El_Tercero
It took them forever to update badges. They should have been doing this with the previous ratings updates. It would also be helpful if they said which players got their badges updated. I know most of the rookies who play a lot got their badges updated, but besides that I have no idea who else. Because I can’t remember what players had what badges before.
Most of the rookies had 0 badges at the start of the year, which I’ll allow since COVID messed everything up and we had a very short off-season. It was the first season they couldn’t launch the game with the rookies in the game, they had to add them on the fly, didn’t have face scans, etc.
Yet you can also argue that they SHOULD have had badges done in advance (especially for the top players) just like they do for the ratings. 2K also has users literally submitting draft class data to them – they are having information thrown at them and they still aren’t able to get it done.
Notable updates:
Ball: 31 (+21)
Haliburton: 17 (+12)
Edwards: 9 (+9)
Quickley: 7 (+6)
Bey: 7 (+2)
Bane: 6 (+6)
Wiseman: 6 (+4)
Vassell: 5 (+5)
I highlighted Saddiq Bey out of this group (only +2) because this was his THIRD badge update this year. Anthony Edwards was the #1 pick in the draft, started with 0 badges, and March 26th was this was his first badge update. He leads all Rookies in Minutes Played.
In the case of LaMelo Ball, even with him being much better than anticipated, there’s no reason a player should be getting 21 badges added in a bi-weekly update system. These are clear indicators that their system is broken. You don’t need half a season’s worth of data to properly diagnose these.
Now that I’ve got a solid grasp on the badges (at least on current-gen) and have two years of their badge data to work with, I am able to diagnose what they are doing wrong (most of it is that they too data reliant, but don’t have a great grasp on the data sets they’re using).
Even with 187 badge updates (a guesstimate – it might be closer to 200 – Kemba Walker for example had no badges added/removed but had the quality of many decreased), what’s crazy is that there are STILL high-quality players in the game that weren’t touched and are blatantly missing badges. Kentavious Caldwell-Pope is the starting SG on the World Champion Lakers and has had 2 badges for the past 2-3 years.
Lakers Badges
60 LeBron James
43 Anthony Davis
22 Andre Drummond (-1)
22 Dennis Schroder (-2)
20 Marc Gasol (-2)
19 Montrezl Harrell
12 Alex Caruso
9 Kyle Kuzma (+1)
4 Wesley Matthews
4 Jared Dudley
2 Talen Horton-Tucker
2 Kentavious Caldwell-Pope (440 career starts, 16,000 career minutes played)
1 Kostas Antetekoumpo
0 Alfonzo McKinnie
0 Devontae Cacok
That’s nothing short of embarrassing. The other starters literally have 10x as many badges. Rookie SGs posted above have 3x as many badges. You could literally throw darts blindfolded at a badge board and get a better representation of KCP (this might make for good content – don’t tempt me).
(Don’t worry guys, I’m sure 2K will sheepishly acknowledge this post by silently updating KCP in X amount of days/weeks. How a game with 15M players doesn’t have multiple community managers is beyond me. Stop asking your devs to wear five different hats).
