 Alright, it's been 500 hours later, 2K18 released 2 months ago, since then there's been 6 patches, here is my judgement. Now, the unfortunate truth is you do have to wait a couple months with 2K games because they always drop, then there's game breaking bugs and you go, I can't possibly rate the game with these bugs around. So you wait for them to get resolved, like the East Coast, West Coast issue on Pro-Am. There was glitches where you could just dead ass walk on the park and walk on in the middle of games. You could just casually walk around and ruin the whole flow of the game. There's been a whole ton of VC glitches, there's been animation glitches. And although those have been solved, the people who did the VC glitches and the animation glitches still have the VC in the animation. So it's throwing the game's balance in a complete tailspin. But still, the gameplay is solid. I like the gameplay on 2K18. The level design is great. The whole idea of the neighborhood, it was a dope premise, right? You walk around, you head to the NBA store, boom, grab yourself a t-shirt, head and play some mini basketball hoops in the 2K zone because you don't like your life and you like wasting time. Boom, you could do that as well. Hop in to walk on Pro-Am and just enjoy yourself. Or hop in with a team, eventually three of them will get kicked and you gotta back out. And then 40 minutes later, you all get in the same game and then you realize it's walk on Pro-Am. Why the f*** am I doing this? I should be playing Team Prime or the park. And a sad realization with 2K is that at every corner you turn, that they sacrifice gameplay for revenue. And it happens all the time. Everywhere you look, they sacrifice, make money, sacrifice, make money. At the end of the day, you're like, I get it, they're a business. There's a lot of, every developer is trying to make money. We know that, but there's some developers that do a really good job of dropping a good game while they do it. It's possible. I think it's something Ubisoft realized that EA hopefully realizes now with Battlefront 2. And 2K will eventually realize is all you have to do is drop a dope game. Try and build a community around that game, listen to the feedback, of course. Although at times, especially with the slider, everybody has mixed feedback, we understand. It can get complex, but it seems like at the core, they're not worried about dropping a good game if it comes at the cost of making money. I have casual friends in real life who I never would have thought would buy VC because they generally don't buy too many games talking about some, oh yeah, I'm gonna wait for the next VC sale to buy some VC. It's almost crazy how 2K is pulling in a business sense. If it wasn't pissing everybody off, it would be genius what they're doing. The fact that they're still selling the game and doing this, in fact, might very well be genius because I don't know how they're still pulling it off. So if you had to Metacritic, you look at the score, it shows an 8. That's solid, we can agree that's solid. But if you look at the user score, it is one of the lowest user scores in the history of Metacritic user scores. And the reason for that is in protest to what is the most ridiculous microtransaction implementation to any game I've ever seen. So anyway, again, I don't want to make this video all negative because it's not. The game as a whole, I'm having fun on Team Pro M. Now, there's the occasional guy who thinks it's hilarious to snatch back every two seconds, or if the whole circle in the paint set a screen because apparently, you can't touch a guy who sets a screen, they're invincible, they're like the f***ing hulk down there. And then they go in there pure athletic and put a dunk down easy. They can't get blocked. Like there's certain cheeses in the game and the gameplay. The dribbling this year is weird. Any of the dribble heads will tell you like, why is some of the stuff in the game? It just makes dribbling unnecessarily random and less skill-based. But I think more importantly than that, and this is important for both casual and competitive guys, is there's no real need to play. Like, when I play 2K, and it's changed recently since I've hopped on Pro M, but I didn't really feel like on the park, I had to get better to improve. I just had to play more. And that's frustrating. I talked about the whole leaderboard situation and the ranking system on 2K. With 2K, it's let's buy VC, continue to buy VC to stay at the top, right? Because if you don't buy VC, you're not going to be at the top no more. You're going to be at a disadvantage now. And the whole goal is to get you to 99 overall. But again, it's a point system that's easily abusable. The best way to do it isn't even to have fun. It's to go on my career, put it on pro difficulty, and just do floaters or flashy passes, or alley-oop dunks, all game. That's the best way to score. But let's say it again, the gameplay is nice and the level design is nice. So all these issues I'm talking about are just accessory to what really is the core of what you would expect any game to be judged on. If some of the two most important things about the game are really solid, how are people so infuriated by it? And it just really takes you playing the game for a while, not for a casual amount, because there's some I've been playing since 2K10. Anybody that's been playing since 2K16 would have seen the pattern. But surprisingly, there's a lot of new people in the 2K community that just really enjoy 2K18. Maybe it's so unfortunate they never had the chance to play some of the great games like 2K11. It really is. And who knows, maybe they have money for micro transactions and they don't mind it. Maybe they just like to kick back and enjoy playing with their friends. And to them it's not so serious so they don't care if there's glitches or bugs in the game and the animations or it takes long to get into a game. There's no matchmaking in the park