Monday Tip-Off: Hacking MyCAREER in Older Games

We’re at midcourt, and the ball is about to go up…it’s Monday Tip-Off! Join me as I begin the week here at the NLSC with my opinions and commentary on basketball gaming topics, as well as tales of the fun I’ve been having on the virtual hardwood. This week, I’m tipping things off by recounting the fun I’ve recently had with hacking MyCAREER in older games.

Here at the NLSC, our stance on hacking modes such as MyCAREER and MyTEAM has been the same as our policy on piracy: we don’t support it. Since we already walk a fine line with modding, we try to stay on the right side of both the law and our host’s terms of service, in order to avoid any unwanted repercussions. On top of that, there’s also the matter of fairness. While we can understand wanting to stick it to a Triple-A publisher by hacking MyCAREER or MyTEAM for content and in-game currencies, it’s also upsetting the competitive balance, and ruining things for your fellow gamers.

To that end, recounting my experiences hacking a MyCAREER save probably seems quite hypocritical. Here I am preaching fairness, while going against our own rules and community philosophy; talk about double standards! If you’re grumbling, I can appreciate where you’re coming from. However, there is a distinct difference between hacking to gain advantages in the connected modes of MyCAREER while the servers are still online, and messing around with an offline save years later. In fact, that’s a distinction that we can perhaps draw in our rules moving forward, because at a certain point, hacking MyCAREER for your own enjoyment does become fair game.

So, what prompted me to try my hand at hacking MyCAREER in some older games? Honestly, curiosity in how it all worked, and what’s possible. Also, I’ve already put in the hard yards in NBA 2K17’s MyCAREER on PlayStation 4, and even swallowed my pride to buy some VC in order to speed up the progress for 2K Pro-Am. Now that that save is inaccessible – I didn’t have the game installed when the servers were shut down – I’d like a PC save where, for the sake of articles and videos, I’ve already made significant progress. I still don’t condone hacking a game with active online support and a competitive scene, and if that’s not a good enough distinction…sorry, I guess!

With that being said, when I set out to mess around with offline MyCAREER saves, I already had some experience with Cheat Engine. As I’d expressed interest in possibly modding NBA 2K17 PC, Dee4Three gave me a demonstration of how to use it to edit various team attributes in the rosters. The MyCAREER cheat tables that I’d sourced online didn’t seem to work, but I found a couple of videos that concisely explained how to manually find and manipulate Skill Points. Since I used an Action Replay (the PAL version of a Gameshark) for the Nintendo 64 back in the day, I was able to grasp the concepts fairly quickly. It wasn’t long before I had 500,000 SP to play with.

I also elected to begin a new offline save – or more precisely, create a new offline save from an online save without much progress – in case I completely ruined another file I had on hand. I figured that I might end up getting rather crazy with it, and thus need to start over while I learned the ropes. Indeed, after awarding myself with 500,000 SP, I realised that immediately upgrading to the cap had made it more difficult to perform further hacks, as I’d lost a value that I could easily change and track in Cheat Engine. It had provided me with an introduction to the basics however, and there were a few other things that I could try without having to start over again from that early save.

Specifically, I was interested in changing my player’s animation packages. As you may be aware, animations and gear in NBA 2K17’s MyCAREER are assigned via an online “store” interface that is no longer accessible in the offline version of the mode. Fortunately, the Limnono Trainer can be used to assign animations, on top of granting admittedly more unfair boosts and advantages. Whether or not you want to play fair in an offline MyCAREER is completely up to you, but either way, it’s useful to be able to access some of that content. It’s a shame that the connected approach forces us into hacking to make basic changes to animations and gear after the servers are shut down.

Just for fun, I changed my MyPLAYER’s face to Michael Jordan. It seems that it isn’t possible to permanently assign different faces to individual MyCAREER save files, though it’s simple enough to change the face ID as necessary, as well as re-enable the customised face through the appearance options in the main menu. In short, there’s definitely some fun to be had with hacking offline NBA 2K17 MyCAREER saves to create maxed out players, or to play as a real NBA player. The ability to speed up progress can also be handy from a content creation standpoint, especially if your online saves are inaccessible, or you’ve started a new offline game to capture media.

NBA 2K17 wasn’t the only game I could play around with. I still have my NBA 2K13 MyCAREER save, and it’s ripe for hacking. Better yet, it wouldn’t be nearly as risky or complicated. MyCAREER saves for NBA 2K13 PC have always been offline, and are like Association save files in that they can be saved to multiple slots for backup purposes. Furthermore, the save files can be opened with RED MC; Vlad’s excellent tool that is now completely free and fully functional. That means no messing around with Cheat Engine and values in memory. No progress need be lost, and if I do need to start over again with my hacking, it’s quick and easy to get everything in order.

After creating a couple of copies of my NBA 2K13 MyCAREER save file, I opened up one of them in RED MC to see what I could change. I decided to start out small, and changed my primary position. As I noted when I reflected on my NBA 2K13 MyCAREER game for Wayback Wednesday, I originally created a shooting guard, but ended up playing point guard when Ty Lawson was injured for the season. I found that I greatly preferred that position, and since then, a playmaking point guard has been my archetype of choice in MyCAREER. I made the switch, and then played a game to see if the rotation would be updated with my player starting at point guard.

Despite some early rust – it’s been a while since I’ve played NBA 2K13 regularly – I earned another minute of playing time, but the lineup remained unchanged. I figured this could be attributed to Ty Lawson’s higher Overall Rating. Before I tried editing the rotation in RED MC, I wanted to see if any upgrades to my player could influence change more organically (albeit with some external help in making those upgrades). Unfortunately, Skill Points aren’t stored in the CMG file that RED MC is able to edit, which sent me back to Cheat Engine. Fortunately, there is a Cheat Table available in our Downloads section that includes SP hacking for NBA 2K13’s MyCAREER.

