NBA 2K20‘s year of bad PR and online issues continued with the $250K MyTeam Qualifier this past weekend. The issue was, well, some could not join even though they qualified for a qualifier.
We are aware of the issues some players reported experiencing with this past weekend’s tournament qualifier. Our team is working to investigate these reports and resolve as necessary before our next qualifier.
— NBA 2K MyTEAM (@NBA2KMyTEAM) November 18, 2019
A quick summary of the issue comes via Reddit, but if you don’t want to check that out, basically what happened was as follows.
A whole bunch of people met the qualification requirements (winning 10 MyTeam Unlimited games within a specific window of time, as explained by the rules) but could not enter the tournament. When they tried to join the tournament, they were told to win more Unlimited games or that they did not meet the requirements to join the Qualifier.
Another issue was 2K simply forgot to change the timing for daylights saving, so the tournament started an hour earlier than expected, which cut into the times when people could play. For those who don’t know, these qualifiers are only open for four hours on one day of the weekend, so that lost hour does matter.
This enraged some people (not surprisingly) and once again led to a blitzkrieg of negativity, and presumably many toxic tweets and the like targeted at those they felt were responsible in some way. This fell on some of the developers, including Robby Haught (TwoBrothersGaming) who works for 2K on the MyTeam side of things. He posted in a since deleted tweet:
“Not sure what happened today, yall. I dont work on the tournament aspect itself, just fyi. What sucks is that I got so buried in rude tweets I couldn’t see. Really disappointing when all I want to do is work hard for you all. Sorry what happened, i just had no control. See ya.”
For those who were impacted, it seems nothing will really be done by 2K to do right by them at this point — albeit that could change I suppose. The top four people in each of these qualifiers gets entered into the bigger $250K 16-man tournament on the Xbox One and PS4 consoles. So whoever qualified this weekend is still in, which is why I imagine nothing will change because 2K does not want to re-open an already-closed qualifier (even if it’s tainted now).
The two remaining qualifiers will take place on December 14 and January 18.
This also ties into what was a rough weekend for 2K’s social media branding, as some of the game’s social media accounts were also hacked. We chose not to write a story on this as we don’t like to give attention to these things, especially in this case as the hacking included a bunch of racially charged elements. However, it did happen, and Ronnie 2K’s Twitter was also involved in the aforementioned hack.
In short, I won’t belabor the point because everyone at this point knows the score with 2K’s PR and online issues this cycle, but the bottom line is the company and studio have to do better. The caustic tweets and hacking of social media accounts of Ronnie 2K and the company’s games are inexcusable — and in the case of the hacking, illegal — but they continue to do themselves no favors. Their communication has been truly terrible this year, and I don’t know if it’s because they don’t have a community manager or something else, but it has hurt them. Everything starts with communication, so until that gets straightened out, you’re going to have people like Robby Haught (right or wrong) taking the barbs when something goes wrong because people are looking to vent their frustrations. Silence is never the play in these cases.
If 2K improves their communication channels, will there still be frustrations, people being terrible on social media and other things of that nature? Yes, because it’s the double-edged sword of the age we live in when it’s easy to comment on anything and everything. However, if the communication is improved, at least from there it’s a starting point to at least getting quicker official replies to problems — even if people end up not liking those official responses.
