MLB The Show 20 Patch 1.04 Available Now - Patch Notes and Discussion

[Christian9]

Re: MLB The Show 20 Patch 1.04 Arrives Later This Morning - Patch Notes Here

Really appreciate you taking the time to break this down, and the logic behind it all. Sometimes the obvious is hard to see.

[Brian SCEA]

Re: MLB The Show 20 Patch 1.04 Arrives Later This Morning - Patch Notes Here

Also, Brian, are you able to elaborate on which slider solution might help minimize this without other deleterious effects? I'm convinced an increase to CPU Pitch Control is a viable option (rather than decreasing strike frequency as that seems to alter how the AI pitches to the user). However, I'd love your take if you're able to provide one.

Pitch control is probably the slider you want.

I'm interested in what is the right balance for pitching, but without all the facts I can't say what's right. Imagine I knew for sure that pitching should be more accurate - should we even change that still? A patch like that would mean two things a) "I lost my game because it's easy to pitch and they nerfed hitting again". I don't mind that, people are always entitled to complain. And b) "The patch made me hit into a double play with Mike Trout. The patch made my squared up hit into an out" - which the patch could not possibly have done but is also impossible to deny (any change to pitch location, even random, will change your hit result through the butterfly effect).

So as a rule, I focus on things that are necessary to fix specific problems. And I think it's important not to change the balance between hitting and pitching unless it's going to preempt a problem later. It helps that offense is high and still is, but that's not the main reason for the difficulty change.

[jeffy777]

Re: MLB The Show 20 Patch 1.04 Arrives Later This Morning - Patch Notes Here

I commend those that actually stick to their word about waiting to buy the game or keep playing the previous year because no matter the sports title, we are game testers for all the bugs and glitches and so forth and it shouldn’t be like that. It’s clear these game come out to soon and don’t have enough development time.

This is how the game industry as a whole has worked for well over a decade now. Not sure why you are acting as though this is some sort of new phenomenon. If you wanted to complain about this trend, you should’ve done it 15 years ago because it’s not going to change now. I’m just thankful we actually have a development team that cares about patching their game in a timely manner...and beyond that, the game was quite solid out of the box this year, so it’s not like there were any huge, game-breaking bugs or server issues, so kudos to SDS for doing an incredible job this year in that department, and the game as a whole is fantastic, imo.

[countryboy]

Re: MLB The Show 20 Patch 1.04 Arrives Later This Morning - Patch Notes Here

I gather user stats twice a year for detailed analysis on topics like this. I hate to give strategy advice, so let me present some hard facts instead. Compared to MLB, users in our game are choosing to throw too many strikes to power hitters. It's fine to throw strikes to most of the lineup, but in MLB pitchers pitch differently when a power guy walks up. Most of our users don't do that.

Maybe there's something else wrong with the game. Whatever that might be, this blows that away. I can go into the detailed numbers on why this has to be for good pitching strategy, but there are hundreds of articles on this. So I'll speak very generally for illustration.

Most of the time in both MLB and the game, a hanging pitch is not even a hit. The batter doesn't swing, or misses, or fouls, or hits it for a normal out even if solid. The difference is with a power hitter, you are risking a HR versus an out - compared to a regular hitter being more often a 1B or 2B versus an out. For simplicity that's a gap of 4 bases versus a gap of 1.5 bases. The risk reward ratio is totally different.

So you walk power hitters a lot when you 'dont have to'. You would think that contact hitters are better at taking balls than power hitters - and they are. But who gets the most walks? Check the leaderboards. On a good year Gallo will get 70+ walks. Ichiro could hope for 50. This is not because Gallo is more careful about what he swings at - but how pitchers pitch around him.

Thank you for the explanation Brian, greatly appreciated.

I re-read my post and failed to mention that I was referring to the CPU leaving to many hittable pitches over the plate. As a user, I understand that my hangers/meatballs are a result of my own doing, meaning I made a mistake in user input thus resulting in the outcome.

I don't know if this changes anything in regards to the response, but wanted to ensure that the question I was asking was complete and I apologize for omitting "CPU" from my original post.

Again, appreciate you taking the time to provide us with this feedback.

[LowerWolf]

Re: MLB The Show 20 Patch 1.04 Arrives Later This Morning - Patch Notes Here

I don't have anything to add at this time, but want to say thanks to Brian for answering some of the questions and providing feedback. It's definitely appreciated.

