If you could change anything in the game, what would it be?

[wichart]

I have a long list of changes/fixes, but I'm addicted to this game. I bought MLB 2K9, but the gameplay just isn't as good as MVP 05, and the menu navigation sucks.

* Allow pitchers to pinch-hit and pinch-run, and position players to pitch (with a high possibility of injury).

* Trade for future draft picks.

* When I hit a ball over the outfielder's head, watch it bounce off the ground and the wall, then he boots the ball, that should be ruled a hit AND an error instead of just an error. Same with bloop singles down the line in Toronto that bounce over the fielder's head.

* Add an "Official Scorer" option that allows me to change something from a hit to an error, or vice versa. This would be especially important when I do something like have an outfielder accidentally run past a grounder. In the game, it gets ruled a 3B most of the time, when it should be a 1B and an error.

* More outfielders taking bad angles and missing balls on dives.

* Player collisions with walls and other players that result in injuries. No more passing right through each other. Players should be coded as solid objects.

* I do not need to wait for a foul ball in the stands to stop "rolling" before the game continues. Make it stop.

* Manually set fielder positions (pull third baseman in during bunt situations, move outfielders close to the lines late in close games, etc.).

* Make correct calls on steal attempts at 2nd. Even in "no blown calls" mode, I routinely have runners called out who were clearly never touched by the fielder's glove.

* (Based on fielding ratings) Make fielders perform natural motions. For example, when an infielder catches a throw from the outfield and a runner is trying to advance to that base, he should never catch the ball low on the correct side, stand up, pull the glove back into his body, then make a sweeping tag. Infielders on cut-off throws should turn with the natural flow of their throwing motion instead of against it. Also, the cut-off guy is almost always in the wrong position in this game.

* Schedules should include the correct number of games against divisional opponents. The game only has them play 12, but they should be playing 18. And those should be your rivalry games.

* Make the injury actually relate to what happened on the field. I've had a pitcher get a concussion from being hit in the shin by a grounder, and a player break his hand while jogging home from third on a base hit.

* Make the CPU players actually have to sit out the games when they are injured, like my players have to. If the CPU player doesn't go on the DL (because his injury will take fewer than 15 games to heal), he gets to DH even if he has a hand or wrist injury that would keep any player from hitting.

* Minor league players should take your current MLB players into account when demanding that they be MLB Indispensable players. If you play 1B and I have Albert Pujols, you should be happy just to sit on the bench.

* Scrap the whole "start with a high-school ball park and build it up to an MLB stadium" BS. It's nice to allow us to build the stadium, but not piecemeal like this. It's absurd.

* Curtail trades so you can't string them together endlessly. I can trade ANY player on my team for ANY player in the league if I'm willing to string enough trades together for progressively better players. It may take several dozen trades, but this game will let me do them all in one day.

* Add stats for catchers throwing out basestealers, or allowing the steal; pitchers throwing no-hitters; batters hitting leadoff or walkoff homers; hitting stats with runners in scoring position.

* Full stats for minor leaguers, and for career stats.

* Add stats for former players in order to show "top 25 or 50" career or single-season lists in each statistical category.

* Allow me to see contract info for players on other teams in the player info pages instead of having to fake a trade in order to see it. Allow me to see player potential star rating there too instead of having to Edit the player.

* "Download to Excel" option for statistics and player ratings/characteristics so I don't have to do it manually. ;-)

* Realistic names (my personal favorite so far was Masato O'Leary).

* Let me at least see a player's potential star-rating before drafting him.

* When the off-season ends, I would really love it if the game would stop dropping a handful of my hand-picked players and replacing them with over-priced old pitchers who suck.

* 40-man rosters in September.

* Media/Sponsorship income should be based on something like team success rather than payroll; and it should NOT be allowed to go negative. I'm PAYING $65 million a year for media/sponsorship right now!!!!

* Roster page for pitching rotation should be able to fit all of them on the screen without scrolling.

* Stats pages should make maximum use of available space to minimize the amount of scrolling needed. There's no reason why I should have to scroll down when I only have 10 pitchers on the roster.

