Differences in Difficulty setting for MLB 26?

[HypoLuxa13]

So I'm curious what everyone is thinking with the difficulty of this year's game. I'm struggling. Not from the game being too hard, but from it being too easy.

For a long time I always played on Hall of Fame difficulty for hitting. It fit me perfectly. Difficult enough but playing with top hitters I was still able to rake at real to life levels. Over the past few years, as I've gotten older and my eyesight and hand eye coordination aren't what they used to be, I've used dynamic difficulty to go down to All Star+. And then with MLB 25 I admitted defeat and went down to All-Star. It has only been a few days, and I've mostly been playing RttS while waiting for updated rosters before I start a Franchise, but I've moved difficulty up to Legend and still far exceeding my RttS player's ratings abilities.

I simmed much of the minor leagues and got called up as a mid-70's overall. I put more training tokens into fielding, arm, and speed than hitting attributes. So my contact is 65, power is 60, vision and discipline also in mid 60's. So around MLB average based on what Sony San Diego Studio have said they use for ratings. But at the end of my first season in around 65 games as a rookie, I hit .345, 12 home runs, 46 RBI, 21 doubles, walk to strike out ratio right at 1:1 approximately. All in under 300 plate appearances. I moved up from Hall of Fame to Legend difficulty with about 12 games left in the season and hit 3 more home runs and hit .333.

Yes, I can try GOAT difficulty, and maybe my sample size is too small at only 65 games. Maybe over the course of a full season my numbers would come back down to earth a little. But I'm concerned I'm going to have to do a bunch of slider adjustments to get a more realistic experience. That's fine, I guess. As long as I'm enjoying the game, slider settings will be what they need to be. But I'm just curious what others are experiencing so far after a few days with the game.

👍

[Unlucky 13]

I'll let you know my impressions when I get the game tomorrow. For the past few versions of the game, I found that for me, playing on Veteran+ for hitting and Allstar for pitching, with sliders tuned somewhat in my favor, gave me a game that felt fair and balanced. Any time I would bump up from Allstar to Allstar+, I'd suddenly start giving up 20-30 runs a game. Whatever clicks in that notch in the belt, it goes against how I'm able to handle things.

I play exclusively single player, offline franchise mode, so the others are all foreign to me.

[bronxbombers21325]

Hitting feels identical to last years game IMO. Pitching and fielding feels different the more you play because of the handedness ratings for pitchers and directional fielding ratings. I wouldn't say the game is any easier or harder than last year in the grand scheme of things though.

[Unlucky 13]

Does it seem like the directional fielding ratings have much of an impact in creating holes in the defense, if one player is slow and/or poor to react, compared to better ones? In the last few versions of the game, I really felt that low quality/slow fielders on the CPU were much too adept at getting to line drives in the hole and hard hit fly balls that they had to run and make adjustments to. Its certainly good and expected that high quality fielders should make those plays, but there should also be a real penalty for playing a lousy fielder as well.

[bronxbombers21325]

If a player has a poor rating for one direction it is definitely noticeable. But it’s not unrealistic.

[bkrich83]

I’m playing Legend/Legend default right now and I’m not noticing any significant change in difficulty either way.

[Ghost Of The Year]

So I'm curious what everyone is thinking with the difficulty of this year's game. I'm struggling. Not from the game being too hard, but from it being too easy.

For a long time I always played on Hall of Fame difficulty for hitting. It fit me perfectly. Difficult enough but playing with top hitters I was still able to rake at real to life levels. Over the past few years, as I've gotten older and my eyesight and hand eye coordination aren't what they used to be, I've used dynamic difficulty to go down to All Star+. And then with MLB 25 I admitted defeat and went down to All-Star. It has only been a few days, and I've mostly been playing RttS while waiting for updated rosters before I start a Franchise, but I've moved difficulty up to Legend and still far exceeding my RttS player's ratings abilities.

I simmed much of the minor leagues and got called up as a mid-70's overall. I put more training tokens into fielding, arm, and speed than hitting attributes. So my contact is 65, power is 60, vision and discipline also in mid 60's. So around MLB average based on what Sony San Diego Studio have said they use for ratings. But at the end of my first season in around 65 games as a rookie, I hit .345, 12 home runs, 46 RBI, 21 doubles, walk to strike out ratio right at 1:1 approximately. All in under 300 plate appearances. I moved up from Hall of Fame to Legend difficulty with about 12 games left in the season and hit 3 more home runs and hit .333.

Yes, I can try GOAT difficulty, and maybe my sample size is too small at only 65 games. Maybe over the course of a full season my numbers would come back down to earth a little. But I'm concerned I'm going to have to do a bunch of slider adjustments to get a more realistic experience. That's fine, I guess. As long as I'm enjoying the game, slider settings will be what they need to be. But I'm just curious what others are experiencing so far after a few days with the game.

👍

This is just a theory but I wondered if batting numbers will rise since now you will be getting some PA's where the pitchers newly added splits are so heavily favored in the batters favor. I know you might think its a wash because some pitchers splits will heavily favor the batter but as they already had plenty of great pitchers in previous years with high H/9 and K/9 numbers, now those amount of pitchers will be reduced significantly, at least on one half of their splits. Think of it as a ''market correction'' loing overdue.
Like twenty years overdue.