 As good as NBA 2K22 has been, as much as people have been enjoying the game since launch, 2K is currently in the process of fumbling the bag, and I mean truly fumbling the bag. Hey, there's a lot to talk about, but before we do, if y'all new to the channel, be sure to subscribe! You don't have to, but it'll be nice. Turn on notification bell, you'll be notified next time I drop a video. So a couple days after NBA 2K launched, there was a very large Reddit post that went like this. Please 2K devs, for the love of God, Lord have mercy, please don't cave to whiny people in packed gameplay. It's near perfect and balanced. There's got 2.8K upvotes, which is massive for the NBA 2K subreddit. And around the same time, Mike Wang himself on Twitter tweeted saying, Glad you're enjoying it, there are no plans to touch gameplay for the foreseeable future. Wait, hold on. What's that sound? Okay, now that we're back from that, the Reddit post continued to say, I'll be the first to admit I thought this was going to be a copy and paste of 2K21. And to my shock, I was wrong. Defense feels meaningful, players seem to naturally stay glued to their defender, like in real life. Shooting feels just right, you can make threes without having 90 plus max badges just like a real NBA player should be able to without feeling OP. He continues to praise the gameplay before saying this. Please do not patch gameplay and significantly alter this masterpiece. This is the best release of 2K in years. Do not cave to whiny YouTubers. For the most part, this game feels smooth, realistic, and for the first time in a long time, a real basketball sim and not an arcade game. You can tell he's like an old head in his frame of mind, but he's right. The game does feel like it's in a good spot right now. That being said, the gameplay is not perfect. And as time has went on since this post has released, people have been having more and more complaints about the gameplay. Like any game, you're not going to get a chance to experience what's wrong with it in the first day. Because once you get your badges and max out your attributes and you get familiar with the game, and there's a lot to it. Like you can get familiar with the 3v3 program, the 5v5 program in the park. Each experience is going to be different. I've played a decent amount of 3v3 program. I've played a decent amount of park. I still have yet to try 5v5 program personally. Damn, you see Chris just dunk, guys. The first thing that people have been complaining about is the steals. Steals in NBA 2K22 are like, bro, you could just get them whenever you want them if you're locked down. I have a two-way scoring machine. So, bro, someone could click L2 and be protected the ball and I'm reaching around to grab it because it's mine. It's my ball. Now, although I do get the opportunity to benefit from the fruits of steals being overpowered, I actually don't think the solution is to touch steals at all. I think the solution is to heavily buff the Unpluckable badge, which, as it stands right now, serves zero purpose. I guarantee you, bro, if you put on the Unpluckable badge, I'm still stealing it from you whenever I want to. The badge is so hilariously useless that I saw this tweet from JA on Twitter saying this. The tallest build to get the Hall of Fame Unpluckable badge, 5'9' slash 5'10' point guard. So, if you don't want to make that build, you're getting gold Unpluckable, which, and I repeat, serves no purpose. If you do like to dribble the ball and you don't want to get the ball ripped from you all the time, just put on the badge and the badge should serve a larger purpose in the overall gameplay experience. The second thing that people have been complaining about is whites. I agree with the post, actually. I don't think you should have to sink in 40-50 hours of gameplay into my career to get your badges so that you can reasonably enjoy playing with your player and shooting consistently. I do believe there should be a skills gap. I also believe that consistent shooting shouldn't rely on 40-50 hours of gameplay before you can even get to that point regardless of your release. But, man, I'm lying to you if I tell you these whites don't drop consistently. Man, sometimes it drops for me and I'm like, bro, I shouldn't have deserved that win, bro. There's a game I play, but we were just being outplayed. I knew, bro. I knew I didn't deserve to win that game, dawg. I wanted to give them the win. That's how bad I felt about it. I think a large portion of that is actually how effective the Sniper badge has been, so if you get slightly late or slightly early releases in NBA 2K22, they drop a lot more consistently if you have Hall of Fame Sniper. I mean, I'm going to say this right now, it might change, but so far, I actually kind of appreciate the badge. It is a significant improvement from flexible release, but I think it might be too overpowered because Sniper is the only badge where I can immediately tell based off of one game, whether or not I have it equipped. Every other badge, I'd have to be like, I don't know, I can't tell if catch and shoot is equipped because I mean, they're all marginal improvements, but Sniper just seems effective by all fronts. So whether or not the 2K Devs decide to adjust that is up to them. I don't think they'll touch it personally. I think for the casual audience that doesn't want to have to release the ball perfectly and have 45 different shooting badges so they can shoot effectively, they would rather keep the