A Few More Thoughts on Club OTP

After playing some more Online Team Play tonight in NBA Live 09 I realized I forgot a few things in my initial write-up. There were also some thoughts that came to mind since then. I included a few screens of the club area and the grading that is done after a game is completed. I’ve also added a poll to vote on the current team assigned to the club. So far club Pasta Padre is struggling but enjoying it despite that.

Fun fact: The Pasta Padre club has the most members of any club at this time.

As a team it seemed like we started to play better last night and got into more of a rhythm. Unfortunately there is little that can be done on defense so there isn’t much incentive to playing in a team oriented fashion.

I was able to switch the team for the club so that is good news. I’d prefer it though if we could just choose a team at the matchup screen instead of having to be locked into the one set for the club.

This brings up a concern I have and that is how only the top teams are being used. Rockets, Celtics, and Lakers primarily. There isn’t any reason for a club to not play with one of the best teams. Personally this takes some of the fun out of it for me as I’d like to have a wide variety of matchups. There doesn’t seem to be a way to get a balanced matchup between two of the lesser teams since no one is going to choose a team for the club when they know that a random pairing will almost certainly result in playing the Rockets, Celtics, or Lakers.

So we have all these different teams in the game but the majority seem unlikely to ever be used in OTP. This includes the FIBA teams. Just for fun we set it up with Team USA and our potential opponents laughed and backed out which was to be expected. Hey we are desperate for a win and were hoping they wouldn’t notice. I know I would really like to play with the FIBA teams and rules but just doesn’t look like it will happen because there is no way to prearrange matchups or discuss them before linking up with an opponent and being locked into the current club team.

In a full 5v5 I don’t believe there is a way to intentional foul. If there is I haven’t had any success with it. I can understand why there might be concern about an intentional foul button but if someone wants to ruin the experience of others they’ll find a way to do so. Hopefully they didn’t remove that functionality out of fear that it would be used to cause problems because it can be a necessity.

In addition to the problem where two players are started way in the back court by the bench at the start of the second half there have been instances, from what I remember usually on inbounds plays in the front court, where it is almost as if the entire team on defense is running in late from the other side of the court. It has allowed the offense to get some easy scores with the defense being completely out of position like that.

I feel bad for people who are controlling bigs. On one hand they do get a lot of chances to score and grab rebounds. But they also end up taking the hit when the player they are assigned to defending scores at will also. So far it definitely seems easier to work up a good grade as a PG, SG, or SF as opposed to PF or C.

I’m still unsure if you can view your own or your club member’s stats as broken down by position. You can with the free agents which is neat to look through.

I do really like how quickly the OTP games are breezing along. That may be due in part to the frantic pace of the games and few stoppages in play though. On average I’d say from start to finish each game is taking about 25 minutes. It’s nice to be able to get a handful of games in within a smaller chunk of time. Still it feels long enough that better teams will be able to separate themselves from the competition and teams that fall behind would have the opportunity to make a comeback.

I really hope that all the club records and player stats are cleared when any improvements or fixes are made to the mode. Right now all the stats are relatively bloated and it really isn’t representative of skill or level of teamwork.

Now that I have been able to change up the club team I was curious how often everyone would like it to be switched? I understand right now we pretty much have to use one of the best teams in order to compete so that limits the options. When I’m online I can change it as much as possible but when I’m off it ends up stuck on a single team.

There are two things we can do. The first is that I can assign a couple people GM duties which would mean that they could invite or boot people from the club but also believe they’d be able to change the team. The other thing would be for me to ask everyone what team to set for a particular period of time. So for now I’m going to put up a poll asking which team you would like that to be right now and we’ll go from there in a few days.