[mac2298]

I just got MLB Manager 2015 (finally!!!) and here are my initial impressions on it.

First off, there are a few things that bug me. While the player ratings are more accurate than I felt they were last year, there are still some seriously underrated players. For example, Devin Mesoraco has a 2 star rating initially, as well as 2 star potential. As a Reds fan, this is unacceptable (I ended up editing him manually). He is probably the best offensive catcher in the NL right now, up there with Lucroy and Posey. He hit over .500 SLG last season. How can he have just 11 power (I think this was the default... I changed it to 12, so that I'm not completely biased)??? He has to have at least 4 stars with 4.5 potential. He has definitely shown that he will become one of the best power-hitting catchers in baseball.
And just to prove I'm not biased here, I feel like Joey Votto is waaaaay too overrated. 5 stars? Really? Maybe 2 or 3 seasons ago, but right now he simply cannot have green contact, power, and batting eye. I had no mercy on him, nuking him to a 3 star player with 15 eye, 12 contact, and 11 power. There are a few other players on the Reds that seem rated wrong, but these are the worst of them, and I'm sure there are many other examples of this on other teams. I sincerely hope that this is fixed in the Opening Day update, as it can take the fun out of managing my own team.

I also would like to see readjusted team profiles. The Reds still have 180,000,000 in cap space, which is just too much. Last season we had a record 114,000,000 payroll, and a large portion of that was cut during the offseason this year. I would say a max of 120,000,000 for us is more than fair. Again, I'm just using the Reds as an example because I'm familiar with them, I'm sure many other teams have similar issues. I think overall the budgets are much higher than they really are.

The fact that players accept superlow contracts doesn't help either. When star SPs go for 12,000,000 per year and you have 180,000,000 to spend, suddenly payrolls don't matter.

Additionally, I am disappointed that there aren't any facts/quotes. That was one of my favorite parts! Those Yogi Berra quotes that came every once in a while made my day, and all of the quotes were incredible, even if I had seen them 10 times already (I've seen them all). At least re-add the same quotes, because that's a huge part of the game for me.

My final complaint is about player morale. This is an issue I've been having since last year. When you demote a player, their morale shouldn't automatically go down. Oftentimes by the end of the season my entire team has those frowny faces, even if we did well and they get game time, because they've been moved up and down for various purposes such as injuries.

Ok, I've slammed the game enough, let me add in some of the things I love. Overall, I have got to say I am very impressed. The subtle changes to the UI look great, the licensing is a huge bonus, the players are, for the most part, more appropriately rated than I found them to be in the previous version. The new trading features look good, although I have yet to use them. The new sim features are a great tool, something that will allow me to get much more use out of this game than I did in the past. However, what I perhaps love most is the extended roster. The rosters feel so much more in depth now, and I feel like I really have the entire organization at my finger tips. When the time comes to add to my 40 man roster, I'll have plenty of my team's best prospects to try out, and I won't feel like I've completely thinned out my team in a few seasons.

So overall, I'm really happy with the game. I'm not sure that it is quite enough to warrant a 5 dollar upgrade from the previous version, considering they're so similar and the old version is now free, but it does enough to keep the dedicated satisfied. If the mentioned problems, particularly the player ratings and definitely the quotes, can be at all fixed, it will make the game even more enjoyable.