So let’s go ahead and assume you’ve been playing PGA Tour 2K21 for a while now, and you’ve learned and practiced enough that you’ve become a dominant player in your single-player PGA Tour career. Ascending the ranks to position yourself right there alongside real pros like cover boy Justin Thomas at the top of leaderboards, perhaps you’ve even been able to win some events and started to collect your fair share of winnings. In fact, let’s say for the sake of this article that you’ve even become the most formidable golfer on the tour and your success has become so preordained in every event that it’s starting to make playing against lesser AI opponents less than enjoyable.
What comes next?
PGA Tour 2K21 Online Societies
At some point, you might be interested in seeing how your skills stack up against other real people by navigating into what the game has to offer as far as online play goes. From there, you can peruse the available online playlists and try out matches that see you squaring off against opponents for bragging rights or coins. There’s also the newer Divot Derby mode if you’re after more of a golfing free-for-all that values speed as much as precision. While there’s certainly enjoyment to be had in all of these kinds of matches, the fact that so many people will often quit in the middle of a round can’t help but be disappointing from a competitive perspective when you don’t get the satisfaction of actually beating someone.
In your exploration of finding the best online challenges, you’re bound to eventually stumble upon PGA Tour 2K21 Online Societies. A staple from back in the game’s Golf Club origins, these Online Societies are created by users who can then schedule events over the course of a season, allowing players to compete against each other in the same kinds of tournaments found in the offline career mode. Those who run the society can customize it however they like, setting their own desired difficulty parameters for each event, how many rounds each one will last, and selecting the courses and names for them as well. They can even choose logos (though the options are somewhat limited) for the societies, which will be emblazoned on the flags at every hole.
As you might imagine, not all Online Societies are managed as well as others, so you may want to be at least somewhat selective about which societies you join. In an effort to help you choose which societies might be the best fit for you — depending on your own personal preferences — here’s a handy guide to some of the top societies out there (on PlayStation specifically since Online Societies are not cross-platform) and what each of them has to offer. Also, as someone who runs my own fairly popular society, I’ll provide some tips on how to create a society and attract others to compete against you within it.
TGC Tours
Without a doubt, TGC Tours is the cream of the crop when it comes to Online Societies if you’re looking for a realistic experience that resembles the actual PGA Tour as much as possible. Their society within the game itself might not look all that different from others, but their website collects scores from across all platforms to build a leaderboard that allows you compete against people using other consoles.
Once you’ve earned your tour card by playing an initial event, you’ll be assigned to a specific flight that’s designed to have you playing against other people who are roughly on your same skill level. By performing well in the weekly 4-round events, you will earn promotions to higher flights until you’re ultimately going against the top players in the world. On the other hand, if you perform poorly you can be demoted to lower flights and forced to climb your way back up with good results.
Though their pro tours and challenge circuits require you to play the game on the unforgiving Master difficulty, they do have other competitive flights that use slightly different settings. A Beer League one, for instance, locks the difficulty to Pro instead for all those who compete. However, the True Sim Tour requires you to play your rounds with virtually all of the game’s aids turned off, including even the putting green grid, so you’ll need to try and figure out the breaks and inclines without any help at all.
PGA Tour 2K21
The official society of the game, PGA Tour 2K21 predictably has the most members of any society on PlayStation, so you’re bound to find the best (or at least the most) competition possible here. But it must be said that those who run this society don’t exactly do anything too special to set it apart from others. Their structure is fairly simple, with new two-round events starting every two days, and these events are devoid of nearly any individuality whatsoever by always just being named after whatever course is being played.
That kind of boring setup likely won’t matter too much to you though if you’re simply looking for a chance to make as many coins as possible. After all, the number of people entering every event and paying the entry fee that partially goes to the purse translates to some big paydays if you’re able to finish high enough on the leaderboard at the end of the event.
The ApexHound’s Club
If you don’t have all that much time to play a lot of rounds of PGA Tour 2K21 but you’re still hankering to compete in an active online society, The ApexHound’s Club might be the perfect fit for your particular needs. With week-long events that typically only require you to play two rounds based on the current schedule (although it looks like majors may be four rounds), there’s hardly a major commitment required here in order to get a score posted on that all-important leaderboard.
With more than 14,000 members in the society and over 350 people competing in its most recent event, you’ll need to put up some awfully good scores in order to come away with any coins here. Still, it will accompanied by a great sense of satisfaction because you’ll know you really earned them.
