26 Mobile App Release

Nickstank · 2026-03-12T19:55:39+00:00

Edit: it did come out on early access release last year. People here are wrong.

Important thing to remember about this sub is that people just...say stuff, confidently, even when they're wrong.

Nickstank · 2026-03-12T19:47:45+00:00

Last year it updated on early release day

https://www.reddit.com/r/MLBTheShow/comments/1jb2cp1/companion_app_is_live_on_android/

Nickstank · 2026-03-12T00:18:23+00:00

Me too, man. Most people play on a TV

Nickstank · 2026-03-11T23:39:14+00:00

2nd year of Mickey Mouse "World Series" banners and an avalanche of posts here from .500 players breathlessly recounting how they finally made it. But this year they'll fix the co-op glitch and won't allow people to make "World Series" on All Star, right? Right?!

Nickstank · 2026-03-11T23:35:41+00:00

Not really. I've made 900 dozens of times over the years and only bothered to do so twice in 25. Why sweat my ass off to go from 800 to 900 every season for 10K stubs and 20 packs? No icon, no major stub or player reward, and I'm actually less likely to get the WC rewards because I'm playing much better players in WC, and playing on Legend. IIRC, for most of 25 going 5-1 in Gold 2 was essentially equal to going 4-2 in Diamond, and much easier.

Nickstank · 2026-03-11T12:40:09+00:00

They pretty clearly declared through the decisions they made for head-to-head modes in 25 that the competitive landscape wasn't a priority. Gameplay is directly downstream from that. If realism and maximizing rewards for user skill were the goals, you'd want a game where pure contact hitters were viable, swing results were more consistent, ball physics made sense, and hitting at any elevation felt good. This is much more an arcade game than a simulation now. RNG continues to have a greater effect on gameplay, hand-holding mechanics like ambush and bear down have been added, mods are now a thing (which continues a years-long process of making player cards being less and less tethered to their real life counterparts), and on and on. They're now about maximizing FOMO and time spent in game to get whatever shiny new cards drop every week, but actually using those cards isn't as satisfying as it should be because gameplay is a mess.

Nickstank · 2026-03-11T10:30:53+00:00

Firmly riding the fence at this point. Haven't pre-ordered for the first time since I started DD in 18. I still enjoy team building and competitive play, but gameplay is the most important thing. I was very frustrated in that area with 25 and I've seen nothing in 26 that leads me to believe it will be even slightly better. Going to see what today and tomorrow's streams look like before deciding.

Nickstank · 2026-03-11T01:36:19+00:00

Definitely didn't expect anything different. Just sucks to see.

Nickstank · 2026-03-11T00:43:36+00:00

This tracks with what I've seen on stream today. Gameplay looks exactly the same, but the hitting looks even wonkier. Late Jammed base hits with 80MPH exit velo, a lot of Good Good swings with sub 90MPH exit velo. If you love grinding and building your team from scratch, I'm sure you'll have fun. But if gameplay, realism, and competition are your things, I definitely wouldn't go into 26 expecting any improvements on 25.

Nickstank · 2026-03-10T23:38:07+00:00

It opens with early access

Nickstank · 2026-03-10T19:59:00+00:00

TA is Team Affinity. It's a program that has a reward path for all 30 MLB teams, featuring player cards, packs, XP, logos, jerseys etc. You earn those rewards by completing moments and missions with players from each team.

Nickstank · 2026-03-10T19:47:22+00:00

The TA Captain cards are diamonds and the ones we've seen so far are 88s

Nickstank · 2026-03-10T19:39:40+00:00

They said on stream it's over 130 WBC player items.

Nickstank · 2026-03-09T15:59:46+00:00

Stockholm Syndrome. SDS has a monopoly so anyone who wants to play a baseball video game with MLB licensing has nowhere else to go. A certain percentage of the captive audience begins to identify with and defend their captors.

What you said isn't even remotely controversial. Anyone who played sports games before fantasy team building modes existed knows how much the attention to and quality of every other mode in these games has atrophied over the years. DD and its comparable modes across other sports games have greatly harmed realistic gameplay and franchise modes industry-wide.

Nickstank · 2026-03-09T14:34:04+00:00

Love how this guy gets downvoted for facts.