yet, although that seems like a basic feature. Like there's so many things that maybe they just don't care about and they just want to hoop with their friends. There's always toning stuff down and moving stuff up, increasing this, decreasing that, and we're not aware of it. And so while I might have a good jump shot now, next week there's something wrong. I can't tell what's wrong, but there's something different with the shot. Why are my shots not hitting? The Mike Wang is playing a little DJ disco there with the sliders doing his own thing. And a lot of the time we don't know about it till we just experience it. And we're like, there's something up with this right here, man. So again, I'm talking about transparency. I'm talking about leaderboards. I'm talking about bugs and glitches. But again, the gameplay is solid and the level design is dope. It just doesn't add up in so many places. Just if you had any doubts about the end goal for 2K, they don't have a private matchmaking. If Fortnite did it and that just dropped, and we've been asking for this since 2K16 Pro-Am, you can do the match. There's third-party companies that come in, run tournaments and leagues on the Pro-Am. They make money. 2K doesn't want anybody to encroach on their territory with the 2K league coming out. I understand, but again, it was gameplay that came at the cost of what? Say it with me now, revenue. And this is specific to the park. I've actually been enjoying myself on the Pro-Am, which is like, it's so refreshing to me. Y'all don't understand the amount of refreshment. Hop it on the Pro-Am, racking up wins on a ranking system that makes sense, that awards victories and improvement rather than just time played. You could play for a bajillion hours, but if you're like 1,000 wins and 1,000 losses, I'm still gonna be a higher rank than you because I actually win games. Team Pro-Am, if you get a good team together, in my opinion, is easily the best game mode in the game. You've heard me say it. So if I had a choice and I have the knowledge I know now, and I'm just trying to hop in and play 2K casually, without a doubt, I'm hopping on the team Pro-Am, grabbing like three or four friends, boom, having myself a time. And for the game mode that I think is gonna be the next to blow up on 2K and do really well, I'm amazed that they haven't spent more time adding in new features, game modes related to Pro-Am. And hopefully that's something to come in. I don't know what the 2K league is gonna offer. I don't know if that game mode the devs are working on for the 2K league is gonna be available to the public, but that would be really dope. If it came out with some sort of ranked system for the people not really interested in being a part of the 2K league, but they just want to play and kick back and improve and you know, talk shit. Do what you do on 2K. That would be really dope. At the end of the day, I think Pro-Am for me is like the light at the end of the tunnel. And I'm just walking towards it, bro. And I see the light and I'm like, yo, this is how it is. You didn't tell me about this. Nobody told me Pro-Am was this nice because I was just sitting here playing park and I wasn't after a while. You're like, why am I still doing this? I'm never gonna hit 99 overall. Like, you know, we games. I had to play 4,000 games. What I look like, man, I have stuff to do. I can't just sit here and play park all day. You know, people have jobs, people have school, people have videos to edit. I can't just sit here and play like that, man. So that's it for me, man. If I had to rate 2K and this is not a protest rating. If I gave, if it was a protest rating, 1 out of 10 for the microtransaction situation, it's ridiculous. But if it's not a protest rating and this is a real rating based on everything in the game in general, I would give 2K like a 6 and a half out of 10. There's too many glitches, man. Too many glitches. You hop on the ruffles, a friend gets kicked out and then you can't hit top 10 no more because you were lagging there for 30 minutes. I think it's still crazy that we're expected to wait 20, 30 minutes for park games at times. You know, every game fills up at the same time. You're like, how is there no matchmaking system? There's just so many small stuff that you wouldn't think break a game. But when you add them all up, you're like, man, this is all in one game. That's kind of crazy. But at the same time, I will, I can't give it lower than that. And you know what? If I was ranking primes specifically, it might be a different story. But I'm talking about the entire game as a whole. I don't even want to get into pay to win my team because that might bring the ranking down some more. It might be five something if I start talking about my team. If we start talking about how my gym and my league is still a thing, but there's really been no serious amount of innovation in those game modes. And it kind of feels like the same repetitive thing over and over again. I haven't really played play now online. So I'm just going to exclude that from the video. I don't want to judge it because maybe it's fun. I know some people who really sit down and play play now like that. I just know that I used to do that and I used to play competitive game battles and everything on play now. But I stopped doing that. It kind of got boring. Everybody wants the same five out or four out pick and roll offense. I just got tired of it. So yeah, six and a half. I think that's fair. Hey, in the comments, let me know what you'd rate 2K18 if you had to. Not a protest rating. All right. I know everybody's all eager to give that one out of 10 roll on Metacritic. I see y'all. That's actually fucked up, man. Hey, I'm going to catch you guys in the next man. If you enjoyed it, make sure to drop a like, subscribe if you guys are new. It's not all negative, man. The game's not absolute ass. It's just sad that it could have been good, but the motive wasn't there. I'm out. Peace.