game like this. And that's such a large majority that no matter how many people complain about it, I am unlikely to believe that that's going to change. After 2K19, Disco Tech, Mike Wang was changing the sliders every two weeks. He's toned down dramatically. Like he's not doing that no more. So unless there's like a very serious issue with the gameplay, I highly doubt that any of those things I just address will be touched. I would recommend though, can we please significantly buff the Unpluckable badge? It would save a lot of- You said fax? Come on in, Davis. I've been listening this whole time, bro. Like, oh, you've been spreading right now. Thank you, man. Appreciate it. Thank you. How do you feel about the Unpluckable badge? It does not work. I get ripped 10 times a game. I see the screenshot. G-Man had 33 turnovers in my career, bro. 33, I swear. I'll link it to you, bro. It's crazy. And on that same note, the AI this year on NBA 2K22 are elite. But I'm starting to believe that the artificial intelligence in the game is actually smarter than the humans playing the game. This is a clip from the NBA 2K subreddit of a guy defending Ben Simmons by just sitting in the restricted area. Just quite possibly the funniest, the most realistic thing I've seen in my life. And he timed it very late. Oh my God, you can't make this stuff up. Ben Simmons is actually the person I enjoy playing the most against in my career. For some reason, he's very easy to steal from, bro. I got 13 steals in a game just spamming square on Ben Simmons. So as positive as the release has been, at least from the fans that are playing it, there's actually been a ton of issues outside of gameplay plaguing the game. NBA 2K knows about it because they've been spamming, and I do mean spamming, patches. The first patch was a day one patch that fixed a lot of stability issues on the Xbox and PlayStation. The next patch, 2K says, our latest patch is live on the PS5 and Xbox Series XS, bringing continued stability improvements to the game, fixing several issues, no gameplay changes. Another tweet saying, our latest patch is live on the PS4 and PC, bringing continued stability fixes to the game, no gameplay changes, other consoles coming soon, to which 2K followed up, and our latest patch is live, experience, and they quote stability fixes and micro story line fixes. And then you might click on the link to get more information, but it's as about as vague as their tweet was. More stability fixes, there was a lot of issues with people completing a mission in the micro story and them not being awarded. I dealt with that too, which sucks because there's actually some missions in the NBA 2K22 story where you need to complete them to continue playing micro games. So people were stuck and couldn't play micro games because although they completed the mission, it didn't register as completed to the game, which brings us to the third issue that people have been complaining about and it has been the AI. The AI is smarter this year, significantly smarter. I'm playing micro around pro difficulty trying to farm badges and it's like a brutal experience trying to do this stuff, bro. No, no, brutal in a sense that like, I can't overcome it. Brutal in a sense that it's like, this is the easiest difficulty because I'm trying here. Chris posts this tweet here saying, bro, 2K, whose career is this? Because it can't possibly be mine. Am I playing TJ McConnell or Prime Gary Payton? And he puts together this montage here which truly illustrates like the experience of playing against AI on my career. No matter what you do, it's a steal. There was a mission where I had to get three assists to get like my incentives for Adidas and those for my Puma deal. And bro, when I tell you that I had like 20 turnovers that game trying to throw all of you, I'm saying like, somebody's allubes were on point passes. It's just the defenses like hox this year, man. They really don't leave you open and considering like he is up significantly in the, like it's 48, 26, which is fine if you like, you know, you put on hall of fame difficulty and you want the hall of fame experience. But for someone put it on the pro difficulty, like damn, they are not going to have an easy go at this year's micro. They just won't. So in other news, I reported about a week ago in a video that somebody hit level 40 a day after the game's launched. Those guys are boosting. So disregard that right there. The first legit person to hit it happened a few days after the game's launch. And that was Glide here tweeting the first legit level 40 hashtag NBA 2K22, to which I responded, damn, the other guys boosted, congrats dog. Level hitting level 40, at least in season one this year has been pretty, I don't want to say easy, but most people will be able to do it if you play the game a decent amount. But shout out to Glide. I believe NBA 2K20. He was the first legend in that game as well. So he is a true grinder. And in other news, Take Two Stock, which is the company, Take Two, this apparent company of NBA 2K and 2K Sports has seen their stock plummet. Now I don't want to sit here and tell you that I know everything there is to know about stock market because it's the opposite. I really do know nothing about it. So I can't sit here and tell you why it's happening. All I do know is that in a video over a year ago, I bought one share of Take Two Stock, which was worth at the time like $120. And now it's worth $150. So I've made some money on my investment, ladies