No Run Support in My Player

[Chasden]

I saw a couple threads on other forums about this, but no mention of it here surprisingly.

Is anyone else noticing a total lack of run support as a pitcher in My Player?

So far in 9 starts (not counting the staged opening game), my team has scored the following number of runs (in the entire game, not necessarily during the innings where i was pitching):
1, 1, 2, 1, 5, 2, 2, 1, 2
Blue numbers are wins (surprisingly!), and red are losses. Black are no-decisions.

In the 9 games that i played, the team has scored 17 runs, or 1.89 runs per game (keep in mind i'm including that one game where they "went crazy" for 5 runs). Removing the outlier results in 12 runs in 8 games, or 1.50 runs per game.

In the 23 games that i have not played in, the team has scored 67 runs, or 2.91 runs per game.
If you include the full season stats (scorelines from games that took place before the My Player career starts), the team has scored 269 runs in 90 games, or 2.99 runs per game.

1 run difference might not seem like much, but when you're calculating an average, 1 run is huge. It almost seems like the game is programmed to produce offense differently when you happen to be on the mound.

I wish i had the actual box scores of these games, as i'm pretty sure my team has never scored in the first 6 innings while i'm on the mound.

Fake Difficulty and Rubberband AI shouldn't be an issue in video games anymore. Am i just unlucky, or is this a case of lazy programming?

[peigone]

Re: No Run Support in My Player

Fake Difficulty and Rubberband AI shouldn't be an issue in video games anymore.

Pretty much every sports game these days has some variation of that. It's the big thing now. Developers call is "momentum advantage" programming and the like. It's supposed to imitate the ups and downs of individual and team performance or something. Every EA game has it (FIFA is particularly bad), as well as some others I could name.

[Chasden]

Re: No Run Support in My Player

So the reason my team never scores runs is because they're sharing the momentum with the other team's offense, who also aren't scoring runs?

Are you saying that, if i want my team to score, i have to start giving up some runs for the opponent?

P.S.: Sorry to come off as a dick, but there were 13 other sentences in my post, and you chose the one i least wanted to discuss

[peigone]

Re: No Run Support in My Player

So the reason my team never scores runs is because they're sharing the momentum with the other team's offense, who also aren't scoring runs?

Well, if you're having trouble with the CPU not scoring runs, that's easy: just ramp up their Contact and Power sliders to 100 and watch them go. Getting your team to score... now, that's a bit more complicated given you're not hitting for everyone I assume. But maxing out your team's hitting sliders as well should provide some kind of boost to those run-producing numbers.

If you're simming games you don't pitch in, then there's a good chance you're going to get different results than if you play them. That's a problem with a lot of sports games -- the sim engine is programmed differently than the gameplay engine. You also may be right that the game programming is artificially fixed to specifically play differently when you pitch in games, in order to keep those games tense and exciting or something. But again, until you test things like maxing out the CPU/User hitting sliders to see if any of that changes game results, then you're only left to speculate.

Anyway, regarding your quoted comment above, there could well be some kind of rubberband AI going on, sure. It was commonplace in games like Tiger Woods for the console up until a year ago. And there are many people who complain about that very issue when it comes to other sports games as well, games that have been recently released. So again, saying it shouldn't be in games, doesn't mean it isn't commonplace. That's what I was saying with my first post.

[p00p1]

Re: No Run Support in My Player

What team are you using. Do they score runs for the other starters?

[Chasden]

Re: No Run Support in My Player

I calculated the average runs per game in the first post. They score more than a full run per game for the other starters on average.

Since my first post, I've played 4 more games. Run totals:

0 (no decision)
0 (no decision)
2 (no decision)
4 (no decision; all 4 runs came in the 14th inning...i was gone in the 8th)

That 3rd game marks the first time my team has ever scored a run while i was still pitching in the game. Unfortinately, i also gave up a run, so i ended up with the no decision.