One of the most promising roster projects in the last couple years has come from Sports Gaming Rosters and their Franchise to Fidelity roster project that works on MLB The Show. The MLB The Show 24 franchise mode roster has been released, and so it’s time to share their work with you all.
First off, here is the download info:
Roster Name: Franchise Fidelity to Reality
Username: ViatorLion10
Before I hand it off to let them explain some of the finer points — and you can read everything in-depth in the first post in the thread as well — let me just be clear these are especially for franchise mode. The rosters are great regardless, but the focus here is on making your franchises last multiple years and make prospects really matter. This is the true selling point if I had to give one myself.
On top of that, if you’re looking for additional items that go with this roster set, the recommended sliders are the S & B sliders, which we highlighted recently. On top of that, JWDixon’s franchise sheet is a great tool to use as well with this roster set to add even more layers of depth to your franchise mode experience.
With that said, I’ll include some thoughts from the creators below.
MLB The Show 24 Franchise Fidelity To Reality Roster
Meet The Team
-ViatorLion10: Project creator, chief auditor, in-game editor
-Sports Gaming Rosters (aka Big_Gargamel): Base roster creator, player likeness and equipment coordinator
-JWDixon: MLB/MiLB data gathering, system development, in-game editor
-Tiboss300: Prospect data gathering, in-game editor
-EggplantKitty: In-game editor
-Matt Thompson: ProspectsLive collaborator
The Vision
For years, I have been trying to achieve the best possible franchise experience. Full minors rosters added enjoyment to my experience, however, they often created huge problems for franchise longevity due to unbalanced potentials amongst prospects and MLB players. I then tried out other creators who attempted re-rate both overalls and potentials for MLB and MiLB players. I give these creators a ton of credit because I now realize how much effort goes into this process. That being said, I saw a vast room for improvement in a multitude of areas, so therefore, I set out to put my own little spin on things and create the most balanced and realistic roster available.
What Sets This Roster Apart From Others?
One of the things I wanted to focus on the most was trying to best recreate in-game every player’s unique style and level of play. To achieve this, I needed to get testing in-game to see what attribute values could replicate what statistics.
So that’s exactly what I did. I spent hours testing how variable values of attributes would lead to different outputs for statistics. I was then able to create standard curves from this testing so I could extrapolate how a player’s real-life statistics could be quantified into an in-game rating. From what I can tell, this is a feature unique to only my roster set. Others certainly use real life statistics to generate ratings, but none that I have found try to replicate those real-life numbers in-game.
After these ratings have been generated, I also go through an auditing process. No system is perfect, and I know that. Sometimes players can fall through the cracks and be heavily over/underrated. This auditing process allows me to catch these players and to adjust them accordingly. These changes are only made to truly replicate a player’s actual value in real-life and I try to keep them at a minimum when possible.
The second aspect that I wanted to heavily focus on in the depth of prospects. I was never a fan of rosters that prioritized AAA/AA filler players over top prospects who are in the low minors. Not to mention, sometimes lesser-known prospects can often be the most intriguing, and therefore, the most fun to play with in-game. That is why I decided to include every team’s top 30 prospects. This allows for significant depth in terms of franchise management, as well as it helps to really set apart strong farm systems from weak farm systems. Again, this is the only roster to my knowledge that goes in-depth from #1 all the way to #30.
The last thing that is unique to this roster set is a tiered potential system. This is by no means something that only I do, however, my tiered system is broken up into various roles that players can fill. Players are assigned certain roles based on their level of play and projected future level of play, and thus are assigned a pertinent value.
The end result should be a roster that has a high number of “average” players in the mid-70s with decreasing numbers of guys in the 80s and 90s along w/ guys in the low-70s and even upper-60s that will be on MLB rosters at times. This should lead to long-term stability of franchises and a strong bit of realism for hardcore sim players.
You can find the full list of features, methodology, how to edit draft picks, and more in the initial post. You can also join their Discord or give to their Patreon if you like their work. There will likely be some updates and bug fixes along the way, so keep an eye on things as well.