[SonnyWest]

Re: MLB The Show 20 Patch 1.04 Arrives Later This Morning - Patch Notes Here

You would not want your plumber working on your electricity. So whoever works on the game's hitting is only looking at the hitting. Speaking only for myself, I looked at other parts of the game, I would probably break it. I barely understand it.



There are wider reasons for the hitting change, but they are related to the exit velo this year compared to last year. I don't know if any stream has mentioned it, but based on last year's game we wanted to make that sure as you ranked up in difficulty you still got hard hits - it will just be harder to make contact and put the ball into play. This patch has to happen sooner or later because it gets exposed more as you approach WS and build up your teams.



As the previous notes pointed out, Perfect-Perfect hasn't changed nor Squared Up. Anyone can hit a 450 HR on Legend DD, it just won't be easy. And as the previous post mentioned, it's a 1/4 difficulty change and difficulty doesn't affect the hit types but how often you get them. But I understand the patch just came out so people are going to judge based on the wording rather than what the patch does.



Simply put: Count the batting average on Perfect-Perfect - it's going to be unchanged in the long run.

LOL this was amazing LOL

Brian, any ETA on the roster fix for the Options error?


Sent from my iPhone using Operation Sports

[mrsaito]

Re: MLB The Show 20: Patch 1.04 Notes and Discussion

One note on the difficulty change. The difference is 1/4 the gap between Veteran and Allstar (or 1/2 the difference between Veteran+ and Allstar in Dynamic). Another way of saying it is, every time you change difficulty in DD (through matchmaking, etc..), you blow way past this level of change by a factor of 4x (going from Veteran to Allstar is the same as applying the patch 4 times).

Between difficulty settings, the biggest result is you get more swing and misses and fouls on your worst swings. The swing feedback meaning doesn't really change (Perfect-Perfect, Squared Up, Good, Okay, etc..). Difficulty does not change the hit types - what changes is how often you earn them.

On hit type feedback, the strategy guide quotes the user stats from Beta. This is from averaging tens of thousands of users:
Batting average on Perfect Contact is around .850.

What this means is that 5 out of 6 P-P are going to end up hits on average. It's quite normal for one person to get 10 hits in a row and another person to go 2 for 5 - both people are playing the same game. To illustrate, I rolled random numbers 1 to 6, 5 times for each user. Imagine that 6 = an out on perfect-perfect:
14155
62422
23624
13266
42555
24334

User 1 went 3 for 5, and user 5 went 2 for 5. Users 2, 3, 4, 6 all went perfect 5 for 5.

Same thing goes for getting HRs with perfect-perfect. This is influenced by how you swing (flyballs or groundballs) and the batter's attribute (a pitcher is not going to HR as often), but otherwise the same idea applies. About 30% of perfect-perfect are HRs but you will get streaks naturally.

Last I checked, Squared Up was around 60-65% hits depending on type and attribute again. You are going to get streaks both ways.

I'm sorry but the only way this data makes sense to me is if '5' were an out rather than '6'. Am I missing something?

[JoshC1977]

Re: MLB The Show 20 Patch 1.04 Arrives Later This Morning - Patch Notes Here

Pitch control is probably the slider you want.

I'm interested in what is the right balance for pitching, but without all the facts I can't say what's right. Imagine I knew for sure that pitching should be more accurate - should we even change that still? A patch like that would mean two things a) "I lost my game because it's easy to pitch and they nerfed hitting again". I don't mind that, people are always entitled to complain. And b) "The patch made me hit into a double play with Mike Trout. The patch made my squared up hit into an out" - which the patch could not possibly have done but is also impossible to deny (any change to pitch location, even random, will change your hit result through the butterfly effect).

So as a rule, I focus on things that are necessary to fix specific problems. And I think it's important not to change the balance between hitting and pitching unless it's going to preempt a problem later. It helps that offense is high and still is, but that's not the main reason for the difficulty change.

Oh...and believe me, I wouldn't want you to upset that balance via a patch....especially so early on.

I'm a total offline guy using classic/directional. So, I have the ability to tailor things, as needed, to my taste. A patch impacts things for everyone (including many who play online). In general, ya'll did a tremendous job balancing things.

My question was more...IF an offline user were to desire a greater tendency for CPU pitchers to "nibble" (without increasing the base difficulty), is there a "best" approach (via slider adjustments) in your opinion in which this could be accomplished without overly impacting other aspects of the game?

No problem if you are unable to answer this, but I thought it would help a lot of folks here who play offline to adjust things to their taste.

[Brian SCEA]

Re: MLB The Show 20 Patch 1.04 Arrives Later This Morning - Patch Notes Here

Thank you for the explanation Brian, greatly appreciated.

