What Is Your Experience With CPU Outfielders?

[jada855]

I am wondering what people are experiencing with CPU outfielders on how it was noted that based on ratings depends on how the outfielder will take a specific route to the ball to make a catch. Was this meant for user controlled outfielders and not CPU controlled?

I did a little test I put all of the attributes of the CPU outfielders on the opposite team to 0 speed,reaction and fielding.

I then hit a rocket shot to the outfield and the CPU outfielder still ran to the exact spot and caught the ball.

After the test I am not sure what to think now I love this game but its a bit of a drain that everything I hit toward the outfield gets caught. It was mentioned on the Twitch Stream again for MLB The Show the 16 that this area Lwas again improved.

I am currently playing on All Star Level Difficulty!

[nomo17k]

Re: What Is Your Experience With CPU Outfielders?

It is no longer true that outfielders get to everything. They have been slowed down enough that gappers happen quite often, to the extent that the game right now is fairly triple-happy:



That's my RTTS guy, and I usually am among the leaders in triples.

I think the corner outfielders position themselves toward the foul lines a little too much right now.

[MrOldboy]

Re: What Is Your Experience With CPU Outfielders?

It is no longer true that outfielders get to everything. They have been slowed down enough that gappers happen quite often, to the extent that the game right now is fairly triple-happy:



That's my RTTS guy, and I usually am among the leaders in triples.

I think the corner outfielders position themselves toward the foul lines a little too much right now.

Do you think this is resulting from the outfielder positioning? How many more doubles turning into triples do you think you've noticed this year compared to 15?

What I've noticed is the animations from outfielders having a greater effect now since they changed the baserunning last year. Now that runners can get to third faster you are seeing doubles turn into triples and triples turn into inside the park HRs. It was definitely a problem playing online. You could do everything right, but if the runner was fast you could easily make it home on a hit in the gap.

I've always felt that many of the outfielder pick up and throw animations from the wall have been sort of slow, especially in the gaps. It was never really that much of an issue, only visually, before. In 15 when they changed the baserunning I started to notice it a lot more and noticed a lot more triples and inside the park HRs.

[nomo17k]

Re: What Is Your Experience With CPU Outfielders?

Do you think this is resulting from the outfielder positioning? How many more doubles turning into triples do you think you've noticed this year compared to 15?

What I've noticed is the animations from outfielders having a greater effect now since they changed the baserunning last year. Now that runners can get to third faster you are seeing doubles turn into triples and triples turn into inside the park HRs. It was definitely a problem playing online. You could do everything right, but if the runner was fast you could easily make it home on a hit in the gap.

I've always felt that many of the outfielder pick up and throw animations from the wall have been sort of slow, especially in the gaps. It was never really that much of an issue, only visually, before. In 15 when they changed the baserunning I started to notice it a lot more and noticed a lot more triples and inside the park HRs.

I think all that you mentioned play factors, so it's not like there is one culprit...

Also, in MLB 15, long throws were less accurate (which in and of itself is not too much of an issue, I think; long throws in real-life are often inaccurate) and unfortunately the receiver tended to go into that "lunging" animation all too often, depriving the user of control too long to make the next throw. Knowing this, some online "cheesers" took advantage of it and were very aggressive on base path online. I think making the lunging catch happen less often and/or having another branch point would have helped.... Baserunners were a tad faster in MLB 15, but I don't think that itself was an issue; slow guys were slow anyways.

(But I actually didn't play that many guys who did this to me... I didn't move up high in ranking so I probably didn't face many anything-to-win crowd this year.)


But outfielder positioning I think plays a big factor in how The Show in the past couple years has tended to produce higher 3B/2B ratio compared to real-life MLB numbers. In MLB, those who generates many triples tend to hit them into the gap in either side:



while doubles happen more often with hits down the line.

The Show really lacks those doubles down the line because I think corner fielders hug the foul line a bit much and also the batted ball does not slice enough after the first bounce/contact on the ground; ball rolling away from the fielder would give the batter runner time to extend it to double. However, triples happen plenty, and in The Show, most doubles also are hit to one of the gaps.

That suggests to me that corner outfielders should really play more toward the center to prevent those XBHs.

[jada855]

Re: What Is Your Experience With CPU Outfielders?

Do you think this is resulting from the outfielder positioning? How many more doubles turning into triples do you think you've noticed this year compared to 15?

What I've noticed is the animations from outfielders having a greater effect now since they changed the baserunning last year. Now that runners can get to third faster you are seeing doubles turn into triples and triples turn into inside the park HRs. It was definitely a problem playing online. You could do everything right, but if the runner was fast you could easily make it home on a hit in the gap.

I've always felt that many of the outfielder pick up and throw animations from the wall have been sort of slow, especially in the gaps. It was never really that much of an issue, only visually, before. In 15 when they changed the baserunning I started to notice it a lot more and noticed a lot more triples and inside the park HRs.