* When I disable the music option, the little pop-up that tells me which song isn't playing should stop coming up. When it does come up, it should be in the upper-left corner where it is least in the way.

* Remove limits on the number of RBI, HR, Runs, SB, etc. that a player can have in a season. I know it's not realistic for a player to have 300 SB or HR, but if you feel like throwing up stats like that in Rookie mode just for kicks, the game should at least track them correctly.

* Career stats page should show all of the player's seasons, not just the last 15.

* A player's stats should still show up for me if I trade him or send him to the minors. His stats don't cease to exist just because he's not on my MLB roster anymore.

* League Leaders shouldn't drop someone just because he went on the DL in the last week of the season.

* Stats on the Standings page should reflect the actual stats of my team at each level, not the total stats of the players currently on that roster.

* All-Star and MVP voting should rely less heavily on SB. An average hitter who steals a lot of bases shouldn't get the nod over a great hitter who doesn't steal.

* I should be able to override the natural tendency for switch hitters to bat opposite the way the pitcher throws. If I want him to bat left handed against a lefty, I should be able to do that.

* I should only be able to substitute a pitcher who has warmed up (except in the case of an injury), and my relief pitchers should always be at the top of the list on the pitcher substitution page.

* Players with horrible batting stats should not be allowed to be switch hitters. Switch hitting is a privilege, not a right. ;-)

* Dugout reactions should reflect what happened on the field. When I throw out a base stealer, the other team should not celebrate in the dugout.

* Allow us to have songs selected from our own music library, using the ID3 tags to get the artist/song title info.

* In the League Leaders pitching stats, IP should be sorted based on the whole number, not just the part before the decimal.

* OBP, AVG, and SLG don't always calculate correctly. 1 hit in 2 at bats does not equal an AVG or OBP of .501.

* Smoother fielding and quicker transitions at second base on double-play attempts. Also, the runner should be less likely to be injured than the fielder when a double-play is broken up by a slide.

* And finally, the announcer who says "Everyday can't be Christmas" should have to go back to grade school. Try, "It can't be Christmas every day", moron.

[Hoop27]

I hope you dont mind. But I have copied and pasted your post in our games wish list thread.

Lots of good ideas that we are trying to impliment.

[wichart]

Please do. I thought of a couple more this morning.

* Add pitching stats for Holds and Blown Holds (and fix Blown Saves to be correct).

* Season ticket holders. (income even if the people don't show up to the game)

[wichart]

Oh, and fix the problem with minor league Fielding stats where pitchers are listed as having played zero games.

[patsen]

Let me go through them quick, a lot of them are already instances of things we want to, but I want go over feasibility as well.

* Allow pitchers to pinch-hit and pinch-run, and position players to pitch (with a high possibility of injury).

Streamlining rosters, emergency pitchers, we want to do.

* Trade for future draft picks.

Technically, MLB doesn't allow this, but there might be leagues that do. (The one I'm in, we do a lot.)

* When I hit a ball over the outfielder's head, watch it bounce off the ground and the wall, then he boots the ball, that should be ruled a hit AND an error instead of just an error. Same with bloop singles down the line in Toronto that bounce over the fielder's head.

Generally, if someone takes a bad path and doesn't get to the ball (as oppose to get to it and miss), it's not an error. I assume errors will be handled by 'fielding checks', which will be shown. If one of these causes runners to advance, it'll be an error.

* Add an "Official Scorer" option that allows me to change something from a hit to an error, or vice versa. This would be especially important when I do something like have an outfielder accidentally run past a grounder. In the game, it gets ruled a 3B most of the time, when it should be a 1B and an error.

Ideally, the error logic we'll use should make this moot.

* More outfielders taking bad angles and missing balls on dives.

Taking bad angles is a factor of range. As for diving, it's generally based on aggressiveness. A great fielder won't need to dive because he gets to plays naturally (McDonald, Everett). Players with poor range can dive to try to get to balls others would (Jeter)... hopefully we can find a good method.

