wudl83

Right now that's only user pitching, yes. As I said I am mainly testing user pitching and fielding and AI hitting and baserunning. Breaking balls in the zone are indeed not hit well. In fact they are hit really bad. That is unrealistic, as you said. But that's something we can't do anything about. So I would advise to try to pitch as realisticly as possible.

For tests I upped the CPU contact slider to 80 and put the power down to 50. With pitch speed between 90-100 and break between 90-100 as well as control of 25-30 you can produce higher pitch counts. You have to do the following: - let your pitcher select pitch type - do not follow his suggested location to a t, but always try to paint the corners and try to throw pitches like in reality (no 2-seamers up in the zone, but down in the zone, not curves up in the zone, but aim them dropping slightly out of the zone, try to throw sliders breaking out of the zone - look at the sweet spots and bad spots of the opposing hitter - throw some balls on purpose, they do it in reality, too - if the opposing hitter is weak, try to throw a lot of clear strikes (not much danger), if the opposing hitter is good try to throw only marginal strikes (lots of danger) In my last 2 games I was able to average about 15-17 pitches per inning with this method. Can't think of anything else. Your hint with pitch speed/stolen bases makes definately sense. Never looked at it from this point of view.

Okay, may be that my observations aren't bogus when you noticed it too. Regarding foul balls, I do see the same as you. The majority of outs/hits comes within pitch 2-3, then a high number of hits/outs comes on the first pitch and I rarely see high pitch count ABs. Maybe we can adjust this via the contact slider and the batting eye rating of the player. Have not looked enough into for a clear statement.

