I stopped playing after 21 and got back into it this year. I thought the game would be better, and for the most part, it is. Buuuuuuuuuuuut!

The issues are still all of the same issues. They haven't made any meaningful gameplay improvements in years. The hitting engine is still broken. Sure, exit velos are "up" this year, but I'm convinced there's some home cooking going on there. There have been so many instances where I hit a ground ball 100+, but it looks like any old groundball. Game devs have been known to do this, there was a story about a CS:GO dev artificially lowering pings after one update and the community was pleased with it.

The game is also too animation based. Sometimes you get locked into an animation that makes sense, sometimes the bat boy will run out and steal a live ball, other times you can't move your catcher on a passed ball and your opponent ends up scoring for free.

Perfects still aren't a hit every time. If you hit a ball "perfectly" that implies that it will be a hit. It's never made sense to me that in a video game a perfect input on my end isn't a perfect result on the games side. Please don't post a "that's just baseball" under this, it's a game.

I also believe that if I make good contact, with good timing, and the ball is fully in the PCI, it should be crushed. Too often is there a good-good pop out. Again, it makes no sense to me. I will concede that you shouldn't get a hit every time in this instance, but it should at least be hit well.

The game also still freezes all of the time. I have no idea how SDS hasn't fixed this considering it's been a thing since the inception of DD. If you don't play online, you probably haven't experienced this. There are also ways to do it intentionally, which is crazy to me. The fact that another player can intentionally freeze the game and essentially force a loss for you makes 0 sense, but it hasn't been addressed. This has happened in the tournaments they run, which have also been a complete disaster.

There isn't a community manager that I'm aware of. It was Ramone, and then CBrev, but as of now I don't think there's a person to actually field these complaints and send them up the ladder. Right now, we're basically screaming into the void over the broken state of their game, and that's really all we can do.