Barstool Golf
Representing the upstart blog or media company(?) — is it weird that Barstool has been around so long but I still don’t exactly know how to describe what they do? — the Barstool Golf society became quite popular thanks to the association with the brand and promotion through its various social media channels. They tend to mix things up a bit with the length and number of rounds for each event, and they get pretty creative with the names of their events (The Butter Cup was a recent four-round major).
Sadly, it doesn’t seem as if the person behind the society is all that attentive because there haven’t been any new events available to play for about a week now. However, it might be too early to tell whether this problem will be remedied soon or if this is perhaps actually a permanent demise for the Barstool Golf online society.
Legacy Leagues Golf – How To Build An Online Society
Rather than just shamelessly plug my own online society, Legacy Leagues Golf (but please join!), I thought I would also offer some insight into how I was able to grow my society into one that now has over 7,000 members and is featured on the first page of Online Societies on PS4 when you search for a new one to join. First off, I should note as a disclaimer that I had already built a fairly popular society of the same name in The Golf Club 2019 and that the fact that I was able to get my hands on an early review copy of the game meant that I was able to create one of the very first online societies people could join when the game was initially released.
That said, there are some best practices and habits that folks who run a society should take note of if they want to have people continue to keep playing event after event.
Always Have Events Running
You’d think this would be a no-brainer, but you would be surprised how many societies seem to have events scheduled up until a certain date and then the powers that be seemingly forget to add any more to the schedule (looking at you, Barstool). Needless to say, there’s nothing that drives someone away from playing in your society more than not having an event to play.
Many people who play in online societies are creatures of habit, making sure to complete a round or two every single day in all of the different societies to which they belong. If you don’t have any event running for even just a couple of days, then it’s very easy for people to just assume there won’t ever be any new events and move on to a different society that does have events to play.
Choose Good Courses
As you may already know even if you’re just a casual player of PGA Tour 2K21, there are an overwhelming number of courses that have been created within the game, whether by developers of the game itself or the community at large. Predictably, not all courses are created equal, making it imperative that you find the types of courses that match your society’s own tastes, and avoid courses that will rub people the wrong way and potentially cause them to lose trust in the entire society.
This is where TGC Tours comes in handy again. They not only run a great career mode but also maintain a huge database of courses that can help you choose the ones you would like to use based on difficulty and other key details. Though there are exceptions, most competitive societies tend to prefer courses that are fairly realistic, and players will get upset if there are elements that don’t fit the bill, such as a pin being placed on an extreme incline.
Be Generous With Purses
The unfortunate thing about trying to entice people to join your society via large purses in events is that the maximum you can set the bonus to is only 4,000 coins, so that means any more substantial prizes will need to come from entry fees. But you also don’t want to set those too high and deter people from entering at all. To help keep those purses high, it’s a good idea to at least set the percentage of the entry fee that goes to the purse at an attractive rate, maybe even above 90%.
This might not be as feasible when your society is just starting out and you’re trying to build your bank so that you can add more bonuses to your purses. Once you’ve established yourself a little bit though and have more members playing each event, you’ll likely find that you have more coins in the society bank than you know what to do with. At that point, you’ll be wishing you could add even more of a bonus to each event.
Post Regular Updates
This is admittedly not my strongest suit, but it’s a smart move to periodically post updates to the social section of your society in order to keep people abreast of what’s going on at that particular time within the society. This can be as simple as posting when a new season is starting and what people can expect throughout the season. You can take things even further and make a post each time a new event is teeing off. For a while, I was even trying to post some sort of witticism or bad golf pun every single day to keep things interesting. However, my limited supply of wit and puns eventually ran out.
If you don’t post any updates ever, there’s always the chance that people will think the society isn’t active enough for their tastes and they will decide to leave it behind.
Get The Word Out
While PGA Tour 2K21 doesn’t have quite the number of people who play it as other sports games like NBA 2K and Madden, it does have an enthusiastic community out there as long as you know where to find it. Even within the forums on this very site, you’ll find a group that’s looking for the next big society in PGA Tour 2K21, even if they might not know it just yet.
Aside from that, there also forums on TGC Tours (is there anything they don’t do?) filled with active users that can surely be enticed to join a society providing it’s something that’s up their alley. You might also want to try the PGA_Tour_2K subreddit as a post there at the right time can draw some interest from the hundreds of people that view the pages there daily. As with many things, people are often attracted to crowds, so if you can get a handful of people to join, others will likely follow.
