Community Forum

Good/Good is an out.

Late/Okay is a hit.

Early/Okay is a hit.

Perfect/Perfect, you rarely want that.

If you have a mission, say get XBH with Mays, the batter ahead of you will double, Mays won't see a strike, the batter after him will double and the batter after him will probably double or homer.

Also your batter on a mission feels nerfed. Once you eventually clear the mission he suddenly comes alive and his stats play right.

The AI always hits a homerun at some point. Generally on an 0-2 count and swinging at a ball.

The Rockies outfield gets to everything, including balls you hit out.

There are way too many times where the AI does throw you something center cut that you time and locate very well and it's a soft grounder to 3rd/short or weak fly. It happens enough times that you can go Good/Good with 94+ overall cards with insane batting stats and go 1-2-3 in an inning with the fielders barely moving to make the play.

The amount of diving and sliding catches by the AI is ridiculous.

At this point with first TA done and second TA 2 done 100% and 1 at 85% and the rest around 50% I would say I have ground into 962 double plays and I have turned 7 against the AI.

The final boss card should be at 145 or even 140. Once you get the last card there is no reason to do the mission. So, if they keep it at 150 a smart thing to do is look at the missions and choose the worst mission card as your last pick. Always take the pitchers if you are just grinding to the end because they are an easy 4 points.

All sports games are like this sadly. Somehow the peak of current RNG coincides with the peak of 1v1 H2H online play.

You could say the RNG is the devs attempt to level the playing field and it probably is although none of them would admit it.

What the sports games focus on PVP did IMO is absolutely kill AI development. Think about any sports game and the point they decided to go with more H2H online vs solo play? From that point in time did the AI ever evolve past that? If anything the AI has gotten worse in most sports games because it is completely neglected.

You can see how unimportant AI intelligence is for all of these sports game makers, few devs or marketing people have touted improved AI intelligence as a feature.

If we are playing H2H and the stupid AI isn't hurting either of us and the RNG isn't favoring either of us too much, job done. No complaints. But every time and look, it's way more frequent than it should be, every time it's skewed one way more than the other you are going to get complaints. These complaints are justified because this is a horse s h i t way to make games. But it's the easiest way to make games. Because there are no accolades for having the best AI intelligence in a sports game, nobody bothers making the AI smart.

But what it boils down to is skill isn't as much a factor each year in sports games. Pressing the correct button and lucking out with the best RNG result possible is all you can do. You are basically watching a sports movie play out and pressing buttons.

For 3 catcher homers, make a team of all catchers and go play away against the O’s or Rockies.

Have SDS just given up and forgotten what a moment is?

Alvarez walk off. So either relive it, or strike him out/get him out.

Or either of the two listed in the post above.

Their in-game description:
Moments - Play as Legends and Superstars to relive or rewrite the biggest Moments from baseball history.

Or you know, get 7 K's with your ballplayer, get on base twice with your ballplayer, play some game that never happened, play 3 innings for no apparent reason, etc

A few shows back you could change sliders outside of DD and it affected moments.

Moments became so fun because you could make the AI pitcher locate much better. Of course they patched it a few weeks later and moments went back to being lousy.

I hate how the AI, when making a routine catch in the outfield only trots along the coded path and then catches the ball on the run facing the outfield wall.

Just watch the sport SDS, please. Outfielders should make much more of an effort to run to the ball landing location and then try to face more towards home plate for the catch.

So many balls hit, which look like good hits are taken away because the AI times their runs to the ball with perfection (and not to the landing spot where they can set up) and can do any type of over the shoulder catch or basket catch the legends have done. Route running in the outfield. ball tracking, seems to have no meaning. An AI 57 ovr player can perfectly time their catch on the run to a well hit ball just as well as a 93 ovr player.

OP, all you wrote is true. The ground ball rate is silly. I think the AI has turned 1739 double plays against me to my 14 against them.

Also watch how well every AI player plays ricochets of the ball off any stadium structures. If the ball is deflected off anything rest assured the AI will be ready and waiting exactly where it ends up.

The AI is also terrible at bringing in relievers. Totally ignoring matchups.

When stat grinding on rookie and vet I play the Rockies a lot and that taught me that Ramel Tapia has 2.9 40 speed and 15’ high jump ability and simply is the undisputed greatest defensive player in baseball history.

@untchable704_psn said in Pretty hyped about TA on friday:

Wish a new inning was starting so all that precious xp doesn’t go to waste but that would probably make my head explode abyway.

Servers explode too. If we have new TA, new topps now and new 3rd inning all at once we would see nothing but unhandled exception error.

There were 2 outs. Catch ball at first and step on bag. None of this should have happened.

1st baseman must have thought there was 1 out. Even then, step on 1st and throw home. Walking the runner (baez) back made zero sense.

Hitting is just odd. I can put the pci on the same pitch in the same location with the same timing and a guy with 62 power homers and a guy doing the same thing but with 108 power lines out.

