Directional Hitting

[kehlis]

Re: Directional Hitting

Took me forever, but I finally found it, post #2:

http://www.operationsports.com/forum...e-hitting.html

Nice post but it doesn't give a differentiation between zone and cursor hitting.

It's a nice post on how a hitter would approach an at bat in real life but not really anything to do with regards to video game approaches to hitting.

[Bobhead]

Re: Directional Hitting

By the way, is it just me, or has the PCI gotten bigger and bigger over the last couple of years? I remember a time where the PCI never covered the entire zone and you actually had to fight to make contact. Now even on Legend I feel like the PCI is ridiculously large. It really takes a bit of the fun out of it when I'm making contact on everything without really moving the PCI

[nomo17k]

Re: Directional Hitting

By the way, is it just me, or has the PCI gotten bigger and bigger over the last couple of years? I remember a time where the PCI never covered the entire zone and you actually had to fight to make contact. Now even on Legend I feel like the PCI is ridiculously large. It really takes a bit of the fun out of it when I'm making contact on everything without really moving the PCI

This is partly a new visual enhancement introduced in PCI for MLB 14; as far as I know, PCI works pretty much the same way as it has, but the size of PCI JUST VISUALLY has been increased to incorporate batter's Power attribute (before, it was just the average of Contact and Vision).

Another reason is that hitting has been indeed made easier since MLB 13... that was the year SCEA focused on making the game more accessible (adding beginner mode, opening up timing window, etc.). It wasn't just timing window that was adjusted.

[Blzer]

Re: Directional Hitting

Nice post but it doesn't give a differentiation between zone and cursor hitting.

It's a nice post on how a hitter would approach an at bat in real life but not really anything to do with regards to video game approaches to hitting.

Cursor would be the little league approach, literally trying to place the bat on the ball. That's how they see how things are, you have to be perfect with it.

Professionals consider very much less than where the ball exactly is, they just need a general location. The rest essentially takes care of itself, because the rest isn't a mental thing with them. Their bodies know how to hit the ball. This is why you'll never see them swing and miss in batting practice. Timing is a different story, of course. Zone hitting mimics this very well.

[kehlis]

Re: Directional Hitting

Cursor would be the little league approach, literally trying to place the bat on the ball. That's how they see how things are, you have to be perfect with it.

Professionals consider very much less than where the ball exactly is, they just need a general location. The rest essentially takes care of itself, because the rest isn't a mental thing with them. Their bodies know how to hit the ball. This is why you'll never see them swing and miss in batting practice. Timing is a different story, of course. Zone hitting mimics this very well.

If that's what you think go's into hitting a baseball then have at it I guess...

[Blzer]

Re: Directional Hitting

I am confused by your statement. I don't have to think about it, that's the point. I gotta know the zone, and I gotta time it.

Influential hitting is, once again, another form of a little league approach. The next coach that tells a kid to step toward the plate to hit an outside pitch is going to get an earful from me. You can't possibly have the time to decide how you're going to change your swing after a fastball is released, that's asinine. The best you can do is hit that thing and time it right.

I forget where we were going with this, anyway. I was merely differentiating cursor versus zone hitting, versus influential hitting as well.

[nomo17k]

Re: Directional Hitting

I did not explain it fully because I assumed most were familiar so sorry for that...I will explain a bit more.

There is no pre-load push or pull....Think of timing today in MLB 14, where you press Square, X or , O to swing, but then lets say that at the same time, if the pitch is inside and you are a right handed batter, you had press the button AND pull left at the same time to swing inside.

As you mentioned timing windows did come into play in MVP as well. If you swung earlier on outside pitch you can still pull it if you had enough power or put the right swing on it. You basically tell the batter where you want to hit the ball and they put the best swing to make it possible. This included swinging under a pitch if you said you wanted a ball in the air or over a pitch if you wanted a ground ball. Timing, location, batter attributes, pitcher attributes, pitch type, etc... determine result...like in real life.

In a nutshell its just Zone hitting, with the PCI hidden, and instead of putting the PCI circle EXACTLY where the ball is going, you "aim" in the general area where you think its going to be (up and in, down and away, down, up , etc..). But the aiming is more for where you want the ball to go and not where you want the bat to go..so unlike Zone when you chose to pull an outside pitch you won't miss simply because the "circle" isn't in the right place you might just roll a pitch over instead. You will still swing in miss again, depending on pitch type, location, attributes, timing, etc...

Which leads me to you discussion about Zone hitting. I believe zone hitting is unnatural. When you play baseball in real life, you do not think "oh that pitch is down and away, let me swing slightly above the ball to hit the ball the other way on the ground." You simply swing and your muscle memory/hand eye coordination allows you to make contact in that same manner without thinking of ALL that in the sub-second time window.