* Player collisions with walls and other players that result in injuries. No more passing right through each other. Players should be coded as solid objects.

I'm working on collision detection now, and I want to make it force an injury check.

* I do not need to wait for a foul ball in the stands to stop "rolling" before the game continues. Make it stop.

I think once the ball's hit, the first thing we'll do is figure out where it lands, so if there is no play, we can acknowledge that then instead of in real time. And, we'll probably have various controls for fast play.

* Manually set fielder positions (pull third baseman in during bunt situations, move outfielders close to the lines late in close games, etc.).

One games had a few custom positioning schemes you could use, we can bring those back, but hopefully the AI will be able to do make basic ones themselves (like move a cutoff man further towards the OF when receiving a weak throw).

* Make correct calls on steal attempts at 2nd. Even in "no blown calls" mode, I routinely have runners called out who were clearly never touched by the fielder's glove.

This is probably an animation thing. In game, the tag was made, but the animation involved didn't look like it. Hopefully our animations will be better.

* (Based on fielding ratings) Make fielders perform natural motions. For example, when an infielder catches a throw from the outfield and a runner is trying to advance to that base, he should never catch the ball low on the correct side, stand up, pull the glove back into his body, then make a sweeping tag. Infielders on cut-off throws should turn with the natural flow of their throwing motion instead of against it. Also, the cut-off guy is almost always in the wrong position in this game.

This is another animation thing... the best way is probably to allow for some hybrid animations, but in some cases, it's probably better to stop, plant a foot and throw... we'll see how it ends up.

And for cutoff positions, hopefully we can talk with someone who knows the coaching aspect, and we can try to make those better.

* Schedules should include the correct number of games against divisional opponents. The game only has them play 12, but they should be playing 18. And those should be your rivalry games.

I thought MVP 05 came with the 2005 schedule. If it changed since then, it's a concept of changing schedules. Ideally, we'll have a custom schedule maker in the program to help out, so people can pick whether their league has a balanced or unbalanced schedule.

* Make the injury actually relate to what happened on the field. I've had a pitcher get a concussion from being hit in the shin by a grounder, and a player break his hand while jogging home from third on a base hit.

Since our injuries are triggered by fielding checks, we'll be able to have different lists for different events. But generally, the exact injury succumbed is just flavour and nothing but the severity actually matters in game.

* Make the CPU players actually have to sit out the games when they are injured, like my players have to. If the CPU player doesn't go on the DL (because his injury will take fewer than 15 games to heal), he gets to DH even if he has a hand or wrist injury that would keep any player from hitting.

Hopefully our injuries will be a lot smarter. Not all injuries prohibit the player from playing, but most are worth at least a serious penalty. And, implementing actual DL rules will probably help. Means we need to record the date of his last game for those that stay on the roster a day or two.

* Minor league players should take your current MLB players into account when demanding that they be MLB Indispensable players. If you play 1B and I have Albert Pujols, you should be happy just to sit on the bench.

Hopefully the trade AI will look at the entire depth chart before making decisions like that. The Cards don't need a lot of depth there, but I still wouldn't sell off every 1B prospect in the system.

* Scrap the whole "start with a high-school ball park and build it up to an MLB stadium" BS. It's nice to allow us to build the stadium, but not piecemeal like this. It's absurd.

Their owners mode was basically around building up your park. Hopefully when we get to dynasty+ mode, we'll have better goals in mind.

* Curtail trades so you can't string them together endlessly. I can trade ANY player on my team for ANY player in the league if I'm willing to string enough trades together for progressively better players. It may take several dozen trades, but this game will let me do them all in one day.

Never heard of that one, but generally speaking, we want more intelligent trade AI... hopefully we can get something clever working.

* Add stats for catchers throwing out basestealers, or allowing the steal; pitchers throwing no-hitters; batters hitting leadoff or walkoff homers; hitting stats with runners in scoring position.

* Full stats for minor leaguers, and for career stats.

We intend to have much better stat options, and likely options for those who want more vs those who want smaller file sizes. We'll have to see what splits people are interested in.

