If you’re not aware, AFK stands for “away from keyboard” and is meant to just tell folks you’re stepping away for a minute and won’t be responding. In video games, it means you’re not actively playing the game, and in an online setting that’s less than ideal when a game starts or is already happening. At that point, you’re actively harming your team’s chances. But, hey, sometimes you got to poop. That being said, AFK NBA 2K23 players have come out of the woodwork this year to cause some chaos in MyTeam.
AFK NBA 2K23 Players Are Hilarious
Just saw someone on the timeline tape a fucking wrench to their controller stick to avoid playing a game mode that literally REWARDS you for losing. We appreciate you acknowledging the idle issue but player lock has to be removed entirely @NBA2K_MyTEAM
I've seen it all. pic.twitter.com/NXd4CpFo4s
— Curr (@Curr) October 19, 2022
First off, that’s not a wrench. Tell me you don’t floss without telling me Twitter user @Curr. By the way, flossers are the superior way to floss (sit down you water flosser weirdos, you’re not better than us).
Anyway, specifically as it relates to MyTeam Unlimited, a surprisingly popular thing to do at the start of this year was to start a game and then just leave. People were doing this for two reasons:
- Player lock is now an option so you can just have control of one player who mostly stays out of the action and is never responsible for things like passing the ball inbounds after makes/stoppages. Therefore games don’t take that much more time when you player lock the SF (minus sitting through all cutscenes and all that).
- You can now earn MT and rewards in things like Unlimited by just playing the game. Win or lose, you continue to get rewards and go up the ladder. We’ll get more into the rewards themselves in a bit.
2K noticed this after people complained about it, and they patched it in Patch #2 that was released in October.
An anti-competitive check for idle players has been added to Multiplayer modes in MyTEAM
This is where that tweet above comes into play. You can’t simply idle in player lock anymore, so now you need to move the controller. This is not an entirely new phenomenon because the “rubber band method” has been around in various forms for years, especially for grinding purposes. The “rubber band method” is basically just putting a rubber band between the two joysticks so you always move and don’t get booted for being idle. It’s been a thing in GTA Online, FUT in FIFA at various points, and so on.
NBA 2K23 is just the latest and greatest here because it feels like a surprisingly high number of people are doing it, and it’s happening in a multiplayer setting where someone else has to deal with that nonsense.
The Patch Fixed Nothing
It’s not hard to beat a basic “idle” check. 2K probably dissuaded the laziest of the AFK players out there, but there does not seem to be anything overly complex about this “check” on their end. It’s still a thing after the patch, and it’s likely going to remain a thing all year. There are multiple reasons for this that I’ll get into, but the driving reason why I think it will be a thing all year is because I don’t think 2K can do anything about it without hurting the user who isn’t abusing this system.
Why People Player Lock
Now, while I think AFK NBA 2K23 players are hurting the game, I also understand why these people are doing it. It doesn’t mean I agree with their reasons (I don’t), but I want to at least go through all sides of this weird little sub-culture within Unlimited.
To start, it’s very easy to player lock. Before you jump into a game, you just go to the Edit Lineup screen and press L3 on the player you want to control. I believe you can do this in any mode, and while I never did it to go AFK in Domination, it was the one time I thought about it. This leads to the second point.
Some people are just not good at this game. I’m not saying that to be mean or demeaning, it’s just the reality. If X number of people play the game, not every player can win 50% or more of their games. Some people in that scenario have to lose more like 75-85% of their games. In this scenario, it’s actually the better play to just AFK. If your team is substantially better than your opponent’s in NBA 2K23, and the other player can’t shoot open shots or just struggles to get by AI defenders, you can win 4 on 5.
I would say if your team is good enough, then you can probably AFK and win 25-30% of your games. This becomes even more true if your AFK team is bigger than your opponent’s team. Offensive rebounding remains relatively busted in this game, so dominant rebounders are just going to ruin people on the offensive glass. Your opponent will end up with fewer possessions and thus your chance of winning will go up by default.
So even if that AFK player is just sitting in the backcourt the entire game, yes, you can lose to them. I have not lost to them, but it’s been close. One game was so close that the AFK player came back for one possession to take a shot late in the fourth quarter. This person missed that shot and gave back up. Hilarious.
Rewards
FOMO is also at play here. There is that fear of missing out, and some people feel like they’re entitled to everything in NBA 2K23 MyTeam. I understand that mindset on some level because the microtransactions, pack luck, and overall money-sucking nature of MyTeam is brutal. The grinds for some of these cards are unfair and not reasonable unless you devote all your free time to the game, which I talked about as part of an article back at the end of September.
Instead of just accepting they can’t earn every free reward in MyTeam, they do AFK methods to earn those rewards and complete agendas. The arms race is real in their minds, and the Trophy Case is the other aspect of this whole thing that can’t be overlooked.
Centerpiece Exchange items are what everyone is after. The other 14 items for the Trophy Case are not that hard to get, so it’s sort of like playing the McDonald’s Monopoly game. Everyone wants Boardwalk, but most of the time you can only get Park Place. You can get these Centerpiece items in various MyTeam modes, and one spot to get them is Unlimited. You don’t have to go all the way through the rewards to get to this Centerpiece, but if someone doesn’t like Unlimited, their thought process might be to just go AFK so they still get to that reward and then can go back to playing offline.
People want to fill out their Trophy Case because then you get awesome players. I love the Trophy Case and thought it was a great idea when they added it to MyTeam. It’s also probably a big reason why some of these loot goblins have come out of hiding. It’s an unintended consequence of a good idea by the developers. It’s always a bummer what that happens.
Is There A Solution?
In short, I don’t think there is a great solution this year. The day this patch happened, I went to Reddit and counted at least five threads where people were talking about what to do now or if this will change anything. These AFK players are hungry this cycle. They want what they want, and I don’t think they will be denied no matter how much they get shamed or how much 2K puts little roadblocks in their way.
The solution I hear the most for how to “fix” the problem is just ban player lock in online modes. However, player lock was not a bad thing to add to online modes. I know some people think it is, and it probably shouldn’t be a thing in an actual competitive tournament (everyone should be playing with the same rules there), but I do think it gets more people playing the game online and offline. It stinks that it’s getting abused, but I’m not really one of those people who says you have to play on-ball defense every possession or all that. I do play full user control and don’t even really control the helper much when playing defense (I will also actively make fun of my long-time 2K friends who play a lot of off-ball defense), but I don’t think it’s an invalid way to play the game. This same courtesy should be applied to player lock.
It’s also not fair to the normal user to go back to getting zero rewards if you lose. One of the best changes 2K made to Unlimited was giving people more rewards for games. Unlimited absolutely sucked last year. Even with the AFK nonsense this year, the mode is better with the rewards for losses aspect.
The problem is that, yes, this is punishing the “normal” user who just wants to play the game against someone else. Regardless, all the major solutions either take out functionality from the game or hurt the normal user. Boosting was another problem in 2K, and the ways 2K combated it during a game cycle really only ended up hurting normal users. The “idle” check was the way to say “well, we tried” by 2K. I would prefer they “pretend” to try when it comes to this.
Plus, as annoying as it can be going up against an AFK player, it’s always going to be funny to me now because I will always see an image of a flosser taped to a controller in my mind.
