Power Pros Forum

I guess a post here would be cool:

So over the past month or so, on the discord server we talked about how the traits were dispersed in the default game; and that we wanted to clear some weird areas of it by editing players to reflect more IRL stuff.
I mentioned that we might not be taking the traits literally enough.

What I mean by this is that 'Timely Whiff' has the description: "Bats poorly with 2 strikes". Pretty much everyone here uses this ability for players that have high K% since it is reflected in the game play itself. Players with this ability usually top the league with total strikeout numbers if they play enough.

But certain players have it when they probably shouldn't. One example (also used in discord chat) was Robinson Cano being the owner of 'Timely Whiff'.
Cano's K% in 2007 was 12.7% (below league avg back then), 2008 was at 10.3%. So it's clear that Cano did not strikeout a lot (at least when the game came out, assuming devs used those season stats for skills and traits). BJ Upton had a 28.1 K% in 2007, 20.9 in 2008 (latter being high since 10+ years ago), but does not have Timely Whiff in MLBPP08.
So my suggestion was that maybe the devs either just dun goofed really bad with a lot of players or we aren't taking the description for its actual face value. "Bats poorly with 2 strikes," sure maybe the devs had an outline for batting with 2 strikes and Cano fell victim but the outcome results in massive K totals, along with low batting average (usually). It's confusing in some parts because you may think that the more you strikeout, you should probably bat worse with 2 strikes than someone that doesn't.

Another trait brought up was 'Dr. K'. Generally agreed that we use this one for pitchers with higher K/9 and K% numbers. Mike Mussina has this trait but his K/9 in 2007 was 5.4 (not above avg), 6.7 in 2008. But the trait reads: "Pitches well with two strikes". Again, maybe the devs had a formula for literally pitching with 2 strikes on a batter, not always resulting in a strikeout, but the game mechanics work that way.

Pretty poor planning since they were not all properly used, but it's also tough to understand it since we don't have their methods of applying these traits.

I feel like this happened a lot in the game, the biggest problem I have is that they would just lowly rate prospects for no reason, I have a feeling this was what happened when the Japanese devs did ratings for the games, them slapping F and E ratings for prospects back then like Justin Upton and Joey Votto. It just seems like not a ton of research was done. I imagine that the NPB players in the Japanese games had more effort and scouting put into them.

my guess is that they had a formula that had a 162 game variable included. so like player A has 30 HR in 162 games compared to player B with 25 HR in 100 games. they may nerf player's B power because there weren't as many games played. but then there's weird instances like Carl Pavano only playing 9 game total from 2006-2008. still has decent letter stats

I think that just happens with ratings at times, they are super random. But with the abilities I really like them and I think it's a concept that the power pro games did really well and that I see other games doing more in their own way. I've read some translations for the later power pro games and some actually raise the numerical value of the letter stats.

i like the idea of abilities too, makes the game series unique, but they seem to outweigh the letter stats for simulation purposes. for manually playing they'll definitely change some of the gameplay (cannon arm, GD IF hitter, throwing 2-4, stealing 2-4, etc.) but if you edit a player to have the lowest possible letter skills and give them all blues, they'll still put an All-Star season together with it.
and then you have the opposite effect where Zambrano is OP for manually playing, but when simulated he flops hard

True, I think David Dellucci was amazing as a power hitter because of the power hitter ability, so even at E power abilities make you go beast mode. That probably applies to average hitter as well. Video game simulation is a strange thing.