MLB The Show 26: The Airing of Grievances Edition

We might be months and months away from Festivus, but that doesn’t mean the airing of grievances ever ended to begin with because I don’t remember any of you pinning me.

And as always, just because I’m doing this doesn’t mean I hate this year’s Show, but every sports game has things that bother me, and I like to get the grievances out on the table while they’re still fresh.

We have an official OS Account that you all can sign-up for now. I implore all of you, whether you want to subscribe to a paid tier or not, to go that site and sign-up. Go there, click the “Sign In” button and then use either Discord or your OS name to log-in and connect everything together.

If you had an OS Account, you could be partaking in our first community event using them, which was free for everyone to join. The March Madness bracket will end with a winner getting an OS hoodie engraved with their championship status on it. Steve and I are of course rocking close to last place, with only my ol’ MaddenMania brother krulmichael saving us from that fate as we enter the Sweet 16.

Lastly, please join the OS Discord.

So we’ll be skewing negative this week, but don’t take that to mean I’m not having a good time with the game — I am. There’s plenty to like in this year’s edition, and while I’m still waiting to start my “official” franchise until a little after Opening Day, I’ve been toying around in Diamond Dynasty and franchise as usual.

(By the way, baseball season is here. Even if I don’t recognize tonight’s first game between the Yankees and Giants on Netflix — gross — Thursday will be a glorious day.)

The other thing to remember about how I do this is I’m not going to criticize the game for what’s not there. We do wishlists and all that to more cover those bases. These grievances all relate to things already in the game. So I’m not going to mention online franchise not being there as a negative because it doesn’t feel like there’s much point to that.

Finally, I mostly try to look at “smaller” things with the Airing of Grievances. What’s defined as “small” depends on each individual, but you won’t see broad stuff like “franchise mode isn’t fun” here — with the exception of the first thing I’ll bring up.

With that said, let’s jump into things.

MLB The Show 26 Airing Of Grievances

Diamond Dynasty And Franchise Mode Fans Find Common Ground

Like I said, it will be mostly small things after this, but this is a big and broad one.

Who said it couldn’t happen? Server issues and a lack of stability are defining the early part of The Show’s cycle this time around and uniting DD and franchise mode fans under a common banner.

It isn’t that out of character for modern sports games to have server issues, but the thing about this version of “shaky servers” is that it’s not clear what’s even going on overall. DD and franchise mode are not having the same problems — after all, franchise mode is always offline so there’s no servers to contend with here — but both are inconsistent experiences right now.

With DD, it’s just that almost nothing feels reliable. DD is fun to play right now (to me), but everything from earning your rewards to finishing games feels like a crapshoot. Modern gamers are used to unreliable servers during that first week of a new release when there’s a massive influx of new people all playing at once, but this isn’t that.

The servers were not “crashing” or wholly unreliable during the opening week, it’s just intermittently been a mess. In addition, it’s almost like people on one coast will be having it worse than those on the opposite coast for an amount of time, and then the script flips and it’s the other coast having issues.

SDS released another patch for server maintenance in the last 24 hours, so we’ll see if things improve, but it’s among the top jobs for a yearly game to be stable because, well, people expect regularity in yearly games that many criticize for not changing enough.

When it comes to franchise mode, the issue here is more around the mode itself crashing. On the PS5, I have crashed back to the dashboard on multiple occasions already, and it’s been at different times — both in-game and then just in the franchise mode menus.

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