Community Forum

It appears that all efforts to balance top players and common players are useless, and top players still beat all other players with ease. Another problem is that in ranked season reset, everyone above 800 is back to 700, making the first two weeks of ranked season unplayable except for top players. And those balancing efforts have negative effect to the game experience, most notably the good/good routine outs increased significantly to compensate the introduction of perfect/perfect, and many games are instead decided by bloopers and HRs that PCI are not even on the ball.

So instead of keep trying other balancing efforts, why not just accept the fact that it's impossible to balance, and instead try to separate? Create something like the premier/super ranked season league, and only players meets certain criteria are allowed to enter, like got to CS or WS at least once in the regular league. The reward of the premier league WS can be the BR 12-0 cards, making those cards more available. Also the top 50 nameplate is only available in premier league. To avoid top players go play regular league, anyone gets the premier league WS reward in the current season can't join regular league games until the next season. Can also consider adding regular league WS pack into premier league CS reward, making it more attractive.

Tested with USB C wired connection and bluetooth off. Both console and controller version are latest. Monitor is Asus Aorus FI32U(144hz 1ms). Recorded 985fps video with my phone. Just play both videos with Windows Media Player and choose "Enhancements > Play Speed" and forward 1 frame at a time, or any other video playing tool that is capable of forwarding frame by frame, and you can count the difference in frames. The input lag in 22 is around 75ms, and in 23 it's around 180ms.

https://youtube.com/shorts/fHM3jlQkJQ4
https://youtube.com/shorts/XuP-WDD94JA

Tested with USB C wired connection and bluetooth off. Both console and controller version are latest. Monitor is Asus Aorus FI32U(144hz 1ms). Recorded 985fps video with my phone. Just play both videos with Windows Media Player and choose "Enhancements > Play Speed" and forward 1 frame at a time, or any other video playing tool that is capable of forwarding frame by frame, and you can count the difference in frames. The input lag in 22 is around 75ms, and in 23 it's around 180ms.

https://youtube.com/shorts/fHM3jlQkJQ4
https://youtube.com/shorts/XuP-WDD94JA

Screenshot of weak popup on near perfect contact

And I had contacts more close to the center of the pci ended up with similar results, just that I didn't screenshot.

Understand this is early contact on a low outside pitch, but I adjusted the human power slider 3 ticks to the right and had 99 power. The average exit velo I hit with this card was about 98mph on near perfect early swing to low outside pitches because I was testing that. During my test I noticed that there were about 15~20% chance where the near perfect pci placement with early, just early or good timing ended up with very weak result, which means lower than 86mph exit velo and very high launch angle. I changed the difficulty to hof and this was still happening, but was like 5% or less. Then I changed to all star and never saw that happen in like 30 near perfect pci placement swings.

My guess is that the default human solid contact slider for legend being too low is the reason for this. I didn't adjust that so it's all default value. This combined with about 15% chance of hitting no pci homerun makes the experience in legend very bad. Unless you are the few top guys who can hit very well in legend, you may only get 3~4 contacts like this in an entire game. With 15~20% chance, it's not uncommon to see 2 out of those 3~4 end up with weak popup. And when your opponent hits 2 no pci homeruns in the same game, that can make you very mad.

My recommendation is to tune the human solid contact slider back to normal, so whenever you make a near perfect contact like this, the ball should never become a weak popup. Understand that this will benefit those top players more, and this kind of RNG may be the only way to limit them. But I am okay with them hitting homeruns on contacts like this, in exchange for not letting my already very low amount of contacts like this end up as weak contacts.