The developers behind Out of the Park Baseball 27 are making major changes to one of the most crucial parts of the franchise: trade logic. 

According to comments from the team, OOTP 27 completely rebuilds how CPU-controlled teams evaluate and execute trades, particularly as the trade deadline approaches. Here are the comments from the OOTP 27 development team

I’ll go into it in a Road to Release video, but for this year we totally overhauled (from scratch) how buyer/seller type trades between CPUs are matched. So in 27 the AI does a better job deciding whether they are buyers/sellers/on the fence, and use factors like players they would shop, players they might need, strengths, weaknesses, etc. to pair teams a lot more effectively.
This isn’t every trade that will occur, but closer to the trade deadline it is the primary type of CPU to CPU type trade, so you’ll see a much more realistic trade deadline.
We included a screenshot of a sim of last year’s trade deadline run in 27 (I believe it was a live start started on like July 20th and run in OOTP27 up to the deadline). And that was to show that the moves made in OOTP27 are a lot more sensible and often reproduce the actual trades that occurred irl (see Suarez to Mariners, Bednar to Yankees, etc.).
So in general in OOTP27 you’ll see guys that you expect teams to deal at the deadline actually get dealt, and if a team decides to go into sell mode, they’ll usually actually sell all the guys they can. There’s more to it, but that’s the gist.

The OOTP franchise is best known for pure simulation, but the CPU-to-CPU trades were often criticized as unrealistic. Deals would often involve questionable prospect valuations and inconsistent trade logic. It made the game feel less authentic, which is a major flaw for a franchise that markets authenticity over anything else.

The new system in OOTP 27 aims to correct that by overhauling the decision-making process from scratch.

What This Means For OOTP 27

The updated AI is smarter at identifying whether a team is a buyer, seller, or somewhere in between. It takes into account multiple factors, such as roster strength and weaknesses, positional needs, and the types of players the team usually shops for. 

The logic becomes more prominent near the trade deadline, where buyer-seller dynamics are the most active. This results in a trade experience closer to that of real life. 

The team also showed an example via a screenshot. They simulated last season’s deadline in OOTP 27 to show the difference. The test was actually successful as it closely mirrored real-world MLB trades like  Suarez to the Mariners and Bednar to the Yankees.  

Another key improvement is how selling teams behave. If a club commits to sell mode, it will more consistently move the veterans and expiring contracts fans would expect to see on the market. Rather than holding onto obvious trade chips or attaching unnecessary high-end prospects to expiring deals, the AI is designed to pursue more coherent roster strategies.

For long-time franchise players, this upgrade will drastically improve the immersion. After all, OOTP is designed to give you the most realistic MLB team management experience. With this update, the game is only going to get better when it comes to realism.

Plus, with OOTP 27′s rebuilt engine, the developers are trying to simulate the complexities of real-world office decision-making, especially during baseball’s most chaotic time period, the trade deadline.

San Diego Studio recently shared its first look at the presentation upgrades for MLB The Show 26. The upcoming game will feature upgrades to the commentary with Jessia Mendoza, Boog Sciambi, Chris “Singy” Singleton, and Robert Flores covering the action. As you progress from the minors to the majors, the broadcast will adapt to your standings with stat-focused presentations. Stadium atmosphere also sees some upgrades with better visual effects, fireworks, smoke, and more.

Unfortunately, players over at the r/MLBTheShow are less than impressed:

“Why does none of this seem new? I swear I’ve seen 90% of those in previous games.”

Now, it’s not really like there’s absolutely nothing notable about these presentation upgrades. For example, the fan culture is expanded with 19 colleges now, with new fans, chants, and uniform colorways. There are also new ballparks, like the Tokyo Dome and Hiram Bithorn Stadium in Puerto Rico, where you’ll be able to play with your Diamond Dynasty.

So yeah, there are definitely some changes here. Are there big changes to the presentation? Not really, and that’s the problem with annual sports games, as highlighted by this comment:

“All these games, sports and other genres basically release the same shit every year or couple years. Arc Raiders is one of the only few games that’s been exciting. Sports games are really at a low. Yes you are just playing the sport what else could they do? Well, up the presentation game, find new ways to improve the movement of the players to be even more fluid, find ways to improve the graphics. I don’t know, I think sports games should release every few years and they can sell a roster update every year.”

