Soooo what’s new in 25?
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The proper solution to this problem has always been to be on the outlook for people who abuse a process and when the evidence of their nefarious work is shown, ban that person from any future access to the process.
It's the same philosophy behind law enforcement, if it's based on moral laws and enforcement. You have to allow the freedom for people to act, vice try to fashion thousands of rules and restrictions to keep the nefarious few from abusing the process.
SDS made a strategic mistake by erecting more and more restrictions to counter the nefarious actors. Truth is the worst these abusers could do was put a corrupt stadium in the vault, and then see people download it, see what a joke it was, and then immediately delete it from their personal list of 30 custom stadiums.
Truthfully, that maximum price is rather trivial. A few minutes of wasted time.
The proper remedy would be for people to report the stadium, via an automatic mechanism, and for SDS to download that precise stadium and inspect it. Upon confirming the nefarious effort, you ban not only that stadium, but the User ID from the vault, all parts of the vault.
If someone changes their User ID to try to bypass this, then track down the console ID and ban it from access to the vault. Eventually, the handful of nefarious types are denied their sandbox to play in and they'll have to go elsewhere for whatever cheap and fleeting satisfaction they can draw, until either they grow up and realize what's really important in life, or their lives are destroyed by their own actions.
This is the cornerstone of my recommendations to SDS. No restrictions on stadium creation -- everything is a prop just like all others. Want to put props in the field of play? OK, go ahead. If you create a stadium designed to cause harm to people, then you loose your access to the vault. However, if you are instead trying to recreate the look of the original hill with the flags at the first edition of the Astros current stadium, or trying to recreate the look of the magnolia trees at the original Ponce de Leon Park, then people can play that.
In getting rid of the artificial restrictions, the creativity is unleashed, including being able to amend the baseline and outfield walls, and being able to put such creations on the vault. I mean, props on the field can be done in ways that reflect real baseball from the past. I mean, for decades it was true that absent fences, there were fans in the outfield.
However, a compromise to this is to at least allow such stadiums in the vault, but they cannot be played in Diamond Dynasty competition or coop play modes. This is easy to implement, and folks can enjoy a whole new aspect of the game in any play mode against the CPU, or in friendly online environments like custom leagues among a private collection of friends.
Of course, I think the best option is to allow stadium creators who amend stadiums to submit their work for a review, and upon passing, that stadium can be played in all DD game modes. Yes, it would require some degree of staffing by SDS, and maybe that's unacceptable. But, ultimately, the solution of banning truly nefarious people, vice blanket restrictions, remains the better alternative.
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So I was perusing reddit this morning for the kick in the junk, and I came across a particular post in the MLBTheShow sub. I felt it perfectly kinda describes what we're looking for.
-In image #1, we can see a couple things- First, we can see how the seats are angled and the wall is used as the cut off for the seating block. Secondly, see how the grass is nestled right up to the wall, again where the wall is acting as the cutoff point. This also shows the smaller types of seating blocks we can use in the creator.
-Image #2- Look at the bullpens, and the way the path flows with the hill to create a more natural look. I don't understand why SDS can't/won't take this bullpen model and allow us to place it wherever.
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Indeed, it's really not that hard. Add a rotational axis up and down plus tilt left and right, to the existing rotational axis. In terms of the stands, the point of using the wall as a cutoff tool solves everything. The inability to accurately model how seating works down the baselines as the walls pinch in toward the foul line is an acute oversight, and one that I think is quite willful on the part of SDS. They've had far too many years of feedback on this issue without fixing it. The conclusion is obvious. It is this way because SDS wants it this way.
To prove the point, HB Studios was acquired by 2K Sports, and despite being bought by one of the few "big boys" in video games, they still have their very capable Course Creator. In fact, it was improved each time a new title was released in their PGA Tour series. For a great number of years, most all props were coded with the ability to edit them in many different ways. They could be scaled larger or smaller than default, and they could be rotated in all three axes. Even small props like sand trap rakes could be rotated vertical and horizontal, so that you could mesh the rake with the undulations of the terrain.
You can elect to let the software lay out a course, with your own presets, or remove everything and have a blank slate to build any type of course you desire. There is a "vault" of sorts, in that you upload stadiums to it and you can then download them to play. It is entirely possible to create courses that rival anything the HB Studios team developed as part of the game.
That's just the basics. However, imagine if SDS did something like this, which in fact HB Studios already did for their course creator. You can lay out a fence or a wall using either a manual placement of each section, or you can also layout a series of points connected on lines, and once you finish laying out this grid path, you click a button and voila -- the fence or wall section type you selected is laid out. You can even elect to make the fence/wall level or contoured with the terrain as well as choose to make directional changes smooth or sharp!
The only props you don't have that the company used in the default stadiums are those props with an obvious copyright, such as props with a real life corporation logo, or a logo of an actual golf course. Clearly, HB Studios couldn't make those freely available, but even in those cases, there are props that serve the same signage purpose that you can use.
So, yeah, it can be done. One just needs a company that wants to!
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@Suel21_MLBTS StadiumsCenter and yourself do great work and thank you for showing a couple of my stadiums. I wish SDS would take notes and showcase the best stadium builds.