I only played some games in which I pitched for both teams and made the fielding manually. Base running and hitting was done by the CPU. I want to focus on different parts at different times so that I don't have to concentrate on too many things at one time. One step after another. 1st Observation: Pitch types, pitch speed matter I wasn't directly looking at this but playing a few games I noticed, that pitch types do matter much more than I previously thoght. As you know we have 3 different changeups in the game. If they are all rated equally (same movement, control, speed) then the conventional changeup is by far the worst, while the split change and the circle change give you much better chances for getting a hitter out or not allowing a hit. And you can apply that to nearly all other pitch types. Also you can say that the higher the speed of a pitch the higher the chance for a strike or the hitter not getting contact. This seems to be true for all pitch types. The AI will hit a slider of Romo better when his slider is rated 90 than a slider of someone else which is rated 80, only because Romo's slider has a max speed of 81 when the other guy's slider has a speed of 87. This seems again to be true for all pitch types. And additionally everything below a pitcher control slider rating of 30 or 35 seems to produce bad pitches, meaning that you won't be able to hit your spots well although your control rating of a certain pitch may be high. 2nd Observation: Range Rating 50 I played around a little bit and I think that the range rating at 25 was indeed a little bit too low. After a few games I realized that BSU-Fan was right with saying that there are too many routine groundballs and stuff like that won't be caught. Right now I am testing a range rating of 50 for all fielders and it plays out better. Everything else seems to be to high and produces too many dives. But 50 (or maybe 40) seems to be something like a sweet spot. It's not too much and not too little. 3rd Observation: Acceleration 99 The acceleration rating regulates how quick a fielder acts. This is true for fielding and running. What does this mean in detail? First, the combination of an acc. rating of 99 with a low range rating produces smoother fielding animations. As I said in an earlier post, imagine range rating as a circle. If the ball crosses the outer line of the circle, the player starts to act. So the higher his range rating, the earlier the player reacts. The consequence is that guys with high range make a ton of diving plays. So we have to reduce the fielding range rating. But when we reduce it too much the players (only certain positions) let balls pass too often without doing anything. Setting range to 50 (see above) could be a method to adjust this. Now the acceleration rating is another 'boost' rating. It has not much to do with diving plays, but seems to determine on how quick a player reacts after the ball has passed his 'range' circle. It produces smoother fielding animations and seems to help against guys not acting when the ball is hit right next to them. Guys still start only start 'trying hard' when the ball crosses the circle, but with an acc rating of 99 they start to act faster. Because they do this, they don't have to dive too often. Second, regarding running, the acceleration rating is the rating which determines how quick a player is at his full running speed. With a little bit adjusted sliders (this is necessary when giving everyone a 99 acceleration rating) it produces smoother running animations. 4th Observation: Giving up hits has a lot of variables To find the right balance regarding pitching against the AI seems to be one heck of a job. There are a ton of variables which come into play. First, I noticed that the power slider of the AI (and so I think this applies to the user slider as well, although I haven't tested it until now) does not only regulate how hard a ball is hit. It also determines the likelihood of players hitting the pitch with the top of barrell of the bat. And as you all know, if you hit the ball with the top of the barrell your chances of getting a hit become better. So the higher the AI's power rating, the higher the likelihood of the AI getting a hit. Second, the contact slider has not as much influence as the power rating. The contact rating is more of a indicator of 1) how good a hitter sees the ball (the lower the slider, the higher the chance of batters swinging at crap and therefore the higher chance for strikeouts) and 2) it seems to be something which indicates the 'pop' of the bat, meaning that the higher the contact slider, the higher the chance that the pitches will be hit up in the air (less grounders). Third, clutch rating of hitters seems to determine the likelihood of hits as well. But only when runners are already on base. The higher the clutch rating of a certain player who has to bat with runners on base, the higher the chance of him getting a hit and driving runners in. It seems like the contact or power rating of batters do not have that a big of importance when they have runners on base as the clutch rating. With a high clutch rating a player is very likely to get an RBI although his batting ratings are bad. Fourth, the pitch speed slider is more of an animation rating, but also determines how hard a ball will be hit. You won't get much more Ks with a pitch speed slider rating of 100 compared to one with 75. But the balls will be hit a little bit harder (travel faster and further). Fifth, the pitch break slider seems to work like an animation rating (the ball will break heavier if the slider is set higher) and it seems to have the same meaning as the contact hitting slider, but to a lesser degree. Sixth, the higher the composure influence, the worse your chances of getting hitters out with runners on base. Even if you spot your pitches well, the AI seems to get miracle hits when the composure influence is set too high. Now see: high clutch rating of upcoming batters, runners already on base, high composure influence and you know what will happen. Hit after hit after hit and therefore you will see 13-14 hits per team if those things are set to high. Right now I am experimenting with the following combination regarding hitting/pitching: - fairly low contact slider of the CPU (about 50-55) - medicore hitting power slider of the CPU (about 70-75) - high pitch speed for users (90-100) - high pitch break for users (90-100) - low composure influence for users (15-20) - low to mediocre pitcher control for users (30-35) I am already quite fine with fielding and CPU baserunning. I gonna come up with sliders for this: - user ('u') throw acc 30 - u gather error 50 - u throw error 55 - u outfield throw 60 - u infield throw 25 - u outfield run 40 (that's because of the low range rating) - u infield run 30 (same) And AI baserunning: - AI base speed 30 (that's because of acc 99, players have their full speed within a fraction of a second) - hit n run 70 - sac bunt 70 (may drive this up a noth, everything below 70 seems to produce not enough sac bunts from batters who are no pitchers) - squeeze 85 (may drive this up, too, still not seeing enough) - base run aggression 70 - steal aggression 50 (may drive this up to 55, base running and steal aggression seem both to have influence on the likelihood of a runner attempting a steel) These are my first observations. I will do more tests today (right now it's 11 o'clock AM here in Germany) and tell you what I've found out.

Didn't have the time to do enough testings over the last few days. Gonna finish work for this week within a few hours. Then I'll have a big part of the weekend to play around with rating edits and sliders. The original ideas for blocking at 99 and anticipation at 25 came up at operationsports. Yesterday I looked at their board and noticed that they had found that giving all fielders an acceleration rating of 99 does help the game even more. I am really looking forward to trying this out. The new animations which I did see in some videos on youtube looked so smooth and fine. Besides that I think that I am growing more and more into the game mechanics or that I come closer and closer to the real meaning of sliders or ratings. I don't know if that was all intended by 2k and as I said a lot of times, it sometimes makes me shake my head, but somehow some sliders may have the wrong name.

