Ultimate Pro Basketball GM

I don’t even know where to begin (get ready for a long read lol) I have never written a review on a game before. If I had an issue with a game, I have always just deleted it and gone on with my day, but I have to write this or I’ll genuinely lose my sanity. I use to play this game back in 2023-2024 on and off and it was amazing, by far the best sports GM game I’ve ever played. But I just picked it back up about 2 weeks ago and it has become the most p2w greedy, unbalanced game I may have ever played (besides clash royale ofc). I’ll break down my top 3 concerns below: To begin, high overall free agents used to be locked for you and as you progressed and made a better name for your franchise you unlocked the ability to sign them. This was great because making a name for yourself truly made an impact on players’ perceptions of your team. You simply unlocked them and then agreed on a contract. Now there is a whole convincing power system, it doesn’t seem bad at first glance, but after diving into it you realize just how ridiculous it is. Literally mid 70s overall players are requesting upwards of 30+ power just to convince, meanwhile they are back up caliber players that have no business even needing convincing, id say a six pack and a please should suffice to convince them, I should not have to spend my entire years worth of power that I have obtained. Additionally, decent overall, but old (32+ year old) players are still asking 40+ pwr half the time, when in reality they would be lucky to even get picked up by a team. The whole system is busted and aimed at making free agency essentially impossible. Secondly, don’t even get me started on contracts. The max I used to pay a 5 star potential, high 90s ovr player back in the day was like low 30 millions per year and that was literally your franchise player. Now I have mid 90s players asking for 50+ million a year, that’s literally almost half of the entire salary cap. Not to mention low 80+ ovr players are now in the high 20 millions after their rookie contracts and older 70s overalls are like high teens sometimes even breaking 20 million (they could be signed for maybe 7-12 million a year back in the day. Meanwhile, the AI is signing these same players for half the price I’m paying, I literally see high 90s ovr players on ai teams for mid 20 millions while it costs me the same amount for an 82 ovr. Ridiculous. Thirdly, the devs have absolutely gutted the trade value of players when on your team. Previously, if you drafted and scouted well and found yourself 5 star recruits you could develop them and trade them for considerable amounts of picks or other older players with high overalls. It was a great way to reward players for drafting well by allowing you to get value back if you have too many 5 star picks to start them all and you want to trade a couple. Now-a-days I’ll draft a 5 star talent and develop him into to maybe an 80-84 overall by the 2nd or 3rd year of his rookie deal; I try and trade him and he’s worth max 5000 points of trade value. The game says that it is a negative and that trade value is decreased because he is still on his rookie contract, meanwhile that’s FANTASTIC. Ur still paying a 5 star 80s ovr player in the 5-8 million range, when in reality (due to these absurd new contracts) is averagely priced at about 20-25 million a year. So the trade system is now horrible too lol I can’t even fathom how the devs thought that any of these changes were at all good. Don’t get me wrong, I love a good challenge, when a game is too easy it removes any satisfaction I get when succeeding. But this is beyond difficult, it’s outright ridiculous and makes the game basically unplayable. I’m sorry this was so long. If you made it through the entire thing thanks for giving me a minute of your time to vent haha. If you would be so kind leave an upvote here so the devs see this and maybe consider actually bettering their game and showing any regard for their player base. Good luck and I hope maybe eventually you guys can build a successful franchise.

A great game to get sucked into for hours if bored