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[turnbuckle]

Also - I hate any post that says "every year is the same shit"

Because that's not true. Previous years may have been shitty for a lot of players...but the shittiness of the 2014's online cannot be understated. To say this year is as bad as any other year would be a compliment. No, 2014 is absolute garbage online. Worse than the worst year of the Show multiplied by Prince Fielder's weight. It can't get any worse than this. Launch Diablo III was a better online experience. Pre-Patch Battlefield 4 was a better online experience. Downloading porn on a 56k modem in 1998 was a better online experience.

 

[eznark]

Last year connections were better (still not on par with madden or NHL) but animations were broken and there were tons and tons of online bugs. In the previous two years the catcher bugs were essentially game breaking and the connections were worse.

For me it has never been good and I've lived with blazing fast internet in Boston to marginal internet now in Indiana. I'm able to play literally every other sports game online with no issues. Christ I was even able to play NBA2K online!

 

[RadarScope1]

Bummer for those who play online. I'd still like to try this game but I'll never play it online. Why doesn't a big publisher like Sony have an internal team that specializes in online code who can bounce between first party dev houses and aid the efforts? Isn't that a pretty standard practice for publishes?

 

[turnbuckle]

Yeah the offline stuff is fine. San Diego is still shit.

The offline stuff is fine save for the loading times.

But many of us buy it for online and this year's was touted as having finally having solved the netcode issues. For the first time ever I thought I'd be getting to play games in a league where more people were having as good an online experience as I had in past versions of the game (I've repeated it a bunch of times how the online was generally great for me in the past unless I was paired up against someone on a wireless or otherwise terrible connection).

Also, some things that persist year over year on and offline need to get fixed too. Slow fielder animations in particular. Infield base hits, incomplete double plays, suicide squeezes that frequently allow a person who knows what they're doing to cheese the defenders etc. Some of those cheesey things you won't see often because you're either playing offline or playing online with others who aren't being shitheads.

The broadcasting booth needs a severe overhaul, too.

Some of these latter things are nitpicks, but they're the types of things that never improve no matter how much money Sony brings in with the series. If we're going to laud the offline portion of the game and say it's San Diego's priority then we should be seeing more of these things cleaned up.

To their credit, I believe the dropped third strike / frozen catcher glitch is finally gone. At least I haven't seen it yet. That one stuck around for a good 3-4 years at least.

 

[eznark]

My favorite thing was last year when a guy from the dev team said he had never heard of the dropped third strike glitch. Amazing.

 

[Dragon]

Don't buy the game next year if you care about online, it's a joke in the franchise and always has been. RTTS is still god tier though and why I'll think about buying the game.

 

[turnbuckle]

My favorite thing was last year when a guy from the dev team said he had never heard of the dropped third strike glitch. Amazing.

Yeah...

 

[Purple Cheeto]

I'd have to disagree on this. Batting would need the most timing accuracy by far.

It's not just timing accuracy though. What a lot of people are describing is the game going completely and utterly out of synch.

The big thing that makes keeping a sports game in synch is that there are tons of physics simulations going on. Its not an action game where you can fake the physics or make them deterministic. It sounds like San Diego is trying to maybe interpolate data and fake the results but things are going horribly, horribly wrong.

 

[DietRob]

Oh please. What did any of us do before online gaming was a thing? We delved into the offline modes.

Online bandwidth is too much of a variable worldwide to ever have solid online gameplay. All games - Madden, NCAA, etc - have unacceptable lag to play online compared to the offline component. Let's not act like this one game is the problem. They all suck online.

Solution? Why don't people actually play the myriad of offline portions. RTTS is worth $59.99 alone.

Ok, I did overreach a little in saying that online gameplay should be the #1 priority. Like FMT said earlier though once you get the taste of human blood it's really hard going back to playing an entire franchise season against the computer. Nowhere near as fun.

It sounds like you haven't played an EA game online in quite a while because all of them I've played over the past several years have been solid online.

Your 'solution' is not a solution at all. As evidenced in this thread many of us buy this game for online functionality and playing a season with our friends here on GAF. If San Diego studios believes your 'solution' is the answer then they should take online functionality completely out of the game and sell us a single player baseball game. If they did that they would get crucified in the gaming press. So instead of just admitting that MLB is a solo experience they keep giving us crappy online functionality.

 

[Smokey]

lol wrong thread sry

 

[bananafactory]

Wow at that bump. Thought this was gonna be about 15

 

[DidntKnowJack]

Interesting necro-bump.