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 takes a look at the five biggest problems with grinding in basketball video games.

One of the main reasons that I can’t get into MyCAREER or MyTEAM in newer NBA 2K games is the grinding. It also doesn’t help that those modes are no longer available once the servers are shut down, meaning that I can no longer continue the journey and enjoy all of the progress that I made. Mind you, while I might be more inclined to sink time and effort in those modes if I could still fire them up years later, I remain discouraged by how grindy they’ve become. They’re designed to make us choose between grinding or paying, prioritising recurrent revenue over enjoyment.

To that end, grinding shouldn’t be confused with a long journey, or the need to master controls to excel at a game. It’s a specific type of gameplay loop that artificially pads out a game’s length; again, usually for the sake of encouraging microtransactions to lessen the tedium. It’s baffling – though sadly not surprising – that too many gamers defend grinding, even when it results in weaker game design and a vastly inferior experience. After all, there are some recurring drawbacks with grinding, and I’m spotlighting five of them today. Please note that while grinding is present in both MyTEAM and MyCAREER, I’m mostly focusing on the MyCAREER grind here.

1. It Emphasises Work Over Fun

One of the most common arguments in defense of grinding is “people just don’t want to put in the work”. To paraphrase professional wrestler Kevin Nash (while using the correct term), look at the verb: “work”. Video games are entertainment products; toys. They’re supposed to be fun recreational activities, not work! I realise that people are using the word synonymously with “effort”, and yes, any game that involves levelling up an avatar or building something needs to have a challenging and engaging journey. With that being said, you shouldn’t have to treat a video game like a job, spending hours performing mindlessly repetitive tasks to get it to a point where it’s actually fun.

When I briefly returned to the online scene in NBA 2K23 along with a couple of the members of NLSC THRILLHO, I started planning on how I could level up my player quicker. Thanks to owning the game on both PlayStation 4 and 5, I could double-dip with the daily prize and other grinding tasks, then funnel all of the VC into my PS5 MyPLAYER via the shared wallet. However, it dawned on me that while it was a viable plan and a sensible way of going No Money Spent, very little of it involved having a good time on the virtual hardwood. Modes involving a ton of grinding force you to either pay or turn play into work, and I don’t find that enjoyable in the least.

2. The Same Journey Every Year

There was a time when I thought that I was done with MyCAREER. Not only was I in no mood to be on the grind in any new games, but there’s no way that I’d go back and touch the mode in an older title. Of course, I then revisited NBA 2K14 MyCAREER to cover it for Wayback Wednesday, got hooked, and am now seven seasons into a career. The fact that it has a much fairer progression system compared to more recent games – not to mention no unnecessary open world and other such annoyances – is obviously a factor here. Beyond that though, playing into my second year – and my third, fourth, fifth, sixth, and now seventh – has proven to be a fresh new experience.

Conversely, starting over from scratch as an underpowered rookie in the latest game is incredibly stale to me. Sure, it’d be slightly more palatable if it wasn’t so much of a grind these days, but I’ve gone back to square one so many times that it’s no longer novel to repeat that journey. The same goes for MyTEAM. A heavy grind is far more tolerable if the fruits of your labour will last for years – or as long as you keep the save file in an offline mode – and it’s your choice to start over. Games with annual releases such as NBA 2K don’t have the longevity or originality to avoid the problem of grinding our way through an all-too-familiar journey so soon after the last one.

3. No Online History Carries Over

This ties into the above issue with grinding, but it’s still worth mentioning separately. Again, losing all of our great MyTEAM cards and high level MyPLAYERs is tough, as it forces us to repeat the arduous grind or shell out money in order to avoid the early frustration. In all fairness, it’d remove the challenge and upset the competitive balance if we could bring all of our progress across every year, though a returning gamer/loyalty bonus would be nice. With that in mind, starting over from scratch does make sense, but our player cards could at least display our records and other facts and figures from previous titles. That way, we’d have something to show for our grinding.

On top of being able to reflect and reminisce about past accomplishments, it would also be something that other gamers could see. This is important, as it could be used to demonstrate that while someone’s current MyPLAYER isn’t maxed out with 500 games of eye-popping stats under their belts, they’re actually an online veteran who maintained a good Teammate Grade as they distinguished themselves on the virtual hardwood. Since those numbers don’t carry over, everyone looks like a newbie who’s never played an NBA 2K game before, despite diligently and successfully grinding for years. It’s just another reason that the online scene has become so incredibly toxic.

4. Unexplained & Broken Meta

Seeing as how MyCAREER is designed to be a grind, the last thing anyone wants to do is to sink time and effort into levelling up a build that isn’t fun or viable. Sadly, that’s all too easy to do unless you wait for the community’s master build makers to figure out the meta, and then create your MyPLAYER. Of course, by that point you’ll be behind, since you haven’t been grinding since you got the game! It’s the drawback of the MyPLAYER Builder leaning into scores of combinations and meta-gaming. Not every build is suitable for competitive play, and even if yours is, failing to meet a certain threshold with some of your attribute assignments can render it less effective.

That’s inevitable when there’s minimal onboarding as far as explanations of the meta, to say nothing of a meta that’s broken. There has been some improvement here, such as the ability to test builds. A game against CPU opponents is often a poor barometer of a build’s viability online, though. NBA 2K26 added some tools to help craft builds, but there’s still the illusion of choice, and missteps are far too easy to make. Notably, we still aren’t told if a rating must be 80 or better in order to be truly effective, or if a rating of 73 might as well be 60 because there’s no major jump in performance until it reaches 75. As such, you can grind for hours before discovering it was a wasted effort.

5. It’s Addictive

Let’s wrap up with one of the biggest problems with grinding in basketball games: it’s oddly addictive. One of the reasons that I fell into a rut grinding away in MyCAREER year after year is because I had the repetitive routine down. Fire up the game, go into MyCAREER, and head to the daily prize giveaway in the hopes of winning VC or something else useful. Shoot around on MyCOURT in between NBA games for that extra VC. Complete the Daily Bonus, at least until it was broken and then ultimately disabled in NBA 2K21. I fell into a similar routine with MyTEAM Agendas, trying to find the most efficient of way of completing tasks to build a squad No Money Spent.

The worst part is that I knew that a significant portion of the experience was now a routine chore that I was fed up. I also recognised the stimuli – the special effects when levelling up and gaining new content – were designed to keep me hooked. At the same time however, it was familiar. I felt I had the system down, and there was just enough fun in between the grinding to keep me going. Fortunately, taking a break from those modes to play with Dee over Parsec steered me back towards other modes and retro gaming with old and new favourites alike. The addictiveness of grinding didn’t cost me money or my health, but it did detract from my enjoyment of basketball gaming.

Have you been hooked on the grind in a career or card collecting mode? What did you do to break the habit? 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 Biggest Problems With Grinding appeared first on NLSC.