The Blog for the Sports Gamer Three guys who love Sports Gaming rant and rave about various stuff.

Maybe I’m Not Completely Nuts (CH2k7)

From a thread appropriately titled "A few things are starting to really concern me..." at Op Sports I'm finally finding some backup for the craziness I'm seeing in College Hoops, and at least a couple posts that backs up my theory that team unity is behind a whole lot of it.

From what I've seen and what's been described in the thread, the worst aspect seems to be how unity affects both your players' ability to defend the perimeter and the AI's ability to drain any open three it gets. Here's a post from "ehh" on page 2 of the thread:

After messing around with a ton of different sliders and options tonight, my latest fix-of-the-moment is turning off team unity. As of now I feel like this feature is total overkill ala NCAA '07's Momentum Meter.

My last straw was when I played on default starter with defensive awareness turned up to 100 and none of my players reacted at all in terms of help defense or getting out to challenge shots. It was as if I was still playing on MOP. I was playing as UConn at home against Texas Southern and they were scoring at will against me and getting open shots every time down court.

As soon as I turned off team unity, one of the first few plays their PG burst down the lane and had an apparent open layup, but Hasheem Thabeet came out of nowhere and swatted it off the backboard. Ah, it's a miracle!

From Armitage on page 3:

I've noticed, on starter mode, that if the CPU needs a three, they will absolutely make it. No ifs, ands, or butts about it.

That is exactly what I started seeing when I reduced myself to playing at Starter last week.

And from Acedeck on page 4:

They seem to apply for your own players [3-point accuracy], but not as much CPU players. The CPU manages to get wide open treys all the time. No matter how good of D you play, you will find the CPU getting tons of open treys, mainly due to the weird help AI. Sometimes your teamates will slide onto the same player in the 3-2 zone, leaving someone wide open on the perimeter. I find that if I carefully control the players on the perimeter, I can stop this most times. I still see the CPU take way too many 3's each game, even with players that have less than 60 3-point skill.

There's also some interesting results from "warnerwlf" in the comments section of my last College Hoops post.

I've now played about three games with Team Unity turned off. The aforementioned starter level blowout. Two at all conference that were relatively easy wins (about 12 points each;) against moderately inferior conference competition in which I was never really threatened. I've got an NCAA tourney game on deck for tonight or tomorrow and I'm going to bump it up to All American for that. At that point, if I feel the game has struck a good competitve balance, I may turn unity back on and bottom out the slider to just 5 or 10 and go from there.