* Add stats for former players in order to show "top 25 or 50" career or single-season lists in each statistical category.

We were looking at how to handle past stats, and we will probably want to keep proper records... we'll see what is enough, or too much.

* Allow me to see contract info for players on other teams in the player info pages instead of having to fake a trade in order to see it. Allow me to see player potential star rating there too instead of having to Edit the player.

Hopefully scouting will be a lot more realistic, but scouts aren't perfect.

* "Download to Excel" option for statistics and player ratings/characteristics so I don't have to do it manually. ;-)

Stat exporting will be there, definitely. The real question is how long we should keep stats in the game.

* Realistic names (my personal favorite so far was Masato O'Leary).

Ideally, we can have different traits for different geographical areas. (Though I'd hate to put racial biases in the game, they do exist. Dominican players have different traits than Asian players, for instance.)

* Let me at least see a player's potential star-rating before drafting him.

Scouting should cover this.

* When the off-season ends, I would really love it if the game would stop dropping a handful of my hand-picked players and replacing them with over-priced old pitchers who suck.

That's probably a simplification they made. Hopefully we can get info from people who know more about minor league transactions to get more realistic results.

* 40-man rosters in September.

Why limit to 40? We should be able to change the number in league settings. We want to be able to handle many different leagues.

* Media/Sponsorship income should be based on something like team success rather than payroll; and it should NOT be allowed to go negative. I'm PAYING $65 million a year for media/sponsorship right now!!!!

Would be a bug in their owners' mode. We'll have to see how we do that.

* Roster page for pitching rotation should be able to fit all of them on the screen without scrolling.

* Stats pages should make maximum use of available space to minimize the amount of scrolling needed. There's no reason why I should have to scroll down when I only have 10 pitchers on the roster.

This game is designed to be PC only, so we can use a more reasonable font. Though, I expect the 40-man rosters to need scrolling regardless.

* When I disable the music option, the little pop-up that tells me which song isn't playing should stop coming up. When it does come up, it should be in the upper-left corner where it is least in the way.

In MVP, you can drag that pop-up somewhere else on the screen, and I'm pretty sure if you disable all the songs from the jukebox, instead of just muting it, it won't show up at all.

* Remove limits on the number of RBI, HR, Runs, SB, etc. that a player can have in a season. I know it's not realistic for a player to have 300 SB or HR, but if you feel like throwing up stats like that in Rookie mode just for kicks, the game should at least track them correctly.

That generally happens because most stats are kept in a one byte field, which is limited to 0-255. I assume two bytes (limit 0-65535) would be more appropriate, and possibly even higher for large sims. (100,000 game simulations have their purpose.)

* Career stats page should show all of the player's seasons, not just the last 15.

We want to keep track of a player's career stats, including minor league. We'll probably have bigger league file sizes, but people can set their own pruning preferences.

* A player's stats should still show up for me if I trade him or send him to the minors. His stats don't cease to exist just because he's not on my MLB roster anymore.

* League Leaders shouldn't drop someone just because he went on the DL in the last week of the season.

* Stats on the Standings page should reflect the actual stats of my team at each level, not the total stats of the players currently on that roster.

That's a simplification they make, we won't need to do that. Every stint on a team for a given season will be kept separately.

* All-Star and MVP voting should rely less heavily on SB. An average hitter who steals a lot of bases shouldn't get the nod over a great hitter who doesn't steal.

Well, no one said All-Star and MVP voters were rational. But, we'll want to try different ways to gather vote totals, which will likely involve polling people's tendencies to vote.

* I should be able to override the natural tendency for switch hitters to bat opposite the way the pitcher throws. If I want him to bat left handed against a lefty, I should be able to do that.

That could be tricky, I'd have to look a lot more into platoon splits to try to figure out how a player would play with his dominant hand against the 'wrong' pitcher. What's your intention behind this, anyway?

* I should only be able to substitute a pitcher who has warmed up (except in the case of an injury), and my relief pitchers should always be at the top of the list on the pitcher substitution page.