Business As Usual

To be perfectly frank, there’s nothing really new to see here, as we see the cycle repeat itself with a majority of annual sports releases. There are incremental or marginal improvements, fans complain, some people still enjoy the game, and we wait to repeat this for the next entry to the series. But this doesn’t excuse the fact that the presentation and graphics are not a major improvement for MLB The Show 26. As we discussed a few weeks ago, SDS needs to realize it’s a new era.

Diamond Dynasty is widely considered one of the most extensive and rewarding card-collecting modes in any sports game. Fans of MLB The Show 25 really enjoy the mode with the current game, and it’s engaging enough that people have stuck with it year-round. However, after such a long cycle with the game, fans have various criticisms about the mode and how it can improve for MLB The Show 26. 

The power creep issue is one of the main critiques, but there are other potential problems that you only learn by playing the game for a long period. With MLB The Show 26 just around the corner, here are some key improvements we want to see with Diamond Dynasty.

Overhaul Team Affinity

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Team Affinity was created to encourage themed squad-building with boosts related to specific MLB teams. But in The Show 25, there are quite a few aggravating points with this system.

One of the biggest problems with Team Affinity is the pre-locked lineups that are set a month before real-time roster changes. This makes the players feel trapped, as they are forced to grind on cards that become outdated almost instantly. The chapters are extremely long, and even dedicated grinders complain about how replacing outdated cards with powerful ones resets their progress, sometimes completely. 

If the franchise wants player satisfaction, it should focus on resetting affinities every month and adding wildcard slots for upgrades. Also, to prevent the grind from becoming boring, the game could introduce boosts that scale with performance or affinity-specific events. 

Cut The Offline Grind And Supercharge Online Rewards

The game’s structure puts players who have limited time on their hands at a constant disadvantage. Despite its fascinating elements, it suffers from inconsistent rewards and unlucky pulls that do not validate the investment. 

In order to stay in the competition, you have to complete lengthy Conquest maps and Mini Seasons. This often requires you to play 50+ games just for one usable diamond card. 

The online play has comparatively slow progression, and offline modes often feel insufficient in terms of scaling. This balance of power between players who don’t spend money and those who buy stubs is quite strange. To prioritize skill above all else, player progression needs to tie itself to online wins rather than total games played. 

Stability And Balance Improvements

There’s a lot to talk about when it comes to overall gameplay and network stability. Major community complaints consist of frequent disconnects, mid-game freezes, and “DD not loading” errors. Every game can have unexpected glitches; that’s fair. But the real problem with MLB The Show 25 was that hotfixes arrived weeks later from when the issue occurred. This is extremely problematic for a game that is built around quick matches and events. 

Another crucial topic is overpowered 99-rated cards being released too early, which makes later progression make no sense. If you feel the game is too easy for you and want to play on greater difficulties, there are other problems. Perfect inputs often result in weak contact, while somehow, late swings produce home runs. 

MLB The Show 26 needs quick patches, a focus on prioritizing servers, and better overall netcode. To control the meta, early-game cards need a lower overall rating to balance the power curve. 

Last week, Warframe’s hotly anticipated Old Peace update launched, kicking off a saga that digs into the very foundations of the nearly 13-year-old game’s lore. Of course, like clockwork, servers immediately took a tumble, resulting in crashes, outages, and chat issues. But why has this pattern become so predictable with online games? Especially when developers are well aware that a storm of their own making is on the horizon?

During a Game Awards-adjacent event celebrating The Old Peace’s launch last week, I asked creative director Rebb Ford.   

"You've gotta spin up capacity,” she told Aftermath, referring to the practice of paying money to a distribution partner for additional servers ahead of or during moments when many players will be trying to access content. “You're allowing so many connections. We're an always-online game, right, so every time a player does something, there's a server call. There's something that needs to be verified server and client side. … Login, mission complete, anything that needs to talk to us to say 'You did this, you did that’ – it happens to us at a volume level that's very hard to account for."

In The Old Peace’s case, Digital Extremes was ready for a stampede the moment it opened the gates, but not quite ready enough.