Thanks for the reply. I am playing franchise mode offline. Also do you know if there is a career stats screen for franchise players like the one you posted from RTTS?

[Jolly Roger]

Re: What Is Your Experience With CPU Outfielders?

I saw in another thread that some think balls down the line are looking a little more realistic for The Show '16 (at least from what they saw in the streams). If that's true, I hope they move the corner infielders in toward center a bit more, because I find that, on default sliders, there are too many gap doubles in the current and previous versions of The Show. Myself and the CPU often get 2-4 each per game. The average in MLB seems to be about 1.7 per game, per team. I've tried to combat this by reducing solid hits, increasing fielder speed and decreasing baserunner speed, but it would be nice if this could be addressed at default sliders.

[TheWarmWind]

Re: What Is Your Experience With CPU Outfielders?

It's true that CPU outfielders do seem to be just a titch too good at fielding (this has been addressed in the streams though), but it's not nearly as bad as it used to be, even as recently as 14, where if it was POSSIBLE for the outfielder to make the catch, the CPU WOULD catch it 99.9% of the time.

[tessl]

Re: What Is Your Experience With CPU Outfielders?

I use manage mode so they are all cpu outfielders. I think the developers have it very close to perfect. There is an occasional glitch here or there but overall they greatly have improved outfielders over the years.

[MrOldboy]

Re: What Is Your Experience With CPU Outfielders?

Thanks for the reply. I am playing franchise mode offline. Also do you know if there is a career stats screen for franchise players like the one you posted from RTTS?

You meant Nomo, MLB 16 will now which is why a lot of us are very excited for Franchise this year.

I saw in another thread that some think balls down the line are looking a little more realistic for The Show '16 (at least from what they saw in the streams). If that's true, I hope they move the corner infielders in toward center a bit more, because I find that, on default sliders, there are too many gap doubles in the current and previous versions of The Show. Myself and the CPU often get 2-4 each per game. The average in MLB seems to be about 1.7 per game, per team. I've tried to combat this by reducing solid hits, increasing fielder speed and decreasing baserunner speed, but it would be nice if this could be addressed at default sliders.

There have been a few examples that looked improved. We haven't seen any ground balls over the bag yet I think, but there was a line drive into the corner and it got to the wall fairly quickly which maybe indicates that the balls won't die as fast on the grass. They never mentioned this explicitly so I don't know if it really is an area that they actively improved, but tweaking one thing, like outfielder routes, will affect other things like balls getting past outfielders and getting to the wall.

There are two sides to this issue though. Too many gap doubles, but to few down the line doubles. Most ground balls down the line get rounded and cut off by outfielders and unless you have a speedster it's hard to reach second safely. With the devs saying that outfielders will take more realistic routes, or what look like "worse" routes by human standards, there may be an uptick in doubles this year. Can't tell until we get our hands on it, but they mentioned several times that you will see more extra base hits, which made me scratch my head as the game already results in too many in 15.

[jada855]

Re: What Is Your Experience With CPU Outfielders?

It's true that CPU outfielders do seem to be just a titch too good at fielding (this has been addressed in the streams though), but it's not nearly as bad as it used to be, even as recently as 14, where if it was POSSIBLE for the outfielder to make the catch, the CPU WOULD catch it 99.9% of the time.

I agree in 14 it was pretty bad they CPU with magically glide to the ball at the end. I might have to tweak the sliders but I always try to avoid that and leave the sliders at their default values because I feel that is the way the game is intended to be played.

[Armor and Sword]

Re: What Is Your Experience With CPU Outfielders?

15 really improved OF angles and routes to the ball. It was the first real significant improvement I saw in that regard.

You couple that with the ever evolving ball physics and hit variety plus even better and more realistic OF routes for 16. I believe vs the CPU it will be the best yet in regards to hit variety and out comes with CPU controlled OF's (for those of us who play auto field and manual throwing).

I also believe for us DD players ratings will matter even more with user fielding. MLB 15 was the first time I thoroughly enjoyed user fielding in this series history. I do hope the out of reach animation on long throws from the OF are calmed down because as Nomo pointed out it allowed cheesy over aggressive base running to take place online with no consequence's and a far too high success rate of being safe.

[Unlucky 13]

Re: What Is Your Experience With CPU Outfielders?

It's true that CPU outfielders do seem to be just a titch too good at fielding (this has been addressed in the streams though), but it's not nearly as bad as it used to be, even as recently as 14, where if it was POSSIBLE for the outfielder to make the catch, the CPU WOULD catch it 99.9% of the time.

I agree with this, totally. I was so frustrated by this that I started my own thread a ways back. Messing around with sliders didn't do a lot to fix the issues for me. Thankfully, last year's game was a MAJOR step in the right direction. There was a pronounced difference in how great OFers would get to balls vs lousy ones.