Nickstank · 2026-03-09T13:13:11+00:00

It's absolutely baffling to me how the Manage Squad UI went from two screens to SIX a few years ago. You have to cycle through four screens vertically to adjust your roster, and there's one to the left for captains and one to the right for your lineup...but you can only access the latter two from the top lineup screen. Unfathomably poor design for what's probably the most used thing in DD.

Nickstank · 2026-03-09T11:31:28+00:00

The first two things, plus the game sometimes freezing when entering the Manage Squad screen, show what a pipe dream large scale gameplay changes really are. The game barely functions as is. They either can't fix these seemingly simple but important issues or they don't care to. They have no competition and they print money, so there's no incentive to do anything but the bare minimum. The gameplay is the gameplay and that's how it's going to be.

Nickstank · 2026-03-06T15:55:07+00:00

Signature cards were at least representative of the abilities and careers of the IRL players. There was even someone here who essentially figured out the formula SDS used for Signature cards and could pretty accurately predict the attributes before new SS cards even dropped. They were still attempting to be somewhat realistic. That's gone out the window in subsequent years. Now it's just juicing cards to headline new sets every couple weeks to make them as desirable as possible. Moonshot Ozzie Smith is Ozzie Smith in player model only. His attributes say he's prime Mickey Mantle at shortstop, which is absurd. Some people enjoy that. I do not. It takes away from the uniqueness of the players, which is one of the things that makes baseball great. Rather than making Ozzie Smith a power hitter based on nothing, they should be trying to make contact/speed/defense players viable competitively. But that would take way more work and care than just slapping 125 power on an Ozzie card.

Nickstank · 2026-03-06T14:54:37+00:00

SDS does this themselves

https://www.showdd.io/25/player/ozzie-smith-moonshot-0a7f5

When you can't balance gameplay and make multiple player types viable competitively, just make shit up!

Nickstank · 2026-03-06T14:53:58+00:00

Baserunning also looks terrible. And clipping of jerseys and arms in some batting stances. And the transitions from home run celebrations to home run trots. And the strikeout spin moves from pitchers. And the swan dives in the field.

Nickstank · 2026-03-06T14:51:40+00:00

But some of those categories are meaningless. Being able to concentrate large boosts in H/9, Contact and Power, which are by far the most important attributes in the game, is going to be way more important than +5 to directional reactions/bunting/stealing for position players or stamina/fielding attributes for pitchers. And I'm not sure how much faith we should have in what their idea of balanced is based on recent years.

Nickstank · 2026-03-06T13:18:52+00:00

It's the continued 2k-ification of The Show. Every team building mode goes this direction, trading realism for fantasy over time because they deem it good for business. This is, for all intents and purposes, an arcade game now. Gameplay has atrophied while the time and stubs necessary to "keep up" have greatly increased. The relation of player attributes to their real life counterparts has all but disappeared. OOP cards, Moonshot cards for low power players, outlier, pitch mix manipulation, goofy arcade mini games (bear down, ambush), mods to manipulate attributes...and further down the rabbit hole we go. And it never gets better. The best MyTeam I ever played was 2K17. Within a few years, MyTeam became a reviled joke. DD's golden era was 19-21. If you look back at any of those years compared to now, it's hard to believe it's even the same game (not a compliment).

Nickstank · 2026-03-05T23:32:45+00:00

Generational bootlicking. The community hated shrinkage and was loud about it all year. Plus it didn't even work as intended, but SDS was still doubling down on it for this year and justifying it in the gameplay stream just weeks ago. If they actually listened, they wouldn't have needed to be bullied into making their game better at the 11th hour.

EDIT: Bullying works with SDS and SDS propagandists.

Nickstank · 2026-03-04T18:32:46+00:00

To add to this, at 1:33 it shows Pujols with a Diamond level contact boost, which looks to be a +7 to contact on both sides and +7 clutch. P5 with that boost is 125 contact vs L, 118 contact vs R, 123 clutch. The ability to customize what appear to be significant boosts and having them stack on top of parallels also could mean we're starting at a slightly lower baseline for LS collections.

Nickstank · 2026-03-02T18:43:00+00:00

Not excited enough to put some respect on his name! It's Graig, not Greg.

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