How to Get a 99 Rating in NBA 2K23

For most players playing offline sports games, you’ll always have the goal of becoming the best of the best.

To become the best in 2K23, you need to have the highest overall rating possible and make use of the best badges.

It can be a long and grueling task to improve your player and reach the elusive 99 rating without spending real money, but that’s what this guide will help you with.

Below, we’ll show you how to get a 99 rating in NBA 2K23 as fast and efficiently as possible whilst playing MyCareer mode.

How to Increase Your Overall Rating

To increase your overall rating, you will need to spend VC. It will always cost VC to allocate points to your attributes.

As an attribute gets higher and higher, the cost of upgrading the attribute per point increases.

The number of points you can allocate to a specific attribute is limited to your player build. You can see the points allocations that we recommend for each position:

• Best Shooting Guard Build in NBA 2K23
• Best Center Build in NBA 2K23
• Best Point Guard Build in NBA 2K23
• Best Small Forward Build in NBA 2K23
• Best Power Forward Build in NBA 2K23

The points you allocate during your player creation will be your maximum potential. It is not possible to maximize all attributes and be the perfect player without any weaknesses, but you can still become a 99-rated player overall.

As you play through your regular season games in MyCareer, you might wonder why you can’t increase some of the attributes even if you have enough VC and it is part of your player build.

This is because of the MyPoints mechanic.

What Are MyPoints?

MyPoints is a leveling mechanic; you need to earn MyPoints to level up and increase your maximum overall rating.

You cannot just buy VC and max out every single attribute on your character. Your player will be gated via MyPoints to increase the number of attributes you can level up.

Earning MyPoints is easy. You can level it up every 1 or 2 games, depending on your performance.

MyPoints always outpace your VC earnings if you are only playing MyCareer. You don’t have to worry about it unless you bought VC from the store or played other game modes extensively and earned a ton of VC from them to spend on MyCareer.

Fast Way to Earn VC in MyCareer

Now that you know the mechanics of trying to increase your overall rating and eventually reach a 99 overall rating, let’s get down to earning VC.

Everything in the game uses VC as the main currency. In MyCareer, you will use it to buy attribute points, gear/cosmetics, or even animations.

To reach an overall rating of 99 fast, you need to earn VC quickly.

When you play MyCareer, you will receive a prompt to alert you that reducing or increasing the difficulty will affect your VC earnings. This is a crucial part, so we will go heavy on the details.

NBA 2K23 VC & MyPoints Difficulty Modifiers

• Rookie = 30% VC & MyPoints Modifier
• Semi-Pro = 60% VC & MyPoints Modifier
• Pro = 100% VC & MyPoints Modifier
• All-Star = 120% VC & MyPoints Modifier
• Superstar = 140% VC & MyPoints Modifier
• Hall of Fame = 160% VC & MyPoints Modifier

After looking at the difficulty levels, you can throw Rookie and Semi-Pro out of the options because those percentages are too low to reach a 99 rating any time soon.

Match Length

We also have to factor in the minutes per quarter settings. Normally, you would like to play 5 minutes per quarter for a more casual playthrough.

A more realistic one would be either 10 minutes per quarter or 12 minutes per quarter. However, the minutes don’t affect the VC earnings as much as you would expect.

The VC earned per game is calculated based on your teammate grade and stats. After playing over 15 games in the regular season, the VC earned in stats is a bit lower than VC earned in your teammate grade.

As long as you perform with a decent stat line and get the highest possible teammate grade, you will be maximizing your VC earnings. If you can get an A+ teammate grade in 5 minutes per quarter, that will be the most optimal setting to earn VC.

I have tested three methods of earning VC in MyCareer regarding these levels and minutes per quarter settings. I already became a starter on the team while trying to test out these methods, so the minutes were already there.

Pro difficulty – 5 minutes per quarter

Playing on pro difficulty is easy. You can get a teammate grade of A+ in under 5 minutes per quarter in every game.

Essentially, you are getting 100% out of every game. If you are having trouble getting A+ on pro difficulty, you can try increasing the minutes a little bit.

Also, your player will get better as you play, and things will get easier.

Superstar difficulty – 12 minutes per quarter

Superstar difficulty will be a bit harder. The sliders are all slightly skewed towards the CPU’s favor.

However, playing 12 minutes per quarter might compensate for the difficulty. While I was able to get an A+ teammate grade and get a decent stat line, the earnings weren’t there.

It is weird how they gave significantly less VC for the stat line than the A+ teammate grade even after recording a 20-20 game (I did have six turnovers) as a point guard.

If you are going to finish two games using the first method, you will earn significantly more VC from it.

Superstar difficulty – 5 minutes per quarter

Here is where it gets a little tricky. Playing the superstar difficulty for 5 minutes per quarter is a bit of a challenge if you are aiming for an A+ teammate grade.

However, getting a B+ or A- teammate grade can already give you more VC than the first method.

The problem is getting a better stat line and how consistently you can finish a good teammate grade.

As your player gets better and better, this will be the best method. You can lower it to an all-star level as long as you can get a better teammate grade and stat line.

Only use this method if your player is already good enough in the league. I played as a 73 overall rating player, and I struggled quite a bit, especially if there was a matchup nightmare.

I even had a game where Gary Payton II kept swiping and stealing the ball from me every time I tried to dribble, but against Chris Paul, this didn’t happen.

To sum these all up, always play 5 minutes per quarter on the highest difficulty you can get an A or A+ teammate grade while producing a decent stat line.

But wait, there are other things to consider besides earning the VC. These are badge points and endorsement deals.

Badge points

As you play through each game, you will earn badge points through every positive action you do. Each action is designated to one of the four badge types in the game.

If you want the fastest way to unlock badges, it will be a good idea to play on pro difficulty and put up an absurd stat line to level up your badges while earning decent VC.

Endorsement incentives

As you rack up more fans by playing the game, you will earn endorsement deals from other brands. These deals can give you VC and incentives.

The incentives are a big deal if you are going to play upwards of 30 games in MyCareer. If you are just going to play online, you can skip this part.

Negotiating with brands to give you more incentives is the best way to go. You can sacrifice a few VCs from their offer because you can earn them all back from the incentives.

How do incentives work? Once you sign a deal with a brand, they will give you a list of tasks or actions to do while playing the game. If you complete these tasks or actions, you get bonus VC for each game.

Incentives like gaining 2 VCs for every successful pick and roll or getting an A teammate grade for 45 VCs are going to be big if you play a lot of games.

The biggest aspect to highlight would be the action-based incentives. Using the 2 VC for each pick and roll score as an example, playing on pro difficulty and doing this on every single possession can give you an extra 30-50 VC per game.

Add more incentives, and you can multiply your VC earnings per game. Consider this if you are choosing between pro, all-star, or superstar difficulty. You might be able to get an A+ teammate grade on superstar, but can it compensate for doing 50 pick and roll scores on pro difficulty?

It is up to your playstyle, but once you have accumulated enough endorsement deal incentives, VC earnings can be higher on a lower difficulty if you can abuse the incentives.

I didn’t include hall of fame difficulty in any of the methods because it is too difficult. The CPU sliders are way too high, but the biggest problem is that your user sliders go way down that it doesn’t feel realistic.

For a 73-rated player, it isn’t feasible to play on hall of fame difficulty to earn VC, but it is possible if your rating is already high enough.

And if all of this seems like too much effort and you just want to get a 99-rated player as quickly as possible, you can adjust your NBA 2K23 game sliders to make things a little bit easier for yourself.