Community Forum

Congrats on the first W and here’s hoping for many more! Many games have some lag so I wouldn’t worry about any of your in game settings. The innings pitched only count if that pitcher completed a full inning, so if your starter went 1.2, then a bullpen arm went 1.1 you’d only get 2 innings counted (silly I know). As far as I know, the rating range in events is more of just finding opponents with a similar record to you. So you won’t find people going 10-0 on their current entry matching someone 0-1.

Just keep enjoying the game for what it is. Some people will be bringing full P5 switch hitter squads, many like me use events to just complete the program or level up some hitters, others will be goofing off with theme teams, etc. Just as long as you are having fun with your roster and feel like you are making progress then keep playing. When it starts to get annoying, take a break. The great thing about events is they are short so even the frustrating games can go by quickly.

Draft and Shark are my two preferences when I play conquest, mostly to grind out parallels on pitchers. The rewards are pretty similar, but I think Draft might have a slightly higher value since the rare/middle rounds go for more than pipeline’s. I think they are the same number of games as well (or within one), but as others have stated shark also has 5,000 XP if you are needing to finish the inning/wheel spin then could use that. But I would only repeat these two at the moment.

Not sure if anything on the backend is happening, but in the last 30 minutes the app has slowed down to where it’s almost taking 2 minutes just to bring up a player. I really hope this is to target bots, but I can only hope this gets resolved before the new legend and flashback comes out

I like the idea of variants and rarer cards, but these ones are kind of underwhelming. Maybe it's just because I'm a sucker for anything animated, but I just see missed potential. Imagine instead of getting a red filter or Mr. negative filter we got some animations. The caution tape swaying or slowly ripping apart, and some gloomy weather in the background. Then the pumpkins could have their candles slowly burn out and a spider crawl across the web.

Even with the first variant, Roch Cholowsky, my critique was to make it different then just highlighting the new "red diamond" gimmick since it just doesn't look appealing to me. Red Diamonds are kind of just a new filter for diamonds so don't really see the point of them existing. I suggested to keep the diamond theming, but have it be black and white since it was a White Sox card, and then it would be a 99 Black Diamond and team specific.

I really just like animated cards though, my favorite card art was the animated All-Star game ones. And of course Finest is always amazing to me. Will I still try to get all the spooky variants? Yes, if I have extra stubs lying around after Finest 2026. I guess the filters just aren't enough of an immediate chase for me, but atleast they are trying something different. They started it perfectly last year with the ranked 1000 card art (which I will never be good enough to get), just hope they maybe put a bit more effort into the cards they make variants for in the future.

Bots are also extremely aggressive on headliners cards before the spooky update gives the free pick one away. Just something to be aware of if you had planned on selling the higher ones later today, that window might have already closed.

@Bridge-Piece_XBL Also getting this on my phone. Seems like if you put in 10-11 orders very quickly, you’re put on a short time out. I’m seeing it for both placing and cancelling orders.

I wonder why we aren’t using Twitter to communicate on some of the server problems. Is the team that checked out and it’s just Joe keeping 26 alive?

Edited: Nevermind, I just checked a random post and can see why Twitter is not such a good idea. Really forget how terrible the internet can be at times. Lesson for me to even check myself and my own words

App running horrendously slow again for me. Brought me back to 1990s dial up internet days.

@DrBear100_PSN Good luck in your games. This is my first year playing online modes and lot. I’ve tried to finish every event and complete every multiplayer path. Had some great success in some weekend classics (lower tiers), but after a few games I just go back to offline using whoever I want. Love Soto’s swing so hoping I somehow pull him with the 50 pack from MP.

I hope they lock in for next year. I’m all for once the all-star break hits, give better odds on the live series pulls, maybe double odds from launch so diamonds are 1:25. Then once postseason comes, give better odds again. I think there used to be games that once endless inning hit, show packs actually had better odds, but I can’t give an exact year off the top of my head.

I’m not a believer in giving every single card away, cards still need to be rare and have value. But 11 show packs, 5 ballin and 4 headliners each inning path is what, maybe 5k stubs on average? Thats worse than the deluxe moonshot pack which only takes up 1 spot instead of almost 20. But I’m not a game dev nor a c-suite who only looks at numbers, so what do I know.

Card art is great as always. I still think 2025 is my recent favorite though, but biased because of how many Mariners there were.

Definitely feel like my live series duplicates are being sold at a quicker rate, which might just be people finishing up any missing collections before weekend classic. Some of the featured headliners, such as the 95 Ivan Rodriguez, was running into what felt like a bot, since they’d undercut me by 1 stub and always list 3. Did find a sweet spot they wouldn’t go lower than, but I also understand those have lower transactions anyways unless it’s closer to a legend collection.