I re-read my post and failed to mention that I was referring to the CPU leaving to many hittable pitches over the plate. As a user, I understand that my hangers/meatballs are a result of my own doing, meaning I made a mistake in user input thus resulting in the outcome.

I don't know if this changes anything in regards to the response, but wanted to ensure that the question I was asking was complete and I apologize for omitting "CPU" from my original post.

Again, appreciate you taking the time to provide us with this feedback.

The CPU isn't trying to hang pitches, but they miss. When I looked at this, the CPU location is pretty continuous. What I mean by that is for example:

https://library.fangraphs.com/misc/heatmaps/

Occasionally Rivera is trying to throw down the middle, but more often he's working one side and it happens to miss and land there. However, down the middle is no more frequent than the sides. I've looked at different settings and modes and the CPU appears the same. But I can't speak to your individual experience.

You can use the pitch control slider to adjust this. If you're getting a lot of success against these pitches, it's also going to be in part to your skill - either difficulty setting or how well you react against pitches down the middle. A lot of people actually struggle on a pitch down the middle because they're expecting the worse, but your 'optimistic' approach (assuming you're successful) is better.

[Brian SCEA]

Re: MLB The Show 20 Patch 1.04 Arrives Later This Morning - Patch Notes Here

My question was more...IF an offline user were to desire a greater tendency for CPU pitchers to "nibble" (without increasing the base difficulty), is there a "best" approach (via slider adjustments) in your opinion in which this could be accomplished without overly impacting other aspects of the game?

You want to use the sliders in that case, but as far as what you change this differs from person to person so you would know better than me. Allstar is designed for the average person to play very similar to MLB - but almost nobody is average.

[JoshC1977]

Re: MLB The Show 20 Patch 1.04 Arrives Later This Morning - Patch Notes Here

The CPU isn't trying to hang pitches, but they miss. When I looked at this, the CPU location is pretty continuous. What I mean by that is for example:

https://library.fangraphs.com/misc/heatmaps/

Occasionally Rivera is trying to throw down the middle, but more often he's working one side and it happens to miss and land there. However, down the middle is no more frequent than the sides. I've looked at different settings and modes and the CPU appears the same. But I can't speak to your individual experience.

You can use the pitch control slider to adjust this. If you're getting a lot of success against these pitches, it's also going to be in part to your skill - either difficulty setting or how well you react against pitches down the middle. A lot of people actually struggle on a pitch down the middle because they're expecting the worse, but your 'optimistic' approach (assuming you're successful) is better.

Thanks for this Brian....that answered my last question as well!

You're awesome for hanging around and helping us all out!

[countryboy]

Re: MLB The Show 20 Patch 1.04 Arrives Later This Morning - Patch Notes Here

The CPU isn't trying to hang pitches, but they miss. When I looked at this, the CPU location is pretty continuous. What I mean by that is for example:

https://library.fangraphs.com/misc/heatmaps/

Occasionally Rivera is trying to throw down the middle, but more often he's working one side and it happens to miss and land there. However, down the middle is no more frequent than the sides. I've looked at different settings and modes and the CPU appears the same. But I can't speak to your individual experience.

You can use the pitch control slider to adjust this. If you're getting a lot of success against these pitches, it's also going to be in part to your skill - either difficulty setting or how well you react against pitches down the middle. A lot of people actually struggle on a pitch down the middle because they're expecting the worse, but your 'optimistic' approach (assuming you're successful) is better.

Thank you so much Brian!

I appreciate the info on which slider to adjust should I feel the need to make an adjustment.

And I agree with Josh, its awesome you are hanging out with us and answering questions and providing feedback on our concerns.

Man how I've missed these interactions.

[Brian SCEA]

Re: MLB The Show 20: Patch 1.04 Notes and Discussion

I'm sorry but the only way this data makes sense to me is if '5' were an out rather than '6'. Am I missing something?

Yes I've edited it for correction. If you roll lots of d6 dice, it's very rare for them to be evenly distributed. Some users will always get 'too many hits on perfect-perfect' and others will get 'too few'. And since you can't go higher than 5 for 5 but can go much lower (3 for 5, 2 for 5, 1 for 5, 0 for 5), the lower end sticks out more - not to mention the user does have something at stake here when interpreting it.

[mrsaito]

Re: MLB The Show 20: Patch 1.04 Notes and Discussion

Thanks for the update and your participation in our community.

[XRumerTest]

Hello. And Bye.