[Syd Thrift]

This will sound like I'm just me-too'ing Markus but I just don't see how "fix the 3D" is helpful, like at all. If there are plays that are off - and I agree, there are a lot of plays that are off - the 3D Bugs forum has a very specific way you can send them in to be quashed. I'm seeing, FWIW, a great deal of progress this year on the bugs that have been mentioned. I'm not seeing any of the straight up Bugs Bunny throws, for instance - yes, there are a couple plays where the second baseman makes a slow-ish throw to first on an infield single, but it used to be a lot worse.

The bottom line is, 3D is not one "thing" that needs to be fixed, it's a lot of different, little things. FWIW FM has exactly the same issue; they've just also had a decade to get rid of the really silly bugs and add in a bunch more cool-looking gameplay.

As for the complaints that it's not behaving like FM... I mean, what did you expect? Personally I would *love* to see a transition to a physics-based engine. We have about a decade's worth of accumulated data to do that now and it would be freaking amazing. That being said, that "little change" means completely tearing down and rebuilding how the game currently works. The last time Markus did that he took a year off of versions and everyone complained that the sky was falling. On top of that there *will* be bugs in any new engine, huge ones, bugs that lead people to refuse to buy the new, physics-based version until they are fixed. I bet historical play will take literally years to get right (and, sorry to those of y'all who like 19th century ball but that may never get fixed).

Baseball is just straight up different from soccer. Sorry to sound flippant, but it just is. On the one hand you've got a zillion stats in baseball that you can use to make a game "feel" like virtually any era you want. That's hard to impossible to do with soccer, and it's a huge part of why FM has never even bothered to deal with historical play (plus, there's that whole issue with changing strategies in soccer - if you played in the 30s you'd almost have to limit people to the 2-3-5 or the W-M - whereas baseball has remained mostly static strategy-wise, with the changes coming more in the frequency of how often you employ stuff like the hit and run or pinch hitting or the use of relievers rather than brand new tactics). On the other hand, all of those stats means you can't just throw out the old engine that produces realistic stats, replace it with one that might not, and expect people to be OK with it (which I believe is more or less what happened when FM transitioned to a completely physics-based engine even for sims).