Couldn’t agree more. Miz was the first this year, but I believe he was a leaderboard reward for two weekend classics in a row, even though it’s still a rare card. Rollins and Ruth only got the one release. I thought for sure Ruth would get a second weekend classic go. Id add that the two WBC 700 rating rewards from the first inning, Rosario and Webb, also not getting a rerelease through rewind backs is another weird decision.

I’m curious to see how they deal with this in the next game. Every single time the marketplace improves, bots figure out how to get back in within 48 hours. May not be in the volume we saw at the beginning of this year, but even now just one bot can pretty much hold a monopoly on old cards that have slow transaction turnover. I would hate to move to console only transactions since the app is so convenient, but I’m not sure if improvements from this year can carry over to next year once player numbers go way up and the bots take over again because of the real world money involved. I really wish certain content creators would just get away from this game with permanent bans being placed on their accounts and any alternates they try, because they played a large part in even creating a place for bots because of their advertising and greed.

Add to that the questionable decisions that continue to surround other aspects of the game like PCI shrinkage, card caps limiting live series investments, the lack of updates to many other player concerns (outside of Manu and Joe of course here in the forums), abandonment of Live Twitch Streams, and what has felt like underwhelming postseason releases compared to years past, although we did finally get J-Ram.

I could nitpick other small things, but I’ve already got a bit off topic. I know there are still devs and people who care about the game, but I’ll end with one final thought. I think SDS needs to do a Developer Insights type of VLOG post or live streams to address how concerns will be answered for 27. The community at large needs to be involved throughout this process and it would be great to start soon. Send out more frequent surveys accessible through the app, website and in game. Surveys could be short and very specific, such as “In the show 26, we made changes to limit card caps because of (be honest and state the real reason), how did you like it and how did it fall short.” I think if the surveys are targeting the major concern points instead of just the current surveys which we get covering every aspect of the game, the responses will form their own patterns on where the community really wants the game to head. Continue to do follow up surveys as the team narrows down solutions and stay ahead of feedback and communication. We need more involvement than just a few streamers flying out in February to make a few videos to hype up the game in March, just to learn that their feedback wasn’t early enough and to be told “hopefully next year.”

So I know a few weekend classics ago that Xbox users had problems with the servers so got one as a complimentary pack if they didn’t play any/all (not sure) games that week. My guess is you might have missed a weekend Classic and it was still coded to give you a pack from that. This is just a guess though, can’t confirm

Agree with Oliver about live series. Something that SDS needs to do in the future is have inning rewind packs similar to rank/event/weekend Classic. I know once we get the final inning path that we get one boss pack from each inning, but for people who missed a month here and there or picked up the game late they are at such a huge disadvantage having to overpay for these cards that aren’t even meta. I don’t think it’s asking for much since they don’t even do cards for battle royals anymore. Also it is very dumb that Eddie Rosario and Logan Webb WBC cards are not in the ranked rewind packs.

@oliver230230230_psn Do appreciate all the investigating you do. I’m operating on very little sleep so I may have misinterpreted some of what you said.

@Oliver230230230_PSN No, I know all that. Just you mentioned people can’t have more than 5 million as if it stopped people from interacting with the market and controlling cards. On Show Zone I’ve been in the top 50 for inventory nearly the entire year, and I usually only have maybe a million stubs in my inventory at any given time since it’s always other places. Semantics though, do agree with most of what you posted, just was clarifying the first part of that post

I’m probably sitting on 12-14 million stubs, with most of that being held on quick sells live series cards I can dump whenever. So 5 million isn’t a hard cap to my understanding, so it’s still plausible for legitimate users to be controlling some cards if they are that dedicated. Not as you described, since that screams to me obviously bots with the transaction windows described.

I’m still finding some success in the market flipping/buying, but I’m also only doing new cards since there is way more traffic there so it’s at times easier to move even with bots. I’ve also changed how I do my orders on certain cards this year, where I’m not jumping by just a few stubs every time I’m outbid. For the few cards that aren’t fast movers, I’ve tried to find the sweet spot where the bots won’t react. Sure, some cards I’ll end up overpaying for or underselling, and sometimes the bots are so aggressive that they’ll keep climbing until the buy now and sell now price are nearly the same.

There are also a couple of other factors contributing to marketplace problems besides just the bots. A example would be boss packs. Boss packs get overinflated if you don’t buy both during their inning. So that All-Star Mike Trout card is an easy target for bots because there aren’t that many available since most players locked him in collections. It would be nice if boss packs had a rewind just like events and ranked. I know we get the “second” pack when they do the final inning, but I think it’s time for SDS to think about this.

Player retention I think has also hit really hard this year. So as we’ve lost players for whatever reason, we’ve lost more cards being moved and available. On the flip side of that, the amount of bots probably hasn’t changed much. So we end up with a higher percentage of bots active in the marketplace compared to actual humans.