[tc020791]

This is something I’ve always felt was there in some sports games. It’s hard to tell though without a serious sample size, especially in something like MLBTS. With that being said I definitely don’t have a big enough sample size but what I’m seeing doesn’t feel like a coincidence. Not to mention, in years past, this exact approach to the sliders worked well. I know a few years back JoshC went with default sliders but USER Pitch Control at 6 because he said it helped the CPU hunt pitches more and be more aggressive. So this has definitely been a thing in the past.

First want preface this by saying I’m playing on HOF Hitting and Legend Pitching. There’s been two major areas in this years game which has me convinced that there is balancing going on under the hood when you change sliders. The first one is errors. On default, I just wasn’t getting enough errors, so I started tweaking the error sliders. Here’s the thing though, with infield and outfield errors at 6, I wasn’t seeing more errors on the scorecard, I was just seeing bad defense. So I settled on just cranking up the infield throwing errors to 9. What I saw over about a 50 game sample size, for just my team, was under 10 throwing errors and no other errors period. So I went back to the drawing board, put all errors back to 5, with one caveat. I turned outfield throwing errors down to 2.I was just seeing way too many off line throws from the outfield, almost never saw an outfield assist. Then out of nowhere I start getting errors I’ve never seen before. Fielding errors, throwing errors, drops on transfers, drops at first base. Seeing all these things I never saw in 50 games, in just a handful of games with outfield throwing errors at 2.

The next part of the game I was having problems with, like many others, is with the CPU not being a threat at the plate. Through 50 games with the Orioles, on default legend pitching, I was top 5 in every single pitching category. Which frankly just isn’t realistic for the Orioles. The numbers weren’t unreasonable, ERA at 3.30, 8.0 K/gm, 2 BB/gm. But the CPU just didn’t feel like much of a threat and were only averaging 0.8 HR/gm. I loathe the fact that I’m hoping the CPU hits a HR off me, it should be the opposite and it just wasn’t happening for me. So I again went to the drawing board and decided to drop USER Pitch Consistency down to 3. Over a small sample size, though the CPU was scoring more runs on a few more hits, their offense somehow felt worse. They were getting a lot of good pitches to hit and were just doing nothing with them. All their runs were coming off of singles and the occasional double and didn’t hit a HR for multiple games, not to mention their K numbers sky rocketed to over 10/gm.

So then I really started thinking about what happened when I messed with the errors, combined with the idea from Josh a few years back. So I put all sliders on default for Legend Pitching, kept outfield throwing errors at 2, and put USER Pitch Control up to 6. It was like a switch was flipped for the CPU. I still need a much, much bigger sample size to confirm this suspicion. But from what I can tell, there has to be some sort of balancing going on under the hood when you change sliders. Baseball is based so much off of averages and numbers. So it feels like when you tilt things in the USERS favor it will try and tilt it back towards the CPU to keep things balanced. The good thing is USER Pitch Control at 6 vs 5 is almost indistinguishable. I well report back after I get a much larger sample size.