Batting is a reactionary thing, Zone hitting makes it almost a guessing game and it slows down the game too much. It also makes it so batting is precise, and while it 100% is in scientific terms, its not how it plays out on the field. Its amazing how an athletes body doesn't need to process "its a ball low and away, let me swing above the ball a little and swing late to hit the ball the other way" Thats basically what you are doing when you are playing a video game as MLB players, its not natural and its too hard. When I am batting as Mike Trout it should not be hard to hit, his attributes should take over and my strategical decisions coupled with the law averages (baseball in a nutshell) should determine if he is successful, and not the 3 second long decision I had to make every pitch, when I only had 0.5 seconds to come to that decision...an athlete simply sees the balls and through muscle memory and hand-eye coordination can make that decision in sub-seconds and influence the swing with out thinking he is being precise, yet achieving it.

Timing Only in MLB The Show is closest to "real" hitting I believe, but it does lack the ability to influence (I know you can pre-load decision today to influence a pitch, again this is also semi-unnatural) and I think MVP's method was the best. If Directional Hitting is this, I am sure SCEA would have improved the 10 yr old method and make the physics, logic, and implementation of it a little smarter.

Thank you very much for clarifying the MVP's system on my request. That clarifies quite a bit.

You provide reasons why you think Zone is unnatural, but they are actually the same reasons why I feel Zone can be a very natural mechanism... below is not really directed to the quoted post but just my general opinion.



I think people are kind of mistaken when they treat PCI as something that you *must* move precisely to a location as a pitch comes to the plate.

In my thinking that is exactly what "cursor hitting" aspires to be (and the reason why baseball games using such a cursor based system are mostly arcade in nature), but PCI, though it's fairly similar in function, is a concept that's quite a bit different.

Basically what comes down to is very well illustrated in Blzer's post (which he linked earlier), that PCI doesn't exactly represent the contact area of bat, but it's more a reflection of likelihood of making quality contact based on where a batter looks for a pitch. As correctly pointed out, hitting (as well as a wide range of other athletic activities) is a result of neuromuscle memory doing its own thing after repetitive training, and it doesn't take a very conscious effort when done successfully.

In turn, a cursor-based system isn't physically realistic. You could of course argue that one can be trained to place a cursor exactly where pitch comes through neuromuscle memory, but it's much harder and require quite a bit more effort to move a tiny cursor by a small amount on screen to hit the right spot... that fairly close enough an activity as a shooting game, but, in my view, it's very unnatural as a baseball hitting mechanism because hitting a baseball is very different activity than aiming a target in shooting.

Since the pitch speed in The Show is quite fast (or at least can be brought up to real-life pitch speed by slider), it's not well suited for cursor-based system. Coupled with giving the PCI a very lenient contact (as well as foul) area, however, it ends up replicating the act of hitting baseball very well, in my opinion.

[aguero90]

Re: Directional Hitting

I agree. Hitting in baseball is not a thinking game, its a fast twitch game. Baseball is the one sport that really doesn't lie, you can hit 90 plus fastballs or you can't, you can throw hard or you can't. My brother told me once tht I wouldn't believe the difference between 86mph and 90mph. He played baseball his whole life, and did nothing but kill 80s fastballs, but as soon as someone reached 90 and above, it became 10 times harder. He said that you can't realize the difference until your in the box and taking your swings. He would have made the majors if only he took the path given to him, but that's a story for another day. Lets just say my biggest regret in my life was not paying more attention to what was going on. I was only 12 years old, when he got a full ride to columbia University to play ball, and didn't take it! So my regret as the huge baseball fan I am, was not saying to him, "are you stupid, go!!"

[El_MaYiMbE]

Re: Directional Hitting

Thank you very much for clarifying the MVP's system on my request. That clarifies quite a bit.

You provide reasons why you think Zone is unnatural, but they are actually the same reasons why I feel Zone can be a very natural mechanism... below is not really directed to the quoted post but just my general opinion.



I think people are kind of mistaken when they treat PCI as something that you *must* move precisely to a location as a pitch comes to the plate.

In my thinking that is exactly what "cursor hitting" aspires to be (and the reason why baseball games using such a cursor based system are mostly arcade in nature), but PCI, though it's fairly similar in function, is a concept that's quite a bit different.

Basically what comes down to is very well illustrated in Blzer's post (which he linked earlier), that PCI doesn't exactly represent the contact area of bat, but it's more a reflection of likelihood of making quality contact based on where a batter looks for a pitch. As correctly pointed out, hitting (as well as a wide range of other athletic activities) is a result of neuromuscle memory doing its own thing after repetitive training, and it doesn't take a very conscious effort when done successfully.

