I didn’t buy ‘21 at all. I usually preorder every year and spend at least a few hundred if not 1-2k on stubs each year. I came to the exact same conclusion after the shambolic state of last years game. SDS do not seek to improve the quality of gameplay, nor do they give weight to the opinions and requests of players who invest hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars in to their product. With all due respect, a player such as myself who would play 2000+ games a year, would realistically be able to offer more valid input than the guys who are forced to play test the game at work as a part of their job. The same guys who let the same bugs make it to release year after year, apparently don’t notice game breaking issues such as outfielders not making plays near walls, or beating able to throw to second base with your catcher when a steal occurs, those guys.
Anyway, as well as the stupid gameplay that doesn’t get worked out until summer, if at all, SDS went absolutely nuts with the cards and the content is now terrible every year as well. Time was, you’d be excited as a kid at Christmas when you finally managed to obtain one of your favourite legends for your DD squad. Huge grinds were not always fun, but the feeling of obtaining a card that was rare and elite like Ken Griffey Jr in ‘17, or that 99 Joe Mauer in ‘16 were always fun.
Obviously, as we saw in ‘18, when this concept is taken to it’s absolute extreme and the grind becomes too long and the elite rewards too few and far between, it stops being fun. This is where SDS lost the plot completely following the entirely justified criticism of the content structure in ‘18 and ruined DD forever. Now it doesn’t matter in the slightest little bit if you grind away and obtain your favourite legend. Cards like Griffey or Miggy aren’t even worth grinding for outside of the name and artwork on the card, because there are multiple fake versions of modern day players that play equally well or better than any legendary hall of famer. While there is an argument that all cards should be usable and not consigned to irrelevancy, that’s more an indictment of SDS inability to make a realistic game, where all types of player are viable, but have tangibly different skill sets with unique strengths and weaknesses. Instead of looking at that issue, they instead opted to unload a dearth of juiced versions of every single card in the game.
The reason why this is such a problem and caused me to quit the game after last year, is because there is no longer any incentive to play the game at all, much less buy stubs or invest time grinding. I used to play to unlock the cards I wanted, even when the gameplay left more than a little to be desired, because that was the entire point. To get that elite team. 6 billion 99 overalls in the marketplace all available for quick sell value has made that entirely obsolete. The fact that you can go all out to obtain 99 overall johnny whoever, investing time and stubs, only to be handed yet another 99 johnny overall whoever for free with slightly different stats, has ruined the point of grinding. The fact that the HOF level players they want you to grind for are made obsolete by free versions of modern day players who’ve yet to even play in the majors, has ruined the concept of spending time and money to obtain an elite team of valuable cards forever. DD is ruined. It’s now a case of loading up on juiced fake cards that have no relevance to actual baseball and playing the game. The problem with that is, the gameplay is not good. Never has been. The grind was what drew me in personally, watching streams to see who the latest new legend was and so on. Now it’s like who cares, every card has 125 everything anyway, none of them standout or play any differently, so they’re not worth the time and effort to obtain or even care about.
They tried offering me flash sales on MLB ‘21, gave it away free with XB game pass, I just don’t care about the game any more. I thought I’d really miss it given the thousands of hours I invested between ‘16 and ‘20, but it’s just become an absolutely garbage franchise and the reason is because they diluted the content so badly that nothing feels unique and failed to improve on the substandard gameplay experience, despite rereleasing the exact same game year after year. They couldn’t even iron out issues that had been recurrent for three consecutive years. Disgraceful and I can’t see myself coming back again for ‘22. SDS aren’t capable of making a high quality baseball game, they rely on spewing out fake juiced 99 overall versions of players that don’t deserve them to wow little kids and keep them playing. See ya.
