The improved ground physics definitely makes it more of a challenge. Hole 1 the ball used to always stop right at the bottom of the fairway if you found the ramp, now it’s through into the rough
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Go play Taliesin if you haven’t yet. I don’t think RJWils touched up the fairways at all and it’s a monster if you hit a bunch of drivers
A lot different now that you can’t just crank the loft up on the driver to carry it 320!
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@Jeff_M so I think I’m interested in trying out getting involved in TGC Tours. I know absolutely nothing, I have registered for an account on their website. Any tips/info I need to know?
Honestly so happy for this. Was always baffled how broken that was.
You’ll have to wait a bit. They have first events on the society you can play as they test out difficulty settings. They’ll announce more on their forums in the coming month.
I’ll write up more once I’m off mobile if Jeff doesn’t first
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all the TGC info
more here (TGCTours), but the difficulty setting and some of the details might change with 2k25
So your registered, that’s the hardest part that people miss honestly. You just need to sign up for the TGC Challenge circuit society and you’ll be 90% there. The last 10% will be if they have some final registration step for 2k25 but I kinda doubt it
The tours are going to get a re-set with 2k25, so there going to be a massive qualification event the first official few weeks, and people will get assigned to tours based on that event.
If you are godlike in this game, you’ll get put in Platinum/Elite/Kinetic. If you are a normal human being, you’ll get put in a Challenge tour, which is CC-A through CC-L currently, and each week you are just competing against the other people in your CC tour. There are roughly 400 players in each CC, but not nearly that many play each week, Cut line is top 60%, and the cut line was usually around 50th place
If you don’t score well enough in the qualification event and don’t get a tour card, no problem, you can keep playing the events and try for a tour card every single week.
TGC has API access to the societies, so you don’t need to plug your rounds in manually like we do here. The weekly events are 4 rounds, monday through Saturday night.
They reveal the scores on the TGC website as the week progresses, so you can play all 4 rounds in 1 day if you want to, or play 2 rounds, and see how you shake out after the round 2 “Cut” is finalized at 4am UTC on Thursday.
Then you need to finish your next two rounds by 12am UTC on Sunday. (if you missed the cut, you can still play all 4 rounds with no penalty or issue)
If you miss a cut, and are pretty far down the leaderboard, you’ll get demotion marks, and the more demotion marks you get. After 5 you get knockled down a tour. If you place high, you get promotion marks. 3 promotion marks get you bumped up a tour. An event win us an auto-promotion
There are also occasional Promotion Events. That’s on the TGCTours (Special Events) society. If you score well in that compared to others in your CC, you can get promoted. Was barely making cuts in CC-L, then played well in a Promotion event, and got bumped to CC-J! where I also struggled to make cuts when I played)
There’s also no penalty for not playing events. Its only a penalty for starting, and not finishing (either get through 2 events if you miss the cut, or through 4 if you make it)
All that said, getting a tour card might take a few tries, and then there is so much movement week to week that just making a cut each week is a good target at the difficulty TGC plays at
Picking a random event from last year. Playing on Dancing Nun (widely praised buy course design folks as a very very very good course, hopefully it gets ported)
CC-G winner was -44 cut was at -8
CC-H -36, and -4
CC-I, -35, and -4
CC-j, -25, and Even
CC-k -27, and Even
CC-L -21,and +6
That week in qualifying, if you shot -36 through-29 you got put on the Kinetic tour, if you shot -26 you got put on CC-A, and if you shot +29 you got put on CC-L. Tour cards are kinda random though, as it depends on some very invisible and mysterious math on how many people available spots there are on each tour based on demotions and promotions.
So there is a LOT of overlap between the tours, skill wise, but they are reasonably well divided still
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Wait, you have a meter? I thought the new game had gotten rid of the meter so I’ve been putting without one…maybe I missed this?
Well, a meter in the sense that you have the swing feedback circle on the side that moves as you power up, and where you place the marker on the green dictates the power percentage target. If you draw it back closer to your player (for a shorter putt), the target percentage is reduced.
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@Albinobluesheep put it better than I ever could!
If you run into any issues or challenges getting involved with TGCT, let me know. As noted, they have test events up now, I would expect the final difficulty settings to mirror either the Legend or Master test events that are currently ongoing. I believe Legend is in the Platinum Tour, and Master is in the Elite.
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Is it the same settings across all divisions?
How am I supposed to work today when I just want to play this game
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Once they finalize settings then in theory, the swing difficulty should be the same across all the tours. I think in 2k23 for the CC divisions (it goes Plat, Elite, Kinetic, CC) they had the lie grid option on and the wind speed visible, then Kinetic and up had the wind meter without speed and no lie grid, but it was all Master swing difficulty across the board.
All that is TBD for 25 though, they could choose to use Master for CC and Legend for the upper tours. Personally I hope it’s Master across the board.
Literally playing on a call right now
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“And that’s why we need those widgets as soon as…oh come on that did not hit that tree!”
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dammit I’m kicking myself for not noticing the old thread was just about to end. After owning the thread for 4 years I BLEW IT…
PGA 2K23 Refuge Tour - Info Post #9562 - S24 Begins 11/25 - #2 by mctrees02
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My current understanding from people who know how/care to test such things is that pro-master-legend all have the same size white mark for you to hit.
The difference between the levels is how big the penalty is when you miss the white mark.
For example, a swing that just misses the swing path mark returns a 2% push on pro, a 4% push on master, and a 6% push on legend. I’m making up the “% push” for each level because I dont have any clue what the disparity looks like…but I believe that’s what is happening.
Given that, my current guess on TGCT settings:
CC Tours
- master swing difficulty
- wind speed on
- lie grid on
- swing vibration on (possibly)
Pro Tours
- legend swing difficulty
- wind is direction only
- lie grid off
- swing vibration off
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I would not be surprised if that is the final settings. I would like to see Master swing difficulty across the board for consistency, but that’s just me. I’ve only played a TGCT test event on legend so more testing to do, but it isn’t more difficult to hit perfects on Legend vs Master, as you said the misses are just exaggerated more.
yes, with the exception of the TST (true sim tour), which has it’s own leader board, and takes away a LOT of the assists, like the scout camera, and the green slope grid, and was usually a harder swing as well.
You can look up and join all the TGC societies and play in any of them for practice (the Plat/Elite/Kinetic play on harder courses) and if you aren’t in that tour on TGCtours.com, they just ignore the score
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Taking away the scout camera on a course with a lot of blind shots can be sick fun, and takes a few rounds to get the lay of the land. I don’t understand how anyone can play without the green grids and get a decent read, but I guess it’s possible.
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