NBA and got the game so close to that that we all left smiling that day. Most will be minor, of course, and the relative ratios should be damn near perfect.

Injury proneness is determined by 16 different body part durabilities this year and we hope Mike's ratings should provide great OOB results. You can of course edit the roster and adjust the sliders to your liking.

Excellent. As I said, at first glance that number seems high, but then you start thinking about it - even without the data you guys have had access to - and it absolutely makes sense. Good stuff!

Follow up to PhatGeezer's question, will we be able to edit the staff in any way in either mode? Or will we be able to create or import/export our own staff members like rosters? I'm guessing it's a no for both questions, but you never know til you ask.

Thanks for that, Leftos.

Standouts...

injuries will impact attributes based on the body part affected and the severity of the injury.

That's cool.

Draft Classes will be fully editable and sharable.

Fictional draft classes here i come!

We did a lot of tuning to try and improve the simulator stats, so I feel they're a lot better this year (the league leader will often actually get double digits in assists per game, for one).

Awesome to hear. I really hope this aspect is truly good.

Also, we only allow trading picks up to 4 years ahead, so if there are any traded picks beyond 2018, those won't be in the game.

Oh is that all? (4 years ahead is awesome!)

Not all players will choose to attend the Draft Combine.

How many players generally skip it? It would be good if all players went.

For the ones that do go, you will get to see results for things like their real height/weight/wingspan

Is their finally a wingspan attribute in the game?! Is it done in inches, points (0-99), or a binary system (like short, normal, long)?

We haven't made changes to the display of the potential rating once a player is on your team, but we have added things that make whether the player reaches or exceeds his potential less binary. For one, injuries could pile up and make the player never reach his potential. Additionally, the players may peak sooner or later or have a shorter or longer peak period (we did a lot of work analyzing the current NBA players looking at advanced stat trends such as PER or GS over their careers to try and model this better). In-season training, as well as the quality of your staff (or GM in MyGM), all will also impact this.

Does playing time (i.e. game experience) affect likeliness to reach potential? Because it should. Player farming happens.
Follow up question, how much control does the user have on a player's potential/progression when editing/creating a player? I.e. can you edit whether he has an early or late peak? Or is it automated and you can only edit his potential rating? (I'm just asking with making fictional draft classes in mind)

Whenever his overall rating gets updated, we calculate all the overall ratings for his position by player type. The player type that gives him his the highest overall is the one we determine "most compatible", so we assign it to him along with that Overall.

Can you then edit the player type he was automated as? (not a big deal, just wondering)

Thanks for remaining involved in the community, Leftos

Assistant coaches can be promoted. Players sometimes decide to become assistant coaches, not up to the user which though.

Awesome gutted that you can't will a player to be promoted as team staff but I know someday that modding will be able to do that so no problem at all... thanks for the answers Leftos

Leftos, will you include an all-around modding tool for pre-orderers?

Can we still use the current tools?

No CAT this year, really want it soon though.

i really want the ability to play as an expansion team.

"No 3-team trades yet."

was that a general statement or just refering to draft prospects??

because if there are no 3Team Trades AT ALL.. that would be a big concern!!

Last edited by crazy_me_87 on Wed Sep 10, 2014 3:41 am, edited 1 time in total.

Will we be able to remove injuries from official roster update players?

Thanks 4 all this Leftos!

I believe it's been confirmed that we can.

Is there a D-League or something like it where you can send your rawest players to develop without taking up roster spots?

Hey leftos, will there be more legend players or classic teams added to NBA 2K15?

Leftos, could you please explain SimCast better? It sounds amazing

Correct me if I'm wrong but I think it's the ability of the user to simulate a game, lets say the first 2 quarters and then let the user play the remaining time whether he likes it or not. I may be wrong though, which is most of the time.