On this page
A relatively underwhelming new Diamond Dynasty program might be redeemed by its ultimate reward.
Cityscapes Program Brings Home Field Advantage, Mickey Mantle
The new Cityscapes Program appears, as was predicted in this space a week ago, to take a lot of artistic inspiration from the popular Home Field Advantage short-printed cards that MLB The Show partner Topps has produced this decade. It does not, unfortunately, give much more than short shrift to the majority of MLB teams.
The Cityscapes Program's XP reward path itself focuses on just six cities — Houston, St. Louis, Milwaukee, the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, and Chicago — that cover just five markets, all of which have teams that were part of the AL or NL Central for most of the 21st century until the Astros realigned to the AL West in 2013. The five players on that XP reward path hail from those five markets — J.R. Richard as an Astro, Willie McGee as a Cardinal, Rollie Fingers as a Brewer, Brian Dozier as a Twin, and Ian Happ as a Cub — with the White Sox getting ignored.
The rest of the Cityscapes player pool is also a little disappointing. There are three Brewers and Cubs, two Astros, Randgers, Reds, and Red Sox, and one player each from several other teams, but the only NL West player in the entire Program is Dodgers slugger Max Muncy, the NL East is repped by just one current player (J.T. Realmuto), and the Yankees — a franchise as tied to one-team stalwarts as any — are only part of this Program in the form of the final Collection reward. The Athletics, Blue Jays, Diamondbacks, Giants, Marlins, Nationals, Orioles, Padres, Rockies, Royals, and White Sox all do not have Cityscapes players.
The Cityscapes Diamond Quest holds 91 OVR Dave Parker and Michael Young cards as Epic-tier rewards and Ballin' is a Habit Packs as Rare-tier rewards. The skyline-shaped Conquest map for Cityscapes contains rewards including a Cityscapes Deluxe Pack — players include Sammy Sosa, Max Muncy, and Jacob Misiorowski at the rarest tier — and a 90 OVR Richie Sexson from his Brewers days, but maybe most importantly has a random Deluxe Pack — including the Cityscapes one in its pool — as a repeatable reward for full completion.
Cityscapes also brings the first new Mini Seasons since the New Threads Program (that released in March), with four players — John Franco, Ian Kinsler, Jim Edmonds, and Edgar Martinez — tied to goals within the mode. A full run to a title earns the usual Mini Seasons Championship bundle, but the appeal here is again a repeatable reward: 10,000 Parallel XP with Cityscapes players will earn a Cityscapes Deluxe Pack each time that threshold is achieved.
This all funnels into a Cityscapes Collection that offers 92 OVR Clay Buchholz (12 cards), 93 OVR Jimmy Rollins (24), and 93 OVR Mickey Mantle (30) items for collecting and locking in the various Cityscapes players available throughout DD. And while those players are all good to great, they lack heat and pop: Buchholz's fastest pitch is a 95 MPH fastball, while Rollins comes out of the box with 65 Power against both righties and lefties despite hitting 25 and 30 homers in consecutive seasons as a shortstop and Mantle — one of the very few players with over 500 career home runs — has 90/81 Power against righties and lefties.
All of that combined with Cityscapes existing outside of and thus only tangentially related to Team Affinity makes for what is a fairly underwhelming Program that could be saved by Rollins and Mantle proving to be better players in game action than they appear to be on a static screen.
Gameplay Update Reshapes Strike Zone Display, Clarifies PCI Shrinkage in MLB The Show 26
Maybe the most important thing to happen in Diamond Dynasty this week, though, was actually Gameplay Update 7 for MLB The Show 26, which has changed how the strike zone is displayed in game to better match the real-life use of the Automatic Balls and Strikes strike zone and challenge system.