"We actually didn't fall over as much as I thought we would,” said Ford. “That's when we realized 'Oh, we didn't think this was gonna be bigger than TennoCon [Warframe’s annual convention that often drives record player numbers].' We spun up IRC servers, we spun up things just to deal with volume. But sometimes you just cannot be prepared enough when you didn't predict it to be the third-best day in the history of the game. That was an error on our part, but it's not so much a tech error; it was an anticipation error. We fixed it very quickly."

The ability to quickly rectify server issues is also the result of preparation – in some cases years of preparation.

"One of our most important things to do is make sure people can get the content as fast as possible,” said Ford. “With Warframe, when we have the build or the update, we release it to our distributing partners, and we do something called a pre-heat of our CDN, or content delivery network – which is basically us saying 'People shouldn't all be fetching the game data from one node.' Because that will take forever. It'll get congested. So we distribute it, and this is through years of network partner shopping, working with really good network partners. We have content servers in 16 or 17 central population hubs."

The pre-heat, Ford explained, ensures that the whole network doesn’t hinge on a single point of potential failure.

“So sometimes you'll be going in the Philippines instead of being routed to our deploying headquarters, which is Ontario,” she said. “We pre-heated our server structure across the globe so that people can fetch [new content] quicker, and that takes a lot of load off.”

But that’s only one stair in what Ford characterized as a winding staircase of individual, overlapping needs.

"So that's the first point of failure: Can you download the game at all?” she said. “Second point of failure is: Can you login at all? When that happens, that all comes to us through login capacity. That one, you just have to spin up more capacity. Then you have the question of 'Can people play missions?' So you can kind of see the staircase: Can you download the game? Can you login to the game? Can you play the game? And each one of those is a slightly different sector of stability."

In Warframe’s case, elements can function independently, but if they’re not all working in conjunction, players quickly begin to see the seams.

“A lot of people can be logged into the game, and that's cool, but if you can't play, [then there's a problem],” said Ford. “It's like Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. Can you chat? You don't need chat to play the game, but chat servers run independently. Those were hit the hardest [on Old Peace launch day], and we fixed it fairly fast by spinning up more capacity." 

Games are complicated, as is the process of distributing them to millions of different computers with as many hardware configurations as there are stars in the sky. You will not be surprised to learn, then, that many other things can also go wrong.

“We have issues where we release new code in this build, and then maybe one piece of code fires every second on a heartbeat,” Ford said. “And sometimes we find these heartbeats, and we're like 'What is pinging the servers every second on the second,' and we're like 'It's the new title system we put in,' for example. ‘It's checking against server-client to issue you a title, but it's doing it in a way where we were unsure because it's checking all this indexed stuff.’"

Warframe has been around for over a decade and regularly pulls in tens – or in Old Peace launch day’s case, hundreds – of thousands of concurrent players. Nonetheless, said Ford, Digital Extremes still frets about The Ramifications as though it were a much smaller company.

"We still feel very young and scrappy, and we're like 'Can we even afford $600 more per month in capacity?'” she said. “That's the kind of question we ask ourselves on launch day. And then we're like 'Just do it! Just do it!'"

Warframe’s servers weren’t quite able to withstand the sheer weight of years’ worth of anticipation on launch day, but Ford was relieved that they didn’t go down for “hours and hours,” which would’ve necessitated a suitably less jubilant speech at the launch event in LA. 

"It's exciting. It's thrilling. Everyone did an amazing job,” she said. “We asked our team to do the impossible with this update, so even though those little hiccups happened, we had two speeches prepared – funeral or the celebration – and we undoubtedly got to do the celebration."

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Sony and San Diego Studio are officially expanding the MLB The Show franchise to mobile devices with the launch of MLB The Show Mobile. However, The Show Mobile website lists that the game is currently under a limited regional release. Right now, only people in the Philippines can download and play it. We’re unsure how long this soft launch will last, and the website also states that they don’t have a timeline for expanding availability to more regions.

We also know that this is a standalone title that is exclusive to iOS and Android, meaning there won’t be cross-play with console versions. For iOS, the website recommends an iPhone 11/iPhone SE 2nd Gen or above (iOS 26 is required), and the Android requirements list a MediaTek Dimensity 9200 as the minimum processor, while recommending 8GB of RAM and the Android 12 operating system.

What To Expect From MLB The Show Mobile

While they’re not calling it as such, the studio’s own website indicates that this phase is effectively a public beta. According to the official website, most player progress and content will be wiped before the global release, including unopened packs and earned player items. Purchased Stubs are the only exception, and any bought-but-unopened packs will be converted into a special currency for a “Loyalty Shop” once the full game arrives.