1) As far as I can tell there's not much to do about it and t I found no method to correct that. But with range rating at 25 the 1Bs should have a harder time at least. 2) To be honest I do not see this when playing the game. It occassionally happens to me, but not in the majority of possible situations. 1) can be changed a little bit with rating/slider changes, but 2) I don't know.

Maybe I could do it at the weekend. Right now I am busy as hell.

That's a 'bug' inside the game or something like miss-coded. You can't change that. The only thing that helps is to manage the CPUs lineup by yourself. Feel free to change the controller and go for it. I've done that anytime when I thought it would be time for it.

Well, IMO the answer is quite easy. Compare how many copies 2k sells of NBA 2k to how many copies 2k sells (or sold) of MLB 2k. Because MLB 2k traditionally sells much worse than NBA 2k, they did put their effort into NBA 2k. They even put an end to NHL 2k in 2011. MLB 2k followed some time later. Thy simply didn't sell enough copies. At least that's the reason I am thinking of.

My answers come in in red to make clear to what I made references. I will write my answers directly into your post! All in all I am really thankful for your answers and opinions in this one. This discussion is really going into the right direction.

And to add something: the 'beauty' we get is that you only have to look at fangraphs and know within a few seconds which rating a player should get for most hitting stats for example. Me, I like to take ISO (http://www.fangraphs.com/library/offense/iso/) to rate a players power (of course split up in vR and vL). Now if you look at the link I posted, you will see this table: Rating / ISO (rating in game) Excellent 0.250 (99) Great 0.200 (90) Above Average 0.180 (80) Average 0.145 (70) Below Average 0.120 (60) Poor 0.100 (50) Awful 0.080 (40) (30 for everything worse) Now assigning ratings is as easy as it can get and it's not only easy, it's also realistic! You only have to tweak the table from above a little bit and make some reasonable adjustments and that's it. For example Lucas Duda has an ISO of .274 against RHP this year, while he only has an ISO of .040 against LHP. This accumulates for an overall ISO of .224. Look at the table above and you see that .274 would be excellent (99) and .040 would be 30. That makes no sense, so I would say give him a power rating of 90 against RHP and 60 against LHP. This method is the most realistic, easiest and quickest I have come up with and as I said it makes no difference in gameplay if he has a power rating of 87, 93 or 90, 57, 60 or 63. But for editing most players it's much easier. E.g. Jose Abreu has an ISO of .273 against RHP and .307 against LHP accumulating for an overall ISO of .281. No doubt, he is one of a few guys who have 'excellent' power against both RHP and LHP (99 and 99). Buster Posey has .165 against RHP and .210 against LHP, this would be a power rating of 70 against RHP and 90 against LHP.

The problem isn't that I am busy (although I am , the problem is that (as I said) I played around with the ratings, too. And if I give you my sliders and you have different ratings, I don't know if my sliders are compatible. If you still like to, I can post them nonetheless. Now that I've opened the rating topic we can discuss it right now. I use a 8 (more like 7) step rating system now. The reason is that I never understood why 2k came up with its rating system in 1 point increments from 25 to 99. How can someone differentiate players in 1 point intervals when the actual range goes from 25 to 99 on a reasonable base? IMO that is crap and nothing else. Tell me: How do you determine if a player should have a 88 or 87 power rating, or a 55 or 56 speed rating? That's crap and that's it. That's at least my opinion. As some of you may know, I did a roster some time ago (which I had to stop because of not enough free time). I had an Excel-Sheet set up which gave me the ratings via formulas which were based on stats. That was good, but the problem was, that I had a lot of identical numbers (e.g. lots of 75 or something like that). Because a lot of ratings were identical I thought of making it easier. And to make it easier I tried rating steps of 5 instead of 1 (e.g. 55-60-65-70... instead of 55-56-57-..67-68-69). I realized that for gameplay it made no difference. And it made no difference for simming as well. The players still had different OVR, the players still acted differently. But since I am a guy who likes to make things not only easy, but as easy as it can get, I decided to take it even further. If you break it down to 8 (7) ratings it not only becomes much easier to decide what rating a player should get (to say if someone is a 66 or 67 is difficult, to say if he is a 65 or 70 is easier but still not easy enough for me, but to determine if one should have a 60 or 70 is quite easy), but you also have the advantage when editing players that you do not need much time. And as I said a difference of 3 or 4 for a single rating makes simply no difference ('no' literally meaning nill, nada, nothing). I've come up with this: 99 - excellent 90 - great 80 - above average 70 - above average 60 - below average 50 - poor 40 - awful 30 - as bad as it can get (this ones mainly used for the hitting ratings of pitchers or the bunt rating of power hitters and so on) And now forget the '0' and think of '99' as '100' and get rid of the last '0' as well and then you have: 10 - 9 - 8 - 7 - 6 - 5 - 4 - 3. You can apply that to every single rating (not tendencies!). And believe me: it makes no difference if someone has a contact rating of 70 or 74, 87 or 90, 54 or 50 and so on.