This is a complex change that includes a dramatic change and a visual update that isn't a change:
We have updated the Diamond Dynasty strike zone to match real-world ABS rules, meaning every pitch that touches the zone will be called a strike. This change matches the strike zone we had employed across the game when the ABS option was on since the launch of MLB The Show 26. In addition: Umpires in DD will continue to make perfect calls, so there will be no ABS challenges. In order to properly represent ABS rules, the updated strike zone is slightly smaller than what was previously in DD, but this is purely a visual update that doesn’t change what constitutes a strike or a ball.In practice, this means that more pitches will feel like strikes on the edges of the displayed strike zone, as the visual feedback suggests that anything that even minimally touches the strike zone while crossing the plate is a strike, but probably only that a very small percentage of what were previously balls will become strikes — and also that the updated strike zone will play havoc with players' brains, as it attempts to represent what the actual strike zone is but also the new application of ABS rules.
Why this is coming more than a month after the release of the game and/or with little warning to the player base is anyone's guess, and doing it to represent real-life MLB baseball while also including "perfect" umpires and not including manual challenges is even more perplexing if you take even a moment to think about it. (If the umps in Diamond Dynasty were and are perfect, why mess with the strike zone and not just let players ride out the year?)
But that update might be less objectionable to the more obstreperous folks in the MLB The Show 26 player base than the "clarification" on the way the Plate Coverage Indicator changes — colloquially known as "shrinkage" when it comes to the on-screen indicator getting smaller — in game.
Shortly before launch it was communicated on stream that we would be removing PCI shrinkage on pitches down and away. We wanted to take the time to provide some clarity regarding that change. For balancing purposes, the game inherently applies bonuses and penalties based on pitch type and location. For example, if a pitcher hangs a curveball, your PCI grows because in real world baseball, that is a mistake and hitters will generally punish those pitches. Similarly, if a pitcher dots a slider down and away, that pitch inherently is more difficult to hit, hence, the slight reduction in your PCI size. Before the change, the user was penalized for both A) breaking balls moving away from the batter, and B) the pitch being located down in the strike zone. After the change, the user is only getting one of those penalties, not both. Also understand that your swing timing plays a huge role in your PCI size. The shrinkage also helps with the high number of foul balls that users have seen in the past. PCI shrinkage and PCI enlargement remain in the game as a mechanism to maintain balance between the pitcher and the batter. We hope this helps clarify the change and reasons behind it. As always, we appreciate your feedback.This ... does not clarify things all that well, to my eye, as it implies that one of breaking balls away from the batter and balls low in the strike zone causes the PCI to shrink, but does not suggest which of those two penalties are in play on any given pitch. Furthermore, it conflates two different aspects of the PCI indicator — the one players see before a swing and during a pitch, and the one players see only as on-screen feedback after a swing — in a way that feels needlessly confusing.
But then MLB The Show players have been upset about PCI shrinkage for a variety of reasons not limited to confusion about it: The metagame for online play has revolved around breaking pitches thrown low and away for multiple years now, and players have tried to achieve their own "balance between the pitcher and the batter" largely by relying on switch hitters who inherently face fewer pitches that break away from them by virtue of almost always seeing pitchers who will have their pitches break toward the batter.
I will not pretend to have a perfect solution to the problem of players being frustrated with a metagame that has become stale and stultifying, especially as it increasingly departs from real-life baseball, where it is less a prevalence of breaking balls but ever-increasing velocity that has changed the way baseball is played. But I do not think this imprecise communication around a particularly prickly part of the game is helping matters much — and I would encourage gameplay developers, not just content team members, to participate in on-stream or recorded demonstrations for better clarity.
Other News and Notes
- The new April Showcase Event is available in game for a week, and holds four April Spotlight Drop Packs — one for each Drop — and a 92 OVR Carlos Cortes for players who wish to make progress toward the April Spotlight Collections that arrive on Tuesday, May 5, and contain Lightning and Retro Lightning players.
- The April Spotlight Drop 5 Program, intended as a whole-month recap, is also coming on May 5.
- The Retro Lightning player tease: This player spent his entire career on one MLB team.
- A Double XP Weekend is in place until Monday, which should be helpful for anyone trying to run out grounders to the end of the 2nd Inning Program's XP reward path.
- An unusual Thursday content drop will include a new Program featuring an MLB The Show cover athlete.
- The first roster update with a ratings update comes next Friday, May 8, in conjunction with the arrival of the 3rd Inning Program.
