First of all I absolutely love the game. I'm super addicted which is what has given me this abundance of feedback on how the game could be even better. My background, I used to make dynasty reports on college hoops 2k8 10 years ago, played 1000s of hours of sims like basketballgm and football manager. I'm your market!
lol. I've bought this game every year and either never really dived in or refunded it quickly. This year was different and I was able to get the magic. It's always like that with the best sim games, I find. I just wanted to provide these notes of my gripes, some remote bugs I've found, and what I think could be done better. It's almost all UI-stuff, information availability. Some of it you might find super nitpicky, some of it maybe I'm just dumb.. but..feedbacks feedback right! In my opinion, most of this stuff is easily achievable and not far-out suggestions in any way.Serious Concerns / Bugs
-It took me many live games before I figured out that you have to turn on auto pause on every stop in order to do subs on a deadball. I was attempting to pause exactly on deadballs and getting really frustrated. The entire sub process could be made easier with drop downs that you can interact with mid-game-screen
-The calling recruits thing where they say um idk over and over is a click-fest nightmare. also while on a call calling it "Pitch Academics" is EXTREMELY unintuitive when you are not pitching, you are like, probing. even simply "Ask about Academics" would be more immediately clear to the player what its doing.
-A game-engine bug for me at least. if you set your defense to a zone defense, and then back to auto-select, it never actually goes back to auto-select. you have to manually select man-to-man and zones for the rest of the game, or else it will just be stuck on the last defense you play, forever.
-Another game engine bug? The score is 79-80, I'm down, 0:05 left in the 4th. The team advances the ball up to the half court, 0:04 in the 4th when the timeout is called. The team totally would've taken a shot if I hadn't called a timeout. The ball is inbounded, and the game abruptly ends. No player movement, just 0:04 to 0:00 immediately. You can imagine how upset I was. This has happened to me twice now in similar scenarios (won't happen a third as I will just let them play I guess)
-Had a recruit come in that my scouts got wrong. I kept him coming off the bench, he expected starter minutes. his mood quickly declined to a red face. I was totally fine with it til I found out he's actually the best player on my team. later in the season, I promote him to starter after seeing how good he is really on the floor. his minutes at the end of the season (starting at 12mpg off bench) ended up at 20mpg. at the beginning of the next season he is still 20% coach relation and unhappy. it would be helpful if I could text the player, promise him increased minutes, then see those results reflected in his mood when I make him a near 30 minute starter for the last 15 games.
-Took me way too long to find the drop-down bar in the top right of the Insights page. so much useful information hidden from me
. see pic-For staff....make it clear somehow that they will vanish to free agency if you don't negotiate with them in the staff page. I know its like duh of course they do, but I feel like the game should tell you at some point to alert you that this could happen (cuz it totally happened to me lol
)-Ask for commissioner approval before doing an automated conference move. idk why I just think the player should have sign-off over these occurrences. in my game, Texas Southern won the SWAC tournament in 2022 and 2025. with a team prestige of 22, they were accepted into the Big 12. wtf? also found a UI bug with this, if you go to Texas Southern's team history and look at conference champions, the game assumes they won the Big 12 in 22 and 25, not the SWAC. I would have never noticed this, probably never would have known they were contending to move up conferences. lets say they win SWAC 25, 26, 27. the game asks me every year if I want to approve the promotion. I decline until the 27 win as the commissioner of my fantasy league, and they go to the big 12. my 2 cents there. I want auto conference movement, but I want final approval
Btw, props where props due, the basketball sim game itself is fantastic. and as a coach during the game, I feel impactful to the appropriate degree on the simulation. like, I'm pretty sure u know but if it ever becomes possible for the game engine to be 3d in the way football manager is, thats when u blow up. thats like the main barrier of entry to the game IMO. you slog thru the first offseason figuring out recruiting, it takes a really long time, you finally get to your first game, and youre disappointed somehow by the UI. over time, I love it. but initially, it always instantly turned me off. the sim itself is gold.
Wishlist / Frivolities
-Player instructions for college. I know you can text them about shooting style but what about, drive and pass, etc. why show the entire floor shooting chart, if you can't influence whether they shoot 3's from the corner or from the top.
-Jersey number control (without going into commissioner edit mode), jersey retirement.... speaking of which I play some games where the opposing team will have multiple guys with the same number, dunno what youd do about it but thought id mention lol
-Mid-major poll missing...season predictions for each conference would be cool..had this in old console ncaa games
-When you get invited to a tournament, tell us in the email what region and what seed we got in case we skip the show. I just have to check every one til I find my bracket. the post season in general is just...messy. I have no helpful feedback there
-In a game where ur dealing with thousands of random names and shifting lists, the ability to simply right click a name and put a star next to it is very useful in sorting through these players
-On team recruit class page, itd be nice to have a year toggle and be able to show historical recruiting classes...same exact thing for schedule page. feels nice to have that kind of information so easily navigable (from basketballgm)
-I want to have sound but let me turn the volume like all the way down. I play lofi while I play as like the soundtrack and itd be nice to get some basketball noise in there, but the default volume is blaring.
-In the season recap screen of history, also in the coach history screen: show how the team performed in conference. show conference record next to the record like it is almost everywhere else and show tournament results (MAC Quarter Finals) next to Postseason results.
-In the team stats page, let me sort what players im currently viewing. let me see only guards, only forwards, sg/sf, similar to the drop down that is used for recruits on the recruiting page.
-Super small but give hotkey to start texting player, its like the only recruiting thing not there, see pic
-EFF stat missing from advanced stats page, see pic
-general question, the recruiting coach that scouts recruits, is that scouting lumped into his recruiting ability, or am I correct in assuming I need an assistant with high recruiting AND scouting? Also, what impacts the success of recruit campus visits? It seems seriously impactful for something idk if its random or not.
Thanks again for this fantastic game, I've been playing it non stop! Looking forward to feedback to my feedback.
EFF ^
Insights ^
Texting ^
