I've been noticing while playing online games that improper positioning doesn't seem to result in errors as I had assumed that it would. Occasionally, particularly with a running shot, an error will result, but it seems that most shots with what looks like horrible positioning don't result in an error. I've watched many replays of online matches, which has confirmed this. I'm not sure that this happens with all players, as I do remember several months ago playing with some who had really poor positioning and who made many errors because of it. However, I doubt that there is anything that can be set with a player's skills or whatever that would give an advantage here, so I'm assuming that this issue is independent of a particular player. It's been a while since I have noticed errors resulting regularly from poor positioning.
With all of these matches, Simulation mode is being used. Really, I don't see how Arcade mode could make it any easier to hit error-free shots with poor positioning. I'm not referring to just safe strikes where the game returns the ball just because the player is in reach of it. I know that there is this "feature" where I think a safe strike hit with the racket handle results in a very short ball, but that isn't what I am talking about. However, certainly many of these out-of-position strikes were made with what appears to be the racket handle (but they weren't short or slow shots). What's going on
This is frustrating, because sometimes I get into long rallies where the opponent does reach a ball that I thought would be a winner and returns it well even though the opponent was in a horrible position. I just have to keep waiting for the right moment to try to hit a winner again and hope that it will be successful.