Front Page Sports Baseball - Limitations

Limitations

The popularity of the game has waned for many reasons. The first blow came when Sierra abandoned the series. The next major issue was the games incompatibility the newer operating systems entering the market (Windows XP). The game would crash upon finishing a game on NT based systems.

The limited ratings scale of the players continued to be an issue, as this made it difficult to accurately emulate real major league baseball players. The fact that all players were only assigned 5 ratings limited the nuances of real baseball. These ratings controlled: contact(CH), bat speed(PH), run speed(SP), fielding ability(FA), Arm Strength(AS). Missing skills that could have enhanced game play would have been ratings for batting eye, base stealing ability (since not all fast runners can steal bases, and some slower runners are very good base stealers), fielding separated in to throwing accuracy, catching ability, and range, bunting.

Additionally, the games internal player creation engine gave power hitters an unfair advantage in their ratings. Hall of fame players like Wade Boggs and Tony Gwynn were only given respectable CH and very low PH. This was because the game assigned CH based on batting average and not a better method like balls in play or strikeout rate. The game also based its ratings on a specific baseball seasons which had some effect on ratings. Early after the games released, this was a common complaint, because while these players excelled in real life, their counterparts in the game suffered. Conversely, the counterparts of power hitters dominated because the game usually have them a higher CH rating then deserved and this combined with their higher PH rating made the results obvious.

Gamers eventually determined that although players like Boggs and Gwynn did not hit many home runs, they did have a respectable bat speed and required a higher PH rating than they were given, this was balanced by giving them a high G/F ratio that resulted in that player hitting more line drives than fly balls. As a result there were many user created formulas for determining player ratings that would work better in the game. This discovery extended the life of the game for many leagues. In recent years, additional modifications to the pb.ini file has resulted in more affective use of contact hitters.

Pitchers only had the ability to feature four pitches in game play, there are pitchers in real life who feature five and sometimes six pitches.

There were also several bugs that interfered with gameplay at times. One issue was an injury bug that would cause teams to lose several pitchers in a row on consecutive pitches. But most of these limitations did not cause gamers to lose affection for the game, it was more a victim of time as is the case with most computer games.