The studio also describes the game as a “new standalone experience built from the ground up”, indicating that this is not a scaled-down port of the console editions. Hopefully, it’s a better showing than the WWE 2K25 Netflix Edition. The game will feature touch-friendly batting, pitching, and fielding mechanics, along with a full roster of MLB teams, stadiums, and modern and historic players.

Generally, mobile ports of such sports games often focus on bite-sized gameplay: quick PvP matches, daily challenges, and event modes. The developers confirm that this is the case with MLB The Show Mobile.

Since its inception in 2006, the MLB The Show IP has been a console staple for PlayStation consoles. Eventually, it also expanded to Xbox and Nintendo platforms, but this is the franchise’s first foray into mobile platforms. This is the first true attempt to translate the simulation-style DNA into a phone-friendly form.

Core gameplay similarities, like familiar batting timings, realistic stadiums, and licensed rosters, remain. However, it will be quite difficult to match the depth of its console counterpart. When the full global release eventually arrives, we might see the game positioned closer to FC Mobile or NBA 2K Mobile —fast-paced and driven by card-collecting systems.

Switch-hitters have taken over almost every Ranked match, and it feels no less than a pandemic in MLB The Show 25’s Diamond Dynasty mode. The online meta is a mess with the same lineup of switch hitters ready to mess with any matchup you try to set up. 

As a pitcher, it seems kinda pointless to worry about matchups anymore because rivals simply wipe out any platoon advantage when the next guy walks up to the plate. So, if you’re not stacking the lineup with players that can bat from both sides, you’re basically playing on hard mode. 

It’s a balancing issue that needs to be addressed, and that’s exactly what we’ll be discussing today.

Switch-Hitters Are Over-Represented in Diamond Dynasty

Switch-hitters are the bread and butter for easy pickings, and currently, most competitive squads are built around them in Diamond Dynasty. Revolving the game around switch-hitters really pulls the fun out of the game, especially for those who care about their card collections. 

Those classic one-sided hitters are turning stale these days, and loading the lineup with switch-hitters has become the norm. Such a formation, rather, contrasts with real baseball play, where you rarely see more than two or three of those versatile hitters in a squad.

The Real Culprit: Meta Design & PCI Shrink

If we hunt for the real culprit, it’s the PCI shrink on outside sliders, and breaking balls against same-handed hitters is way too severe. The game punishes you the second you put a right-sided bat to a right-sided pitcher, or vice versa. 

Your PCI, the sweet spot for hitting shrinks down, especially on those low and away pitches everyone loves to spam. At that point, you’ll often find yourself reacting instead of actually competing.

So now, the path to winning seems to be the one with a loaded lineup of switch-hitters. It’s not even a smart “meta” anymore; it’s the only real way to keep up. It feels like SDS overstated their balance changes after all the home runs people were blasting on tough pitches. However, one-sided hitters are almost unplayable. Now, if your player can’t play both sides, you might as well bench him. 

Let’s be honest, that’s not how it’s supposed to work, and the community consensus is essentially the same — nobody ikes the current state of the PCI shrinkage.

How Can SDS Actually Balance This?

To work on the current sad state of Switch-Hitters in MLB: The Show, here’s what we can expect from SDS:

SDS needs to stop shrinking the PCI so much. They should dial it back, especially on those outside pitches when you’re matched up against same-handed batters. Let single-sided hitters have their moment if balance is the goal.

Real baseball doesn’t necessarily limit switch-hitters, but what we see in The Show’s meta is much more extreme than reality. To fix that, SDS could set a cap on switch-hitters and try to limit their usage in Diamond Dynasty.

One-sided hand stars shouldn’t be left rotting either. SDS may add quirks or clutch bonuses, so they can remain reliable matchups. In essence, when legendary righties and lefties start pulling in clutch moments, people will start playing them again.

What’s Next

What we need from SDS is an effective rework. Until same-handed matchups keep getting punished, we’ll keep seeing the same switch-hitter lineup in every ranked match. I mean, Diamond Dynasty doesn’t even feel like the real baseball experience anymore. 

SDS needs to tone it down by holding back those high-end switch hitters. It’s time for a real rebalance.