and gentlemen. I'm going to take that extra 30 and buy some VC, fellas. No, but for real, it was at a peak of like 163 a month ago, and it's dropped dramatically. That's the news for that. Okay, this is now like 2K. I need you all to pay attention. Look at me now. And I'm looking at you. Now look at me. Don't mess up, please. The next gen experience, I can't speak for current gen because I haven't played it. The next gen experience is so littered with crashes and crashes and error codes and blue screens that it is actually taking the enjoyment out of an otherwise good experience. I logged on to the game, got packed up. The second I touched down in the city, got packed up. I logged in again, packed up. Logged in again, packed up. One more time, packed up. I made it into the city. I was like, oh man, let me hit up my friends and see if they could join. They were getting packed up. Bro, after like 45 minutes of trying and a lot of being packed up, we finally got in the game. My teammate was packed up the second we loaded into that game. We're like, all right, let's try one more time. We loaded into another game to which I got packed up. So now they're playing without me. And I just said, let's just play 3v3 Prime because the experience on the city was so full of being packed up that I was frustrated. Not only that, but a day after the game released on video, I said, I haven't experienced any frame drops. Ladies and gentlemen, that has changed. Yesterday I was playing, bro, and I cannot make this up. I was in the city center, going to do my little story modes. I'm almost complete. I might drop it in the next couple of days doing the last cut scenes for the music and the fashion. I've reached level 10, fellas. Story mode is pretty good. I'm not gonna lie. But in my traverse across the city center, I was experiencing what I don't even want to call a frame drop. It was like I froze in space for 10 seconds. I moved up an inch and froze there for more 10 seconds. It took me like minutes to just cross the city center because I kept freezing. That's the only way to describe it. So all of that to say, you need more stability fixes. And whatever stability fix 2K you did in the last patch has actually ruined my experience. It has made it infinitely worse. Undo that one and do more stability patches, please. Please don't finally get the gameplay good in a good situation and then ruin the game because your servers are dogged. Please don't do that. My solution to the city being like almost unplayable the last couple of days for me was just to play 3v3 prime. Actually been having more fun on 3v3 prime than even in the city. So maybe that was an interesting discovery. Damn, I ain't realized till just now guys, I've been overexposed this whole video and you guys didn't say nothing. The complaints actually continue beyond that because the main complaint that I have actually, one that I feel like more people aren't focusing on enough is how much VC prices have been inflated. Because although when you go to the store and you purchase VC, it's the same price as it was last year. That VC you purchased at 200K VC or 450K VC can do less this year. It's literally in-game inflation. It costs significantly more to upgrade your player this year. If you want to complete the fashion story mode it will take you like 50K VC of just spending money on clothes to do it. And that's on the low end. I spent probably 150K VC throughout the whole story because 2K will give a vague objective, like put on a bold fit and you buying all these fits trying to figure out what does bold mean? Whole time the only thing you had to do was go to the Alter Ego store and purchase anything because that's what they considered bold. They didn't tell me that though. I had to purchase 100K worth of VC to do that. There's more things that cost VC this year when you walk into the stores, everything's more expensive, your player is more expensive to upgrade. And 2K has also been doing like little slick patches too because in their patch notes, if you believed everything they were saying, those are all the things that were adjusted. 2K has said in multiple of the patch notes that no gameplay was adjusted, but the same thing I keep hearing from everyone across the community was the Chris Brickley gym workouts have been patched dramatically. People who are in the Chris Brickley gym practices upgrading their badges because it was the easiest way to do it and farm badges. It's like, okay, 2K patched it. They want us to be more miserable grinding badges and actually enjoying the game fine, 2K, if that's what you want the experience to be like. But then they never like said that they did that. People just discovered that it was changed because they used to get like 8K badge progress and now they're only getting 5K badge progress. So just know that 2K is also patching things outside of the things they say in the patch notes. And unfortunately, we have to like stumble onto it and discover it in our experience playing the game because 2K is just not being transparent about it. Anyway, let me know what y'all experience has been like in the comments down below how y'all been feeling about 2K 22. If y'all enjoyed and you guys missed the last bit of news, go ahead and click this video over here. But if you guys want to see me get to max level as a rapper in NBA 2K 22, click this video over here because I did go in the studio and I did have a lot of fun. Appreciate y'all watching. I'll catch you guys in the next one.