Alright, let’s talk about MLB The Show 23 for a minute. Been playing it a ton, mostly Diamond Dynasty, you know the drill. Some days you feel like a baseball god, other days you can’t hit water if you fell out of a boat. It was during one of those rough patches, getting absolutely shelled online, that I started wondering… are people finding ways around the system?
My Little Investigation
So, I did what anyone does when they’re frustrated and maybe a little too curious: I started looking around online. Not for anything crazy like god mode, but more like… exploits? Glitches? Little tricks people might be using to get an edge. You see weird stuff sometimes in online matches, right? Makes you wonder.
Found some forum posts, random videos, talking about timing things or ways to maybe guess pitches better. A lot of it sounded like nonsense, just people complaining. But one or two things caught my eye. Stuff about manipulating controller inputs or network timing maybe? Seemed complicated and honestly, pretty sketchy.
Trying Something Out (Sort Of)
Okay, I admit it. I decided to try one little thing I saw mentioned. It wasn’t a downloadable hack or anything, just a supposed timing exploit with the controller inputs right as the pitcher released the ball. The idea was it supposedly made the PCI react better or something. Sounded dumb, but I figured, hey, let’s try it offline first, just against the CPU. Don’t want to mess up anyone’s game online if it’s bogus, or worse, if it actually works and is cheating.
Here’s how that went:
- Fired up an exhibition game on rookie difficulty just to see.
- Tried doing the weird button combo thingy before each swing.
- Felt completely unnatural. Messed up my actual timing more often than not.
- Maybe, maybe once or twice I got a hit that felt suspiciously solid, but who knows if that was the ‘trick’ or just luck against the rookie CPU?
- Mostly, I just felt stupid doing it. It wasn’t playing the game anymore.
The Aftermath and Thoughts
After maybe 30 minutes of feeling like an idiot, I just stopped. It wasn’t fun. It didn’t suddenly make me amazing. If anything, it took away the satisfaction of actually squaring up a ball properly. Even if it had worked perfectly, it felt cheap. Like, what’s the point?
Then I went back online later. Played a ranked game. And guess what? I got matched against someone who was hitting everything. Stuff way out of the zone, perfect-perfect swings like it was nothing. It felt… off. Very different from just playing someone good. And it reminded me of my little experiment. Is that what people are chasing? Winning like that? It just felt hollow even from the receiving end. Made me appreciate just playing the game straight up, win or lose.
So yeah, that was my brush with looking into “cheating” in The Show 23. Didn’t find some magic bullet, didn’t become a cheater, just wasted a bit of time and confirmed that trying to game the system sucks the fun right out of it. Stick to getting better the real way, trust me. It’s way more satisfying when you finally launch that perfect-perfect nuke fair and square.