Thanks for your input. Regarding fielders standing around and routine ground balls passing them: If you raise pitch speed/hitting power, you will not see too many of those with fielding rating at 25. If the balls are hit harder, the balls will travel quicker. Balls which pass a fielder won't look like routine groundballs, I promise. I've never ever (and that's no bashing) seen those plays from above regularly when playing MLB 2k12. Doubles which bounce back from the wall after flying over outfielder's heads was as common as rain in the Sahara desert. And yeah, I've seen awkward results when siming, too, like another person said before. That's maybe because of something like Kershaw's contact ratings in the 70s and so on.

I want to directly answer your first 3 sentences, LvL, since I know what you mean. The most important thing IMO is a reasonable amount of differentiation. IMO this game tends to be 'too random' sometimes, meaning that you don't see much of a difference when e.g. pitching with King Felix compared to pitching with Scott Feldman. I bet that many people have a ton of problems pitching with (in reality called) Aces, meaning you have a hard time getting hitters out. On the other side, I sometimes have the feeling that I don't have a much harder time hitting King Felix compared to hitting Scott Feldman. (Those names serve as a placeholder, I only want to point you towards a certain direction.) The hitting sector in this game is not too bad IMO, as well as the fielding sector. Do a few tweaks (both ratings and sliders) and it will play out quite well (at least if you forget some bugs in the game engine for a minute). But what's really off is the pitching. As I said above, I think BSUFan did a very good job with the hitter's ratings, his pitcher ratings may work for him, but e.g. for me, they don't. Again, this is no bashing! The problems aren't mainly his ratings (while I got to say that we would have to adjust them for pitchers a little bit IMO), but more the game engine itself, which then hower can be broken down to the ratings, but that's the thing we can adjust. I could try to make some sliders or give you my sliders which work for ME, but that's no guarantee that they will work for YOU. They could only be a base of which you do your own adjustments. And besides that, there's the problem that I have already adjusted a lot of pitcher ratings and revamped the rating system completely. I don't have the time right now, but I will come up with some info on pitcher ratings and how they affect the game play as well as the revamped rating model. Because IMO that's at least as important as the fielding range and anticipations adjustments.

