Strange behaviour - difficulty level

[half-fast]

Hello all, I'm looking for some help from some experienced MLB players. I'm an occasional Online vs., exhibition mode or home derby player, turned franchise player. Ive tuned the settings to the way I think I like them. I use analog batting, and recently switched from analog batting to zone + analog batting.

With the announcement that my MLB 14 franchise would be playable in 15, I started a new franchise, and wanted to be a not-so-great team, so I chose the Twins(no offence to any Twins fans, lol). Somewhere to start building.

I previously started a franchise a week before as the Pirates and was getting shelled. Then I decided I would start over not having known much about the game's mechanics, as the Twins.

I started game one of the season which is against the CWS. I was getting hammered ... hard. Then I got an unknown error and the game kicked me to the dashboard. I started again, without changing any settings, and this time it seemed I dominated them. Maybe not so hard in the score, but doubled their runs, pitching seemed easy and so did batting. There was a moment in the game where I thought maybe there was some difficulty level anomaly because I cracked one out to centre-field and out of the 20 or so games Id played against the computer, I'd never seen it act with so much incompetence. The centre-fielder faced away from the ball and just stood there about 6/7 feet from where the ball landed, it ricocheted off the wall and then he picked it up and threw it. I got a triple out of that. The replay looked like he forgot he was playing.

Was this just a random occurrence, or is this how the game behaves at times?

Thanks everyone.

[HypoLuxa13]

Re: Strange behaviour - difficulty level

A couple thoughts - the center fielder standing there: this is the AI knowing exactly where the ball is going to deflect to off the wall. They will stand in the exact perfect spot if it is over their head and is going to hit the wall. Not a bug, just the way it is programmed. I think this will be tuned this year, as they have said the AI logic for MLB 15 has been tweaked so the CPU fielders don't approach the ball perfectly every time.

As far as the difficulty, I think I have had similar situations. I've always just discounted it to a combination of user error( I was half-assing it and not really trying), and just general randomness of baseball. The same way in real life a team can score 10 runs on 15 hits one day, then get shut out the next day against some back of the rotation pitcher. Or the same way, in 2014, Jake Arrieta took a no-hitter into the 7th inning in back to back games, then a couple starts later, got rocked and gave up something like 9 runs in 4 innings or something like that. Sometimes you have a bad day, sometimes you have a really good day.

[half-fast]

Re: Strange behaviour - difficulty level

Ya, the ball bounced off the ground first - he could have caught it, which was the weird thing. Oh well, thanks for your response, HypoLuxa13.