Once again, I gave myself 500,000 SP to spend on attributes, and thus max them out via the in-game upgrades. I opted for this method over directly editing attributes in RED MC for two reasons. The first is that I believe it’s much safer to use the in-game mechanics and editing functions wherever possible, so as to avoid errors, corruptions, and invalid data. The second is that I wanted to calculate the cost of upgrading from 78 Overall to a maxed out 99 Overall. It turned out to be 86,656 Skill Points. Before I gave myself 500,000 SP, I had 2,742 available. Earning the difference would likely take over 250 games, given the amount of SP that can be reliably earned on average.

I also purchased every Signature Skill and upgrade that my attributes qualified for. Those are more expensive, with full upgrades costing me a further 146,950 SP. To amass that amount of SP legitimately would generally take over 600 games, on top of the season and a half it took to get to 78 Overall, and to buy a few Signature Skills. Fortunately, your player was capable of being very effective long before reaching the point of being completely maxed out. Nevertheless, it’s quite feasible to get there by playing through several seasons. Since I’d already sped up the process via hacking, I decided to take my newly maxed out player into another game, and try to dominate.

Thanks to a combination of maxed out attributes and exploiting a glitch with the Acrobat Signature Skill, I scored 123 points while making an effortless 23 three-pointers. It presented me with the dynamic goal of breaking an NBA record – and allowed me to see a cutscene I probably wouldn’t have ever seen otherwise in that MyCAREER – but it didn’t alter the rotation. Taking another glance at the roster, the lack of high-rated shooting guards likely gave virtual George Karl little incentive to bench Lawson and slide me back over to the point. Changing the rotation through RED MC didn’t seem to work either, as it continued to revert back to the old lineup.

There were a couple of other things that I wanted to try out while hacking my NBA 2K13 MyCAREER save file: assign a cyberface, and attempt to qualify for the Hall of Fame. I began by assigning Andrew Bogut’s face to mine, which was much easier than in NBA 2K17 thanks to RED MC’s ability to edit CMG files. I suspected that manipulating the achievements to qualify for the Hall of Fame would be tougher. I began by noting the progress I’d already made, such as how many points I’d scored, assists I’d racked up, and double-doubles that I’d tallied. If I could find those values in RED MC or the Cheat Engine tables, making it happen would be straightforward.

After locating my stats in the appropriate tab, I bumped up my totals, and added a couple of awards and All-Star appearances. My Player Card recognised the changes, but the Hall of Fame Progress remained unchanged. Upon entering a game, pop-ups immediately began informing me of career milestones that I’d “reached”. Backing out and selecting “Play Next Key Game” likewise began a series of milestone pop-ups as the games were simulated, and when I checked on my Hall of Fame progress, the stats objectives had been marked as completed. It then occurred to me that a faster route to Springfield would be to steal the career accomplishments of a future Hall of Famer.

With a simple copy and paste, Kobe Bryant’s career stats were now also mine. This allowed me to complete the objective of at least 5 All-Star selections. Combined with my previous hacking, I was now four objectives away from qualifying for the Hall of Fame. By manipulating my current season stats, I figured I’d be able to complete the league leader and all-time record objectives. Following some tinkering with the stats, simulating to the next Key Game, and playing a few games on five minute quarters, I reached the requisite ten milestones. I most likely didn’t do it in the most elegant way, but it did prove that it’s possible, and I was able to watch the Hall of Fame cutscene.

Now that I’ve spent some time hacking MyCAREER in a couple of older games, I’ll say that I absolutely see why some gamers do it. I’m well aware of how much of a grind or potential VC gouge that MyCAREER can be, and hacking will alleviate that. There’s appeal in assigning a proper face to your MyPLAYER, testing maxed out ratings, and seeing some things that you may never get to experience otherwise, such as qualifying for the Hall of Fame. As with modding, there’s also satisfaction when you want to manipulate the game to achieve a specific result, and succeed in doing so. If nothing else, it’s handy to be able to change your number and primary position.

At the same time, it doesn’t carry quite the same satisfaction from a gaming point of view. Reaching the Hall of Fame in NBA 2K19 felt like an accomplishment, because I earned it. It was cool to see NBA 2K13’s cutscenes, and I was pleased that I’d been able to persevere with my MyCAREER hacking, but it wasn’t the same. It was fun to play with an overpowered player at first, but spamming exploitable moves with him quickly grew stale. Needless to say, it isn’t fair when gamers take hacked players into the online modes. Once again, I understand protesting anti-consumer practices and a desire to skip the grind, but it’s hardly fair to everyone else who’s playing by the rules.

I would also suggest that hacking MyCAREER for offline play – at least to the extent that I did here – can easily spoil the fun in the long run. It’s akin to finishing old games with God Mode and other powerful cheat codes: it’s completing a game, but not truly beating it. Of course, that’s up to the individual, and if you just want to see an ending like the Hall of Fame in MyCAREER, then hacking can be part of your experience. It’s undoubtedly interesting to see what you can achieve and how it’s done, so I’m glad that I messed around with a couple of games that I took the long road with many years ago. With little room to experiment nowadays, it’s also useful for content creation.

To that end, I would recommend trying out some hacking on old MyCAREER save files. I still don’t condone hacking in the connected online experiences, and we won’t support it in our community. Although many people do get away with it, the risk of a ban on your Steam account makes it inadvisable besides. All the same, it is fun to pull these games apart and create some crazy scenarios for our own enjoyment, in arenas where we can set our own rules and standards for fair play. I’d rather not take all of the fun out of dusting off old saves, but boosts here and there, or a wacky experiment, make it worth dabbling with. Just be careful, and keep backups whenever possible.

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