We, the gamers and regular customers of NBA2K, request a developmental feature to be implemented with the goal of limiting aggressive players from smothering opponents via full-court press/trap tactics. These tactics are championed by many popular YouTube creators as an effective way to win. While this may be true, it severely inhibits the overall enjoyment of players who do not play this way as it forces them away from running plays, playing effective and intelligent half-court offense, expeditiously drains the stamina of the team with the offensive possession, and prevents players from utilizing the developer’s intended defensive and offensive strategy and play calling features.

Plainly put, it ruins the experience of players not taking advantage of this exploit, either on principle or because it is not how they want to play.

During practical gameplay testing it appears that the way stamina drain occurs, a full court defensive press with “intense-D” in use drains the OFFENSIVE players’ stamina faster than it drains the DEFENSIVE players’ stamina, making for an unfair advantage to the player utilizing the exploit. In addition, in a game that strives for realism in its gameplay, there are very few examples of constant, intense full court pressure schemes in use in real professional league basketball games, with one of the main reasons being that defense such as that results in real human players getting needlessly tired in a short amount of time for very little defensive benefit.

We suggest a simple feature change to the stamina calculations in order to address this, as follows:

- Whenever a defensive player’s physical location is beyond half court (on the offensive team’s court when inbounding the ball) all movement should incur a slight additional penalty to the player’s stamina.

- When “locking” into defensive stances, using “intense-D” or in general smothering/contacting an opponent’s player also while in that back court, the penalty for stamina drain should be significantly increased.

We believe that, because the effective and well developed stamina system in this year’s game has such a profound impact on the players performance in-game (e.g. the less stamina a player has the less effective they play, defensively and especially offensively), this will effectively limit this type of smothering full-court defense satisfactorily enough for it to be an occasional occurrence, which much more realistically reflects the current state of play in the NBA, WNBA, and other professional basketball leagues.

We humbly ask you to seriously consider this seemingly minor but highly significant technical change to be implemented as soon as technically feasible for the sake of your dedicated community. To be clear, we, the supporters of this change, are not asking for an advantage with this change and we don’t believe it would give us one, we simply believe that this would add to the realism of gameplay that NBA2K strives for in its gameplay features and would allow this exploit to be used less often while not providing any unfair advantages to either playe. This would thus enhance the fun and equitable experience of playing this game we all love.

Signed,

Chris A - GT: unsightlyBulge, and the below undersigned players