That's a matter of both sliders and ratings. I have done a ton of testing sliders and ratings variations over the last few years. Some things are very awkward on how the AI seems to be coded and how it is working. As I said yesterday, there may be some ratings in the game which don't even matter for gameplay or simulation (they only influence the overall ratings of the play - heck, how dumb is that?), while on the other side some ratings seem to do all the job. When playing a game, my tests pointed towards strikeouts being dependent on the pitcher's ratings (mainly the pitch rating itself, contact rating far less, it might even not matter whatsoever) and the hitter's ratings (contact and eye) as well as the sliders which influence that (pitch speed, pitch break and pitch success for pitchers as well as contact ratings for hitters), too. The lower the hitter's contact (dependent on contact and eye rating of the hitter and the contact slider), the more likely a strikeout will happen. The higher the pitch success or control slider of user pitching (or how it's called) and the higher the rating of a pitcher's pitch, the higher the chance for getting a K. Add pitch break into the mix and you have a slider which influences hits like hell. The higher breaking slider, the less likely it is to make good contact. Additonally, the power sliders from the hitting department and the pitch speed rating then influence how hard a ball is hit. They both don't have much to do with contact, but more with the balls speed of the bat when it's hit or how likely a K will happen (well, that I can say is at least somehow realistic). It's not easy to find a balance but - and I don't want to criticize BSUFan since I know how difficult it is to make rosters and ratings - some ratings in his roster are at least a little bit off. A bunch of pitcher ratings is simply too low and (to a much lesser degree) some hitter's ratings are too high, while also other hitter's ratings are too low. But as I said and only to make it clear, this is no bashing of BSUFan, he has done one hell of job. But only to give you an example. BSUFan gave Huston Street (LAA closer) the following pitch ratings (pitch type/movement/control/speed): Sinker 87, 89, 91 Slider 77, 65, 84 Changeup 57, 69, 82 Fastball 61, 57, 91 Throw some sliders and changeup with Street and you know what will be happening. He will give up too many hits, that's it. Know what I mean? (At this point, it would be useful to explain what the control and what the movement ratings do, but I will address this later if there's some kind of interest, and leave it at that. And I should tell you something about pitcher's overall ratings as well, which is directly related to how many different pitch types a pitcher can throw.) As far as I can draw conclusions when looking at BSUFan's ratings it seems like he has shied away from giving to high or too low ratings for both pitcher's and hitters. While I like this approach for hitters very, very much, since it does work gameplay vise indeed, it doesn't work as good for pitchers. But, that's not his fault, because in combination with the sliders it may work for HIM when HE is playing the game. So everything's fine from this regard. The problem only occurs when someone else plays the game who has a different (better or worse) game playing ability than him. Then, because not only the sliders matter, you may see awkward results or however you wanna call it. You can't adress problems in this game with sliders only or ratings only, you always have to adjust BOTH and after that it all depends on your playing ability as well. So you have three components working together and since we aren't all equally good at playing the game we can only give tips and after that one has to draw his or her own conclusions. The only thing oneself can do, if he/she shies away from editing the ratings, is to adjust sliders. And then, as I said, it's still dependent on your playing style or how good you are at playing the game. And after all still the ratings do matter. There are some global things which work for everyone, e.g. the fielding anticipation rating and fielding range at 25, but more or less everything else (both ratings and sliders) is dependent on yourself.

To add even more thoughts, I think that (at least that's my feeling) we see not enough wild pitches or passed balls in the game. In reality, about 0.7 wild pitches happen PER GAME. That's about 0.35 wild pitches per game for a single team. You can see the relevant stats here: http://www.sportingcharts.com/mlb/stats/team-wild-pitches/2014/ When you play the game 2k12, how many wild pitches or passed balls do you see? I even can't remember when I saw the last wild pitch or passed ball to be honest. What I will give a shot is the catcher's blocking pitches rating at 25, so basically set to the lowest rating available. I would be everything but surprised seeing an increase in wild pitches and passed balls.

Couple of additional information: If you fear that after that all fielders would act equal, I can tell you that this fear is without a reason. You still have those ratings which make the fielders act different: - glove - arm ratings (strength/accuracy) - speed - acceleration That's more than enough IMO. Put Mike Morse into LF and put Gregor Blanco into LF. The difference will still be huge. Morse has a weak glove and is slow, Blanco has a good glove and is fast. Guess who's more likely to field better? Besides that I have found out that there are seemingly even more 'useless' ratings in the game. I am refering to the Doubles and Triples ratings for both hitters and pitchers. They simply make no difference to the gameplay. Nada. In the gifs above already all pitchers and hitters have their doubles and triples rating at 25. And as you can see Buster Posey hits a double (in the gif with Crawford) nonetheless. In the game itself hitting (or giving up) doubles and triples is dependent on - contact - power - speed - acceleration - base running aggressiveness I don't know why 2k put a doubles and triples rating into the game when it has no meaning.

