Welcome to another edition of The Friday Five! Every Friday I cover a topic related to basketball gaming, either as a list of five items, or a Top 5 countdown. The topics for these lists and countdowns include everything from fun facts and recollections to commentary and critique. This week’s Five is a list of five mistakes I’ve made while working on roster mods over the years.

When it comes to modding – no matter what the game or series – it’s absolutely fine to be proud of your work. Unfortunately, this sometimes goes beyond pride and creative satisfaction, and dives straight into egotism. This goes for any mod, but I’ve noticed that roster makers whose work receives acclaim for its accuracy and quality often begin to get a big head. It’s how we come to see a long-time, well-regarded roster maker claim that Al Horford is a better, more skilled player than Hakeem Olajuwon! Seriously, how does that not utterly destroy your credibility?!?

As a roster maker for many years, such egotistical bluster and confident inaccuracy greatly bugs me. I’ve received some kind compliments about my rosters for various NBA Live titles throughout the years, so I’d like to think that I know a thing or two about basketball, the NBA, and modding. However, I’ve strived to remain humble about my work, in part because I value humility, but also because I’m well aware that I’m not infallible. Beyond any issues with ratings and lineups, I’ve made mistakes while planning and assembling roster projects, and failed to fix technical errors before public releases. To that point, here are five mistakes that I’ve made with roster mods.

1. Typos When Entering Stats

I’m throwing it way back with this one! When we created roster updates for the early NBA Live releases on PC, we made a point of updating the player stats. For example, a 1998 roster for NBA Live 96 PC would be updated with 1997 season stats, rather than keeping the original data from the 1995 campaign. This wasn’t just for cosmetic reasons, as those stats also influenced simulated performance in Season mode. Being one of the more tedious tasks of roster making, this extensive amount of data entry invited the risk of making mistakes. Indeed, those mistakes not only forced me to quickly fix my 1998 roster for NBA Live 96 PC, but start my Season all over again!

While entering Kurt Thomas’ 1997 season stats, I made a couple of careless typos that caused his averages for the previous year to be truly incredible, including scoring well over 50 points per game! I discovered this when I checked in on the league leaders, and saw Crazy Eyes having a Wilt Chamberlain-like season for the Dallas Mavericks. Fortunately it was an easy fix for the public roster, and although it was a bummer to have to restart my Season, I was only a couple of games in at that point. Nevertheless, it impressed upon me the importance of not only double-checking the stats screens, but also running simulations to weed out various roster mistakes related to data entry.

2. Incorrect or Missing Values in Vital Fields

Speaking of typos and other data entry mistakes in roster mods, I’ve certainly made some doozies over the years! I’ve caught several of them before a public release as they either caused a crash or a missing texture error, or were otherwise immediately identifiable. When a game still functions normally (for the most part) however, some roster mistakes involving incorrect or missing values have flown under my radar until I received a bug report. An example is the inability to release or trade Darius Miller in my 2013 season roster for NBA Live 08. Somehow, after adding him to the roster, I’d neglected to assign him the appropriate value for his hidden TRADEABLE attribute.

These mistakes became more common after I began converting my current roster for NBA Live 08 for use in NBA Live 2005, 06, and 07. Although I tried to be thorough and created batch files to quickly correct values that differed between those games, errors did slip through the cracks. Whether it was the free throw ritual (an animation in some games, the number of steps back from the foul line in others), different dunk packages, or Freestyle Superstars moveset assignments, values intended for one game caused glitches and weird behaviour in others. It goes to show how challenging it is to juggle four different rosters at once, and that undoubtedly contributed to my burnout.

3. Leaving Out an Art File

Look, I’m all for taking games to task for quality control issues. We can’t entirely blame QA since there’s a good chance they reported the problems and the developers’ response was “aware, won’t fix” or “we’ll get it in a patch”, but in any case, it’s fair to point out problems. However, I can sympathise when it comes to roster mistakes and missing or otherwise incorrect art, because I’ve found myself scrambling to release a hotfix when someone points out that I’ve forgotten to include a file. It’s embarrassing as I always endeavoured to thoroughly double-check those details, but occasionally I’ve forgotten to include a face following a coaching change, or some other art update.

In hindsight, the approach of creating an installation routine didn’t help here. Creating a setup executable assisted with compression and made the roster easier to install in theory, though all too often it didn’t correctly locate the game folder, and misplaced the art updates. Because the files were added to the routine manually and individually, it was easy enough to forget to include a new one before the next release. Zipping up a folder of required files that can be easily extracted to the necessary location is a far better solution, and it’s the approach I now prefer. Naturally, mistakes can still occur – no method is foolproof – but I find it easier to manage the art for roster mods that way.

4. Creating Players Unnecessarily

Roster modding has its tedious and repetitive moments, and a few mistakes are bound to happen as you slog your way through them. Usually it’s something minor and easily fixable, such as overlooking a rating or an error in a player’s bio data, but sometimes you lose track of where you are. To that end, when I was updating my NBA Live 08 roster for the 2009 season, I inadvertently created Marc Gasol twice! Rather than delete the duplicate, I assigned him to the Retired Pool to remove him from the active roster, which kept him on hand to add to the Rookies team later on. It also ended up being a useful “watermark” that quickly let me know when someone stole my roster!

There are also times when it’s ultimately a mistake to create just one instance of a player. At one point, I was committed to adding any and all offseason signees, just in case they made the final cut. This only increased my workload, and also resulted in unnecessary requests for art updates. If you’ve ever seen a training camp castaway in the Free Agents with a face and portrait in one of my rosters, that’s why! Similarly, one of the mistakes I’ve made with retro roster projects is creating players that I didn’t need to, because I was working from incorrect information such as old game rosters, or they were cut before the end of the year. Thankfully, we now have better resources.

5. Neglecting to Save Early & Often

You’d think that growing up playing adventure games – particularly ones from Sierra – would impress upon me the need to save early and often, so as not to lose progress! It ultimately did, and indeed I’m probably overly cautious about saving my work these days. Of course, that habit is also because of the time I didn’t, and ended up losing an entire day’s work on a 2005 season roster for NBA Live 2004! I was on a roll creating the Class of 2004, and I didn’t want to slow down by backing all the way out to save the roster. Notably, because I didn’t have a second screen or laptop on hand, I was Alt-Tabbing out of the game to refer to information on the Draftees being created.

This turned out to be one of my biggest mistakes in modding, as the game eventually crashed when I tried to re-open it, resulting in hours of hard work on the roster being lost in a flash. That was already heartbreaking, but the day was further sullied when I logged into the Forum and discovered that a major revolt was taking place, as a few disgruntled members decided that instead of approaching me about their concerns, they’d flame out with some extremely nasty personal attacks and doxxing. It almost drove me to quit, but fortunately I was able to move past it. Even without that drama though, my careless mistake made it one of the toughest days running the NLSC.

Modders, what are some of the worst mistakes you’ve made while working on roster projects? Were you able to resolve them, or did you have to start over? Have your say in the comments, and as always, feel free to take the discussion to the NLSC Forum! That’s all for this week, so thanks for checking in, have a great weekend, and please join me again next Friday for another Five.

The post The Friday Five: 5 Roster Mistakes I’ve Made appeared first on NLSC.