The sad truth is there is so much RNG in this game it’s making what you think should happen, not happen.

Basically there are multiple pools of results. If the pci is here and the pitch is this then consult hit pool 46. It then does a dice roll and you are handed a result.
Hit pool 42 might have all lineouts and 1 gapper so if that is what is summoned you have the slimmest chances of getting a hit.
If the game deems your pci location and the pitch type are suitable for hit pool 1 which is 75% homer 15% warning track and 10% shallow fly you have a decent chance of homering.

This explains why bad pci can homer and why perfect/perfect fails.

They need to fine tune the p/p hit pool. It’s currently too negative, also take out all the p/p foul ball results from all pools.

These player evo's always amaze me. Instead of making you want to add the card to your squad these moments make you want to forget the player existed.

Yep and flip it the other way vs. the AI. They have a runner on 1st. Good luck pitching in any way shape or form to influence a ground ball and possible double play.

I have written it here elsewhere but if, since the game came out, the AI has turned 1592 double plays against me I have 23 turned against them.

So here we go try number 3. I fail the lefty grove boss and it’s over?

Is this how it works? It keeps resetting me back to draft after failing that.

Stupid piazza celebrated a pretty shallow fly with a runner on 3rd, he was jumping up and down with excitement as my 62 speed player took his sweet time to get thrown out at the plate.

And back to draft.

Personally, I would rather have to get 1000 hits with Brooks Robinson than play showdown.

@chuck_dizzle29 said in My theory on difficulties in the game:

Showdown, Moments, Conquest and play vs CPU. Do each one in the same difficulty level and they'll play different. Each mode is tuned different because the game parameters are different. You're talking about everything from a single AB to a full 9 inning game.

Exactly.

And across the board, maybe not outside DD in exhibition or franchise but in MtO for sure, the AI defense is juiced!

I have seen insane plays of the year, if not decade, from the AI defense. Running up the wall to rob homeruns, swiss watch precision double plays, top-notch cannon arms to second or third from facing the wall position to picking the ball up, one smooth animation and no look laser to the fielders glove, diving catches in the outfield, split legs at first into the stretch to catch, running the wrong way throws back across perfectly to the 1B, every outfielder can pace the speed appropriately to the ball well hit into the outfield to turn it into an over the shoulder or no look style basket catch.

And then you will hit a sharp grounder to short and they won't get their glove down.

The AI is biploar but the majority of the time they are All-World legends on defense.

If you use him in the moments you may not even want him. I hate the card, it plays awful, slow and can't hit. Looking at the ratings he is one of those cards that plays below the ratings.

A sneaky good card is that Bregman card but have not used him after they lowered his ratings today.

Best part is you can just play the game and earn xp. Play anything anywhere in the game and there is xp afterward.

You get plenty of xp just retrying some tough moments. I spent like 40 minutes trying to clear the Vlad 8 base april moment and all the retries/restarts before I cleared it added up to about 7500xp.

I think I would rather just repeat play a moment than walk over and over again.

Also let me control the runners. So many instances of the guy on 1st trots to 2nd and stops even if he has a 50/60% chance of getting to 3rd. Let me force him into running to 3rd so we aren't standing together on 2nd waiting for me to be tagged out.

And foul homers. Good lord the amount of times everywhere in this game I have ripped a wonderful looking hit, foul and then next hit will be a weak grounder, happens so often in moments.

I firmly believe hitting works like this. You can apply this same result table type rng to everything else in the game.

Basically divide the K box into 9 zones. Then you have different pitches and different timing and pci location.

So let's say a pitch is thrown middle high so
123
456
789
it's thrown in zone 2. You line the PCI up perfectly and have good timing.

Game then goes into RNG and consults the table for Zone 2 Good contact Good timing and there are results -
single left 5%
single right 5%
shallow flyball 20%
lineout 10%
Homerun 10%
Warning Track flyball 30%
foul ball 20%.

You then get one of those results handed to you and that is what your swing generated.

If you want to see this concept in action go into practice mode. Make the pitcher throw you the same pitch in the exact same location and place your PCI there. Now note your results with good timing and good pci. They will be all over the place.

This also explains why a Perfect Perfect can generate a foul ball. It means SDS has placed foul ball in the P/P result table for some bizarre reason.

Using this hit generator "method" they can tweak hit success easily. If solid contact on middle up pitches is below league average they just delete some of the out or foul ball entries and add in more hit entries in that result table.

I sat low with zone and power swung only, to clear this. Also yes restart until you homer 1st at bat does help. On rookie something is broken with exit velocity so you have to power swing to keep from hitting warning track hits.

This happens to me vs the AI all of the GD time.

Starter cruises, tires, reliever comes in and AI homers almost immediately.

I swear it’s coded into the game for some sort of idiotic forced drama.

You are probably talking online but would not surprise me if it happens there too.