We are now nearly a month out from the great Q&A thread that was conducted on our forums with members of the MLB '08: The Show developers. However, with opening day just having occurred and with baseball fresh on the minds of many, here is the first portion of questions and answers from the thread.

Pitch Speed Slider

bcruise: Pitch speed slider - we know it speeds up the perceived speed, and doesn't affect the radar gun. But does it affect the path of a batted ball at all - in other words, do balls get hit harder, or are the hits the same strength?

Brian: The only thing it changes is how fast the pitch visually comes at the batter. Nothing else changes on purpose, to give the user the best isolated control. Lowering the pitch speed slider too much can be a form of cheating, but the user can decide that. Most people are best off with default settings in the long run, but certainly some people have very fast/slow reactions. Also, there is actually a counterbalance that activates to compensate steal success % (to keep it constant to the extent possible).

bcruise: I find that with the pitch speed slider maxed out, a fastball is more of a true-to-life speed, and greatly increases the difficulty..

Brian: That's a very good observation. Certain sliders are more useful and allow you to make meaningful changes in preference - I'd like to focus on developing and documenting more of these in the future. Each user deserves to play their ideal game as far as development, technology, and the interests of other users allow. Those limits explain a lot of decisions, but I can't elaborate in the time and space given.

CPU Hit Problems

seveb: Any suggestions for maximizing the number of hits for the CPU on HOF difficulty? I have CPU contact and timing window maxed out.

Brian: How many games have you played, and who were the pitchers you used and teams faced? These are the factors that count. Betting odds reflect how much influence these have. Some people are better at pitching than hitting, and many people are the reverse. Much of this has to do with your interests as well as strategy vs. execution skill. But in the long run statistics dictate a good variety of games for practically everyone regardless.

Chris: The timing window has no effect on CPU, and I really wouldn't recommend changes to the contact/power sliders past a few ticks unless you're sure of it. Contact and power are not isolated sliders, and have unavoidable side effects at extremes. In other words, difficulty changes maintain realism (i.e. the worst MLB team vs. the best is still realistic), but giving an aluminum bat to players because they're in a slump or have bad technique produces unrealistic gameplay longterm. Note that if the game always produced "expected stats" for every user from beginning to end, that would mean skill/effort/strategy/learning didn't matter and the game is not realistic (in fact it would be trivial). What's more important is if the game produced realistic results in the long run given each set of actions, including relatively unorthodox actions.

No Walks

Nez477: I'm a sim freak and the main thing that I constantly long for is more walks. I've toggled with sliders, and I still feel that I am no where near where it should be, getting 1-2 walks a game feels like an accomplishment.

Brian: On the batter side, there's a learning curve to this and there are tips in the original message. Assuming you've peaked the learning curve, there are two sliders you can try. You can decrease CPU pitcher aggressiveness, which is a good isolated slider but might make the AI sometimes foolish in extremes. Or you can try the pitch count slider, which is not isolated but attempts to rebalance relevant factors (which is a lot) to the degree possible. Depending on your goal, that may be exactly what you want. This year's focus on quality gameplay allowed limited time for sliders, and I intend to focus more on slider documentation, organization, and effectiveness in the future.

Power Attribute

OS: Do you believe the power attribute for individual players is accurate? I am consistently hitting opposite field bombs with "non-power" guys....and this is strictly using a contact swing with the L stick in the down position.

Brian: Yes, the power attribute is fairly accurate under a realistic model that the game uses. Pressing select while at bat will show you the power rating. A bomb has a lot to do with the stadium in question with wind as an influence. If your question is about hit power for a given direction I'd look at the home run distance instead without regard to bombs, and consider the type/location of the pitch against your input. A 350 foot hit that easily clears a shallow part of the a stadium (ex: near the foul) isn't really a bomb even if the game's camera indicates there's no doubt, and what I'd also look at is the bell curve of your distances to get context. A good meatball can be hit well opposite field, they just don't happen very often and would be hit even harder same field. Superior pitch recognition would increase that frequency especially on Veteran. I'm assuming you're not playing Veteran and have sliders at default.

Too Many Stolen Bases

traumaip: ..could you comment on the stolen base issue (way to many) and what we should do to fix it?

Brian & the Crew: Have you personally observed too many steals, or is this based on what you've heard? How many steals / games have you observed? Have you compared this to MLB numbers? Let's discuss it with that starting point.

Statistically, it's guaranteed that some users will perceive too many steals over a few games. What's important is the longterm stats of representative users. I don't imagine that people who see no issues will spend proportional time commenting on each "too many X" or "too few Y" threads. You'd have to be very patient and have time apart from the game to participate that extensively.

If you do want to reduce steals, reduce the Steal Aggressiveness attribute. Note that this also plays a factor in discounting surprise - Podsednik and Reyes Jose don't lose as much effectiveness for repeated steals whereas most stealers do. These go hand in hand so it's still an isolated adjustment. Very few runners have high steal abilities - it's a sharp half bell curve. Stealing ability depends on speed but it's an additional ability separate from speed.

More to Come!

This is just the first of a multiple part series that will be running over the coming days. If you missed the original thread, be sure to check it out as well. However, for the folks who don't want to shuffle through the mass of information we will be taking the cool or important stuff out for you and putting them in easy to read form.