Diamond Dynasty is one of the staple game modes in any MLB The Show game. It allows players to craft a custom team, right down to the players on the roster to the team name, location, and colors. Your Diamond Dynasty team is yours to do with as you see fit, and this includes creating a completely new stadium to play your home games in.
Custom stadiums are a major attraction in Diamond Dynasty, as you can really get creative with the design and dimensions of the park. However, some players in MLB The Show have taken some extraordinary liberties with the stadium builder, and they’re using their design choices to give themselves an advantage in the Diamond Dynasty Ranked mode.
Diamond Dynasty Players Complain About Custom Stadiums In Ranked
The topic of custom stadiums in Diamond Dynasty Ranked isn’t a new one. For years, players have argued that custom parks shouldn’t be allowed in Ranked, specifically, as the team that hosts the game can create a major advantage for themselves. If not an advantage, though, hosting teams can make games downright unenjoyable due to the dimensions and other factors of their stadium.
The most common complaint from the community about the stadiums they see in Ranked is the high altitude of the park. You can put your stadium wherever you want and, depending on the location, can place it far above sea level, increasing the overall altitude. Similar to how the Colorado Rockies’ Coors Field acts in real life, a high altitude means the surrounding air is thinner, which results in baseballs traveling much farther than they normally would.
Obviously, this makes pitching much more of a headache, giving players who are more skilled at hitting a massive advantage over those who prioritize stronger pitching in Diamond Dynasty Ranked. To make matters worse, players who create custom stadiums in this environment also shrink their dimensions tremendously. You’ll often see parks with walls much closer to home plate than even the Short Porch in right field at Yankee Stadium. Paired with the higher altitude, pitching feels almost impossible in these types of stadiums.
What About The Other Side Of The Argument?
In most cases, Diamond Dynasty Ranked players want their competitive matches to be about skill rather than who can cheese their way through a game by hitting over a dozen home runs in purposefully unfair ballparks.
However, there have been some players to advocate for the custom stadiums remaining in Ranked. In one Reddit thread, a user argues that created parks fix what a lot of the default stadiums lack. Specifically, the batter’s eyes in custom stadiums are much better than the 30 existing parks in MLB The Show.
While that might be true, the better batter’s eyes can actually lead to even more frustrations with custom stadiums. A better batter’s eye likely results in stronger hits, which results in more home runs with the high altitude and shorter dimensions.
So, with this stalemate in place, many players have seemingly come to a couple of compromises, which they’re imploring the developers to listen to.
The first compromise is to only allow default MLB stadiums to be played in the top ranks of Diamond Dynasty Ranked mode. This makes it so the upper echelon of players doesn’t have to deal with the whackiness of many of the custom stadiums that you currently see in these higher-ranked matches. This idea would put forth a randomized MLB stadium for the match, giving neither team an advantage heading into it. Or, possibly, a veto system could be used that gives both players the chance to veto a stadium before the game. Then, after the vetoes, a random stadium is generated and played.
The other compromise the community has is simply allowing players to enable or disable the playing of custom stadiums in Ranked. Similar to how you can enable or disable crossplay in games, you could just flip a switch to play without custom stadiums. However, this would still allow players who liked custom parks the ability to play with them. While this would create two different matchmaking pools, it might be preferable to the other option, which removes the created stadiums altogether at higher ranks.
Of course, many players on Reddit and social media have simply advocated for players not to create “cheese” stadiums that aim to ruin the integrity of Ranked games. Unfortunately, the cat is fully out of the bag with this feature, and the stadium creator in Diamond Dynasty will likely continue to allow players to play at high altitudes or create their preferred dimensions in future MLB The Show games.
So, now that you’ve seen both arguments and some compromises, which side do you come out on?