I have played only a few games right now, some with user controlled fielding, some with automatic fielding. Both methods showed lots of improvement. Regarding your problem with OFs which are slowed down I can tell you that it can't be erased, but with the fielding rating at 25 I have the impression that it's reduced at least. May only be an impression, though. In general you should see a few more hits, that's right. But if you drive down your contact ratings for both user and CPU hitting, while giving the hitting power of both user and CPU hitting a small boost, you should see the best results. I also drove up infield and outfield run speed (fielding) of both user and CPU fielding by 5. Seems to help. My last 4 games of which I tracked stats had 17 hits per game (home team + away team hits sumed up) on average. I can only tell everybody that you should give it a try. Here is another beauty I never saw in 3 years of playing MLB 2k12. A hard hit grounder passes Dee Gordon:

Now I want to tell you the reason why it works. For this one you got to understand the range rating. I've made a small pic to illustrate it. Imagine the range rating like a circle (or area) around the player. The higher the rating, the bigger the circle (or area). Now when a ball is hit, every player on the field, especially those who are positioned in the direction of the ball, will start acting. This is the time the range rating comes into play. If the ball crosses the 'outer line' of a players 'circle' (or 'area') the player gets a fielding boost, which gives him a quicker reaction, let's him sprint or makes him jump. Now look at the attached gifs in the posts above and can see exactly that. Look at the animation of Mike Morse, where the homerun of Kemp flies over his head. Exactly at the moment the ball crosses Morse's head (gets into his 'circle' or 'area') he gets a speed boost which only lasts for a fractional part of a second, because it doesn't take much time and the ball gets out of his 'circle' or 'area' again. And when it gets out of his 'circle' or 'area' he suddenly starts to jog like he did before. In general we do NOT need a high fielding rating, because every player acts without it, too! The range rating does give nothing than a boost! And this boosts are what cause those tons of dives and succesful catches of balls which would be difficult to catch. If you set the fielding rating to 25, which is the lowest possible number which can be assigned, only two ratings are left which make the player act quicker or slower: acceleration and speed. Any thoughts or questions? I definately will edit every player to a fielding range rating of 25. This makes the game much more realistic

This one isn't like what I described earlier (hit over a OF's head), but you bet that with a normal range rating Carl Crawford would have caught this ball! With a rating of 25, there was no chance for him, like in reality!

Here you see Mike Morse how he's jogging to the outfield wall. Tim Hudson has left a pitch over the plate and Matt Kemp bombs it over the left field wall. Normally, those are the times where the outfielders start to sprint to the outfield wall, which not only looks awful, but also makes no sense. This is connected to the range rating by a 100%.

In this one, Joe Panik makes another nice throw on a bouncer by Carl Crawford. Panik's throw is in time but a little bit of the plate, so Ishikawa has to make a step to tag off Crawford. With a higher range rating this would have caused no trouble for Panik.

Here you see how Joe Panik has trouble reaching a A-Gon infield bouncer, but reaches the ball and makes a nice throw to Ishikawa at first to beat out Gonzalez. With a fielding range rating of 60, 70, 80 or whatever this one would have either been a dive or a routine play.

I played around with ratings. We already have set the Plate Blocking for Catchers to 99 and the Fielding Anticipation of all players to 25. Now I set the Range rating for all players to 25 and....I'ts amazing! 1) Less infield and outfield dives instead of a ton of them. 2) Balls are hit over outfielders against the wall for doubles or triples instead of outfielders catching every ball which goes over their head. 3) Outfielders slowly jog to the outfield wall when they know the ball will be a homerun and watch the ball flying instead of running against the wall in a hurry which caused a stupid animation. 4) Bouncers in the infield now cause much more trouble for infielders and bouncers become a challenge instead of being routine plays. I have made 4 videos in the game of those situations. You got to know that those situations happened within only the first 4 innings of this game! I am currently trying to convert the videos into animated gifs so you can see them.