I’ve been playing Diamond Dynasty long enough to know when something feels off.
That doesn’t mean every loss is suspicious. It doesn’t mean every perfect-perfect against me is cheating. It doesn’t mean every guy who spits on a slider in the dirt is using software. At a 900+ level, you expect people to be good. You expect players to lay off garbage, punish mistakes, dot corners, and make you earn everything. That’s Legend. That’s the game.
But after watching Your Friend Kyle’s latest video on cheating in MLB The Show 26, I’m not sure “he’s just cracked” is going to be enough of an explanation anymore.
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Seeing It Laid Out Changes Everything
The video, which features an anonymous user showing how the software works, is honestly disturbing. Not because most of us didn’t know cheating existed. Trust me, we did. The community has been talking about suspicious swings, automatic pitching, and impossible plate discipline for a while now.
What makes this different is seeing the process laid out in real time.
The software is not just some simple timing macro. According to the video, it can read the screen, detect the pitch, track the strike zone, adjust for difficulty, control swing timing, move the PCI, and even help with pinpoint pitching. There are settings for different difficulties, different swing types, pitching inputs, Mini Seasons grinding, pack opening, and duplicate selling.
If that’s not bad enough, from the footage shown, it wouldn’t even be obvious to anyone. That’s because, contrary to popular opinion, the software doesn’t take an ace perfect-perfect swing every time. Instead, it reads the pitch and calculates where to place the PCI, not just for the optimal swing timing, but also for the best launch angle. This means that some swings will be early, some will be late, and some will be perfect.
Sometimes, it doesn’t swing at all. It can be configured to check swing at close pitches, or even toggled off entirely with a couple of button presses to avoid suspicion. This is a far cry from the obvious, rage-inducing cheating people expect and see in games like NBA 2K. It is built by design to be subtle.
As of now, the software has only one Achilles’ heel: relief pitcher Tyler Rogers. But only under one specific condition.
Initially, the belief was that any submarine pitcher would throw the cheating software off its game and render it useless due to the lower arm angle. However, according to the anonymous user (whom we’ll call Anon from here on out), that isn’t true.
For example, Darren O’Day — a submarine pitcher — poses no threat to the software.
Rogers is different, but not just because of his arm slot. The key detail is visual contrast. If Rogers is wearing white pants, the ball can blend with the uniform at release, which can confuse the software’s ability to track it. Under those exact conditions, the system becomes inconsistent, if not completely ineffective.
Wild.
This Goes Way Beyond Ranked Seasons
Toward the end of the video, Anon claimed that he had never used the software in a Ranked Seasons game, and instead only used it to grind Mini Seasons and collect packs. On the surface (should you believe him), that sounds relatively harmless. I mean, who doesn’t dream up ways to reduce the grind, or have it done passively in the background whilst tending to other things? But even this kind of methodology isn’t a victimless crime.
It affects the in-game economy.
If someone can leave a bot running Mini Seasons for days, grind rewards, stack Stubs, and build a team without actually playing, that affects the entire mode. Diamond Dynasty is built around time, skill, grinding, and team-building. Once automation enters the picture, the integrity of that loop begins to fall apart.
Why This Isn’t An Easy Fix
So the obvious question is this: can San Diego Studio actually fix this?
I don’t know. And that’s the scary part.
Let me be the first to tell you that outside of some crappy old MySpace pages, I’ve never written a line of code in my life. I’ve never developed a video game in my life, nor have I ever been consulted on one. So when it comes to cheating — or how to detect it — my expertise falls somewhere between “huh” and “what.”
But even I, a self-professed moron, understand the basics: cheating in online video games usually involves some kind of detectable tampering. Something an anti-cheating system can identify.
This is different.
If the program is watching the screen through a capture card and sending controller inputs, that becomes a much uglier problem. From the game’s perspective, it may just look like a player pressing buttons. Very precise buttons. Very convenient buttons. But buttons nonetheless.
SDS can tweak pitch visibility, change timing windows, alter feedback, mess with pinpoint consistency, adjust how the PCI behaves, or improve detection of suspicious input patterns. Maybe they can flag players who have inhuman plate discipline over large samples. Maybe they can detect people who never miss pinpoint, never chase, or show impossible consistency across hundreds of games. Maybe Mini Seasons needs stronger bot detection, cooldowns, or behavior tracking.
But every solution has a downside.
If SDS makes pitching less readable visually, normal players are the ones who suffer. If they randomize timing too much, the game feels worse. If they ban on suspicious stats alone, innocent elite players who put in the work to become good could get caught in the crossfire. If they overcorrect, Legend difficulty turns into RNG hell. If they underreact, we keep playing Russian roulette every time we load into Ranked.
You see, the problem isn’t as much about cheating as it is about trust. And that’s my main concern.
As someone playing in the 900+ level, I already know that Legend is stressful. Every pitch matters. Every swing matters. One mistake can lose you the game. But now, there’s this extra layer in the back of your mind.
“Did that guy actually read me perfectly for nine innings?”
“Did he actually square that up?”
“Is he elite, or am I playing against software?”
That is a horrible place for a competitive game to be.
The worst part is that cheating doesn’t even need to be widespread to damage trust. It only has to be plausible. Once players believe the other guy might not be legitimate, the entire competitive experience devolves into distrust.
You know the whole “Spider-Man points at Spider-Man” meme? Yeah, that’s what it feels like right now.
Can SDS Fix It?
Can SDS fix the cheating issue in MLB The Show 26? Maybe.
Again, I know absolutely nothing about anti-cheat software. But I’m not convinced there’s a single magic patch that makes this go away. After all, we’re not talking about something intrusive such as file tampering.
To be fair, SDS does not need to tell us every detail of what it is doing, because that would obviously help the wrong people. But the studio definitely needs to communicate that this is being treated as a serious matter of competitive integrity.
Quiet bans are fine. Backend detection is fine. Input analysis, economy monitoring… whatever it takes. You what wouldn’t be fine? Telling players to “report it and move on.”
My best guess is that eliminating cloud play — which seems necessary for this setup, given the reliance on PC input — would be the solution. But I don’t know if that’s the fix, or just one piece of a much larger problem.
All online games come with a promise: we are all playing the same game under the same rules. This is especially true in Diamond Dynasty, MLB The Show‘s flagship mode. And as of right now, I don’t think anyone is convinced that we’re playing the same game, or are confined to the same set of rules.
Published: May 1, 2026 09:00 am