In turn, a cursor-based system isn't physically realistic. You could of course argue that one can be trained to place a cursor exactly where pitch comes through neuromuscle memory, but it's much harder and require quite a bit more effort to move a tiny cursor by a small amount on screen to hit the right spot... that fairly close enough an activity as a shooting game, but, in my view, it's very unnatural as a baseball hitting mechanism because hitting a baseball is very different activity than aiming a target in shooting.

Since the pitch speed in The Show is quite fast (or at least can be brought up to real-life pitch speed by slider), it's not well suited for cursor-based system. Coupled with giving the PCI a very lenient contact (as well as foul) area, however, it ends up replicating the act of hitting baseball very well, in my opinion.

I see what you are saying, and maybe I have been mistaken PCI/Zone with cursor hitting, and as a result have been misusing the feature.

However, I still do feel there are too many weak hit balls with Zone Hitting, too many popups, groundouts, not enough balls hit on the screws etc...

But maybe its not a matter of zone vs directional, or player skill vs game character skill, but rather the physics and logic of how the ball jumps off the bat in all scenarios needs to be adjusted some how. Making it so no matter which you use, a well timed pitch with proper plat coverage, yields more life like results.

[Bobhead]

Re: Directional Hitting

I see what you are saying, and maybe I have been mistaken PCI/Zone with cursor hitting, and as a result have been misusing the feature.

However, I still do feel there are too many weak hit balls with Zone Hitting, too many popups, groundouts, not enough balls hit on the screws etc...

But maybe its not a matter of zone vs directional, or player skill vs game character skill, but rather the physics and logic of how the ball jumps off the bat in all scenarios needs to be adjusted some how. Making it so no matter which you use, a well timed pitch with proper plat coverage, yields more life like results.

Completely agree.

This is partly a new visual enhancement introduced in PCI for MLB 14; as far as I know, PCI works pretty much the same way as it has, but the size of PCI JUST VISUALLY has been increased to incorporate batter's Power attribute (before, it was just the average of Contact and Vision).

Another reason is that hitting has been indeed made easier since MLB 13... that was the year SCEA focused on making the game more accessible (adding beginner mode, opening up timing window, etc.). It wasn't just timing window that was adjusted.

This is something I hope is reversed on higher difficulties in future years. I understand the need to make the game more accessible/easier for casual gamers, but I don't understand why any change needed to be applied to every difficulty level. The hardest difficulty level for batting is now barely a challenge, and the absurd amount of plate coverage takes away from the very aspects that make Zone hitting fun and competitive. If I'm making contact on literally every pitch then it really doesn't feel like I'm in control.

It's not too big of a deal because it's addressable with sliders, but the idea that I have to play on the highest difficulty level AND lower sliders just to restrict my own coverage to realistic proportions seems pretty silly to me.

Especially since raising pitch speed is not an option due to the "PCI lock"

[nomo17k]

Re: Directional Hitting

...

This is something I hope is reversed on higher difficulties in future years. I understand the need to make the game more accessible/easier for casual gamers, but I don't understand why any change needed to be applied to every difficulty level. The hardest difficulty level for batting is now barely a challenge, and the absurd amount of plate coverage takes away from the very aspects that make Zone hitting fun and competitive. If I'm making contact on literally every pitch then it really doesn't feel like I'm in control.

...

I tend to agree with this too... Legend is still pretty challenging if you increase the pitch speed high enough, but I've noticed quite a few more people play at the level these days (including myself). I believe there should always be a difficulty level where 99% of gamers feel a good deal of challenge playing at the highest level.

I still play The Show almost every day, not casually but actually trying to improve my skills (I'm using this game to train my hitting skills and be ready to make it to MLB by the age of 60), and therefore I'd be lying if I say that I'm not well above average in terms of my skill level at this point. ... but given that I'm still far behind awesome players like mr9inchesbpel, I think if I can play on Legend comfortably and have fun, I think there may be quite a few people for whom the game might have become a bit easy.

[Ghost Of The Year]

Re: Directional Hitting

... but given that I'm still far behind awesome players like mr9inchesbpel ...

lol
He was so awesome OS didn't just retire his number, they retired him .

[El_MaYiMbE]

Re: Directional Hitting

Now that directional hitting has been explained, and confirmed to work mostly as I hoped it would...what'ya guys think?

[Blzer]

Re: Directional Hitting

I'll more than likely stick to zone, because I need my left thumb to do something in the way toward the pitch. I personally wish the right stick was still doing its thing before with directional hitting, but ah well it's okay.

I think I stated my directional hitting qualm incorrectly earlier. The problem wasn't just that low pitches weren't ever rewarded with home runs, the other problem was that little guys never would hit home runs and big guys would too often. I don't think this game is in the "aim up for home run" kind of mindset, but that's how I always feel it is with these systems.

I'd rather play zone, even though it's not true zone.

[Cowboy008]

Re: Directional Hitting

I usually use zone but I will try out directional hitting to see how it is.