If you’ve been working your way through NBA Playgrounds on the way to landing every Legend player in the game, you would have surely found yourself battling the game’s ridiculous stealing mechanic.
While it seems to work sparingly for human players — and the game even goes as far as to tell you that knowing when steal is really important — AI-controlled opponents seem to know how and when to steal, and appear to execute theft with relative ease.
That said, simply spamming the steal button in online matches would eventually lead to theft, and that was incredibly frustrating.
Thankfully, with a new patch having already launched for the game, steals have received a significant nerf.
This update will make it so spamming the steal button actually eats into your player’s stamina, so spamming the button is no longer a viable option.
You could counter this by selecting a player with high steal and stamina ratings, but the tactic is still going to slow your player down significantly.
Here’s the full list of patch notes for NBA Playgrounds.
- Added ‘International English’ with metric units as a default language in case none of the supported languages is the user’s system language
- Adjusted timing for layups and 2-pointers from under the hoop. Layups are now easier to perform, and players with low stats for 2-pointers are slightly better than before
- Adjusted the steal action to better fit intended gameplay
- Changed the Stars Lottery Pick so that it can only be awarded, if a team is at least 6 points behind
- Improved the frequency of catching a ball while in mid-air
- Improved the online matchmaking algorithm
- Increased the duration of the 3 points x2 Lottery Pick
- Reduced the duration of the Stars Lottery Pick
Notable Fixes:
- Fixed an issue that prevented settings from being saved when leaving the options menu. (This includes fixing an issue that prevented audio settings from being saved)
- Fixed an issue that occasionally caused the ‘Lighting Ball Lottery Pick’ not to score from longer distances
- Fixed a misspelling of a player’s name
- Fixed several localization related items and enabled Steam’s language panel in the game’s properties to change the game’s language. The languages available are: English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Russian and Brazilian Portuguese
- Fixed an issue that prevented users from seeing off-screen markers sometimes
- Fixed UI resizing issues in 1280×720 resolution
- Fixed issues related to key bindings in the Options Menu
- Fixed an issue that prevented the ‘Q’ key from showing the Challenges of each Tournament Round
- Fixed several desynch issues in bad network connection scenarios
- Fixed a problem where a dunk could score after the match ended
- Fixed a problem where certain menus could be skipped on PC without user input
- Fixed several problems that made the ball getting stuck on the top of the backboard
- Fixed a problem that prevented the ball from spinning after scoring
- Fixed a problem in which failed dunks could score if the teammate was performing an alley oop
Barters81
Monday 15th of May 2017
You know.....it makes you wonder exactly what sort of QA/QC are done on these types of games.
It would have taken anyone maybe 3 or 4 minutes of game play to realize the stealing mechanism was severely broken. Similarly, it would take someone an equally short time frame to realize the timing of dunks, under hoop layups, etc etc etc......is just......broken.
So either nothing was tested, or it was tested very very softly.
A game like this shouldn't be hard to execute, give the genre was perfected 20+ years ago.