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Old 03-24-2021, 07:15 PM   #4
bcruise
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Re: Franchise Players: A Question I have always been curious about.

There are a few ways to balance gameplay with realism. One is to go heavy on the random factor so that user skill cannot lead to overpowering the CPU (or being much worse than it, for that matter). Slider sets that feature classic pitching, directional hitting and other rating-based approaches aim for this - because no matter how good you are at the game it's going to be very hard to put out results that are significantly better or worse than the CPU.

The one that I prefer, personally, is to balance the game's difficulty to the point where even the heavily user-input based controls, like Zone hitting, can lead to results that reflect player ratings. What I mean is, the harder I make the game, the more skill I need as a user to make those results realistic. It makes me feel like I'm more "in the game". And, if you find the right balance of difficulty, the differences between individual players will still show up naturally.

There's no one size fits all to this, especially with the approach I take - since we all have different strengths and weakness at the game one person's exact settings are likely not going to work for another. For example, I can't really use any of the user-input based throwing controls because they're all too easy for me to use without making errors (and have been since they de-coupled difficulty level from those interfaces). So I have to use the "Button" throwing - the most ratings-driven option there is - to produce a realistic number of errors. Others might be able to use Button Accuracy or analog and still make errors, but that approach doesn't work for me.

Last edited by bcruise; 03-24-2021 at 07:17 PM. Reason: didn't need to quote niner - thought they were the OP
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