If you’re going to introduce bugs in a patch, at least make it memorable. SDS absolutely made it memorable with its Opening Day patch for MLB The Show 24.
Yesterday’s patch did start out with a less fun mood around it as it did more or less break Diamond Dynasty for multiple hours on Opening Day, which is probably less than ideal when a lot of folks have baseball on their minds. In general, it was a weird Opening Day overall for Major League Baseball as the early rainouts meant no game even started before 3 p.m. EST — that ain’t right.
The SDS servers have been a little more erratic with ’24 than in the past couple years as well, so this added more fuel to that fire. However, by the evening the biggest issues had mostly been quashed, which meant we were mostly just left with the wonderful weirdos.
Oh yeah, that’s the good stuff. While the 7-foot players who looked like Jeebs from Men In Black after having his head popped off got most of the attention, I think the inverted eyes bug is far more haunting and wonderful. The Undertaker would be proud of Brayan Bello’s look here.
For whatever reason, this visual bug was both somehow introduced and missed during patch testing, and I am thankful for it. The irony here is that a lot of visual bugs also got cleaned up, and new face scans were introduced for a bunch of players as well. But while we got new face scans for guys like Anthony Volpe, and then got fixes for things like Elly de la Cruz’s hair not moving, we got the Evan Carters of the world as well.
That’s the focus of a World Series champion right there.
These visual bugs will likely be cleaned up sooner rather than later, but the memories will last a lifetime. What do you think about that Grant Anderson?
A pitcher looking in for the signals through the top of his hat would be an MLB first for sure.
On a more “serious” note, the other big non change was SDS explaining why the 15K XP gameplay cap exists and will remain in place. This mostly impacts Diamond Dynasty users, and it’s a change that some folks have been really up in arms about, but it’s good to see SDS holding its ground here overall.
It’s easy to forget that a lot of the people on OS or elsewhere posting about something like this aren’t “normal” or the regular user. Some people want to chase all the new shiny things and get them as soon as possible, but ultimately if there was no XP cap and people got the top rewards way early, the same issue would arise just on the back end of things with people being “bored” now that there’s nothing to chase.
This isn’t to say there’s no changes that should be made to the system, but the general philosophy is a good one to stick to. My personal request would be to simply have the daily XP cap rollover on a seven-day basis. In other words, if I didn’t play The Show on Monday, I should be able to accrue 30K gameplay XP on Tuesday. So as not to be able to abuse this, it just resets every seven days and so you still only have so much weekly XP you could gain via gameplay either way.
I’m sure in the meantime there will continue to be some complaints from the community, but ultimately if you’re only playing to gain XP and get the new shiny thing, then how much fun are you really having with the game or DD? At that point, I would say maybe it’s time to scope out another mode or another game.
When SDS fixes the graphical bugs, we’ll be sure to post a new story — even if I’ll be shedding a tear while writing it.
