Oh man I started writing up an op last night for this exact issue and now someone has sort of done it for me. Here's some user experience from me. (It's the op pasted, sorry
) -- it's sort of half done and the intro still lacks cohesion but I cba finishing it.
This is going to focus on myplayer mode, because the shared pool of vc has prevented me from making any significant headway in the running of a franchise(myGm).
What I find really intriguing about these virtual economies is that playtime can actually be assigned monetary value -- e.g you play for this long and have earned this much virtual value which can be juxtaposed with actual real world incomes for fun and science! NBA2K 14 uses virtual currency, or (VC) for short. To keep the math simple I'm just comparing the largest VC pack available to extract representative value -- It's 80.000 VC for 19,99$.(20$ because I'm lazy and decimal places suck.) So some simple back of the napkin math indicates 1$ is roughly equal to 4000VC. On the superstar difficulty which (multiplies earnings by 1.5)with 8 minute quarters and a great ingame performance(you make less VC if you're bad or playing on a lower difficulty) you make roughly 500VC per 30 minutes. Some extrapolation then tells us you make roughly 1$ every 4 hours of gametime -- 2$ for a full working day. 10$ for 40 hours -- 20$ for 80 hours. To make an equivalent amount VC that you'd gain from the pack, you'd have to play NBA2K14 for 80 hours(and you'd have to be playing well). This does not take into account time spent in menu's, looking at rosters or wasted restarting after a crash. It also does not take into account lack of player skill which makes the VC earnings drop very sharply.
You could do 2 hours and 45 minutes of 7.25$ an hour minimum wage work and earn the equivalent of spending those 80 hours. At that point your player will still be around 40k VC away from maxing out his stats -- meaning you'd have to spend an additional 40 hours playing. At which point you'd still need to purchase signature shots/animations/signature skills and clothing which at a minimum will take up atleast another 40k (and could spiral out to be much much more). So you're looking at a minimum of
160 hours of dedicated grinding (without menu's or any distractions -- which would obviously inflate that number even more) to get a maxed out myplayer to ball with. Or you know 40$ which you can earn in 5 hours and 30 minutes flipping burgers for your local fast food restaurant.
I overshot all of these estimations in 2K's favour, from time spent playing a match to the eventual payout because they're actually higher and lower respectively -- also keep in mind I'm fairly decent at this game because putting up good stats on superstar isn't that hard for me, a beginner will struggle much more and can see that income cut in half or worse. Honestly unless you feel like you'll actually want to spend in excess of 200 hours playing this I wouldn't get it. This game has been made completely inaccesible to casual players unless they are willing to pay, and that's honestly the biggest shame of all.
