San Diego Studios developer, Nick Livingston, released a statement discussing their approach to refurbish and transition community challenges:
“In the past weeks, it’s become very obvious that the culture around Community Challenges has strayed from what we had hoped it would be. When we implemented it, we envisioned a place where users would thoughtfully craft interesting bite-size play sessions for their peers to test their skills against. It was always important to us that when someone took the time to sit down and create something compelling, they better be rewarded for doing so. We thought it would awesome to add a currency component to raise the stakes of the competition.
Community Challenges has evolved to a point where for every well thought out challenge made, we see an overwhelming number of very dull challenges and even worse, clickbait titles and descriptions attempting to confuse users about how the system actually works. We wish we had made some aspects of the mode more easily understood.
For now, we are taking steps towards revitalizing Community Challenges. A couple weeks ago, we put a restriction in that prevented users from creating challenges with Stub Buy-Ins. We immediately saw a huge increase in the average quality of challenges created. Today, we updated all active challenges to be free to play. In the upcoming patch, we will be updating the User Interface to reflect our decision to remove currency integration from the mode for the time being. We remain open to integrating currency into the mode in an interesting way moving forward. A big thanks to everyone who takes the time to create cool stuff in our game.”
In a nutshell, the developers have caught on to what some members among the community have been exploiting within community challenges and finally decided to put a stop to it. If you are unaware of community challenges and how they work then this may be news to you, however most of the community has been fully aware of the problem that the community challenges have brought forth.
Users were creating easy challenges, making multiple accounts, and having groups of their friends play these easy challenges to increase the buy in and reward. Ultimately, it was awarding them unlimited amount of stubs. There is a little more depth to it than that, and it somewhat led to the degradation of Diamond Dynasty these past few years.
The community challenges were implemented in last year’s version of MLB The Show. On paper, it sounded like a great idea and a fun way to compete with your friends by creating your own scenarios. It is unfortunate to see some members of the community exploit these challenges and it may even forces SDS to can the mode altogether.
If you were farming stubs by playing community challenges well then you have to find other ways to make stubs. SDS optimistically, sounds like they have a way to fix this problem and keep the mode in the game. Let’s all hope it works out for the best and we can enjoy this mode for what it was originally intended to be used for.
Do you think MLB 15 The Show Community Challenges are broken? What would you do to fix them??