* Players with horrible batting stats should not be allowed to be switch hitters. Switch hitting is a privilege, not a right. ;-)

Just because they're not major league calibre hitters, doesn't mean they shouldn't be allowed to switch hit. They'd likely be worse without it.

* Dugout reactions should reflect what happened on the field. When I throw out a base stealer, the other team should not celebrate in the dugout.

We'll have to try to figure out some general 'atmosphere' ratings, which will change with the game. Would generally be based on the leverage (how critical the game situation is), the home team (fans are usually louder for their home team), away team (if the away team is more popular, the home team might get drowned out), players and situations. We might even make the attendance vary during the game (albeit much slower), as people start leaving in a blowout!

* Allow us to have songs selected from our own music library, using the ID3 tags to get the artist/song title info.

We probably want it that way anyway, so we don't have to license songs to bundle with the game.

* In the League Leaders pitching stats, IP should be sorted based on the whole number, not just the part before the decimal.

They probably simplified their sort. Generally, people use IPOuts now, which is IP*3. No need for fractions, and we can just divide it when showing it on the screen.

* OBP, AVG, and SLG don't always calculate correctly. 1 hit in 2 at bats does not equal an AVG or OBP of .501.

Computers don't do math the same way we do, so they can see different roundoff errors. I'm guessing our rate stats will be calculated on the fly, so we'll make sure to use standard libraries.

* Smoother fielding and quicker transitions at second base on double-play attempts. Also, the runner should be less likely to be injured than the fielder when a double-play is broken up by a slide.

We'll have to see how the animations happen, and the usual speed for these. It's a shame my TV tuner broke, since I'd have liked to record games then go over footage frame by frame. And, for injuries, some plays will invoke tougher injury checks than others.

* And finally, the announcer who says "Everyday can't be Christmas" should have to go back to grade school. Try, "It can't be Christmas every day", moron.

Well, we'll ideally have customizable scripts for announcers.

Whew, that was long. A lot of it is still on the drawingboard, but we hope to have a good design for these things. We have realism in mind first, and looks second, so we'll see what comes out of it. If there's anything you need more info on, let us know.

[etrius23]

Going beyond the obvious things like new graphics, fixed audio, etc, etc, what would you change? Obviously a lot of these things we can't actually do, but I'm just curious. Maybe one day we can send this list to EA when they start making a new MVP Baseball for MLB game.

I would get different announcers, not anything against the two that are already in the game, but just... I dunno. Also, I would make it so that there would be two sets of announcers instead of just one set.

I would fix the forty-man roster, the disabled list, all that stuff, to make it more accurate. I would also add waivers and September callups and all that stuff.

I would try to find some way to make spring training actually useful. As it is, spring training is a good way to figure out how to set up your lineups, but that takes a couple of days and the rest of the way is kind of worthless.

I would definitely improve the AI so that they actually knew how to rate players, select prospects, etc.

I would fix the draft to be in June, and I would make it so that you could import the actual players in the draft, like the top 1000 players in the draft so that you could select actual players.

I would fix the injuries so that you could have more injuries like appendicitis, etc. I would make it so that you have more options, like you can have players decide to have surgery or decide to rest and rehab an injury, etc. I would also include things like drug testing, and various illegal activities like a player caught speeding, or something. Just to make it realistic.

I would fix it so that when a player comes back from an injury, sometimes they do hit as well as they normally do, but sometimes they take some time to get back to their normal ability. Also, I would make it so that players would sometimes have to rehab from injuries.

I would also add some of the low minors levels, like instead of just having an A+ level, I would have regular A, and Low-A. Maybe not short-season, that's a bit much.

I'm just trying to make the game very realistic, that's all.

I would fix the graphics.

[patsen]

I would fix the graphics.

What in particular is wrong with them?

[etrius23]

What in particular is wrong with them?

I dont know on my PC (which can play 2k9) everything looks horrible jeter looks like a character from a horror movie.

[angryrat]

Well said God.... I mean, Patsen.