PT2.0 has now had 20 seasons. Time to compare to1.0!
 

Now that we are 20 seasons into the new version, how does it compare to the previous version? Here are some of my thoughts:
1. Auction House. I do like the improvements to the auction house. There is a lot more information available before you buy and you can sort by more functions. Just missing the movement and defense sorting.
2. OOTPGO. Promised too much. Tournaments and OOTP GO was what I was looking forward to and why I upgraded. This might not happen in this version or at all? Not blaming the developers, it just seemed like it was a bigger task than expected.
3. Collections. Many enjoy this. I am not one of them. Over-priced weak cards that you are stuck with.
4. Peek players – Changing the definition in 2.0 to peek in various combined categories has made the players too good, overly pricey and mega whales are killing the competitive balance.
5. Competitive balance – PT 2.0 seems less competitively balanced than PT1.0. Too many teams winning well over 100. See my 2nd post on comparing the league standings.
6. Shorter auction times – This was actually an improvement. PT1.0 has too many week long auctions.
7. Non live filter – Love this. The live cards don’t compare to the historical legends.
8. More Cards – PT2.0 is too saturated with various cards. Many overpriced.
9. Zorro – If you played with Zorro you know why he’s listed. He did make 1.0 better with his conversations. PT2.0 is less entertaining without him.'

I am sure many of you played 20+ seasons in both versions. What are your thoughts?

Attached are examples of a current 2.0 Perfect and 1.0 Perfect.

Without all the extra cards and un-human performances by peek players, the PT1.0 was actually more competitively balanced. There were 3 mega whales with 120 wins or more and 9 teams over 100. With so many wins the game was unbalanced and BORING, PT1.0 had only one team over 100 wins and that team did not make it to the World Series. Some very tight pennant races as well as there were a few tie-breaker games needed to determine the playoff standings. Meltdown won the WS last season but missed the playoffs this time. Tube Sox were in 1st place most of the season, but fell apart at the end and lost TWO tie breaker games to miss the playoffs.

PT1.0 was actually more entertaining. Less super outrageous cards.

I agree with most of what Daves said....

I'll emphasize the card population as a problem - and illogical. Historical players should have a "Best Year" card, a "Career" card, and maybe a "Rookie" card. Live players should have a "Live" card, a "Best Year" card, and maybe a "Rookie" card. Reserve "Special Edition" cards for a player's best 3 seasons. Among other things, the POTM card is ridiculous unless it only lasts for a month. That should give us plenty of cards to work with.

The other huge disappointment for me is the PT cards not being transferable to the classic game. I was really looking forward to that.

I agree with next to nothing what he says. And quite vividly so. I'll give him #1 and #7. The rest I mostly politely disagree with, but this one rakes me the wrong way:

You must be joking, top to bottom! :laugh:

First, you are comparing one season with one season. That does not prove squid. With that sort of logic, you can also conclusively argue that the DH destroys the balance of MLB; just look at the 2019 AL and NL standings. Pitchers hitting is what keeps the teams well balanced and bunched together! Bollocks. :rolleyes:

If you give me enough time when I get home, I will show you that PT 19 snatches children and PT 20 rescues them. Just have to select the right league standings... :rolleyes::rolleyes:

I also note that your team seems to win 107 games regardless of the competition. So you don't like that other teams are better than you? Competition is only good when you're at the top of the pile? Perhaps your PT 20 Doubledays should get more of those outrageous PEEK cards ...

I'm sorry, this is just a pile of nonsense.

While there could be an argument made that PT 19 teams at the top might be closer together, I would rather argue that this is because the game has been around for four or five months longer, and people had more time to open packs and more packs to get high-value cards, so *everybody*'s got some. I pulled a 100 Randy Johnson on one of my teams a few weeks ago. I am certain I am not the only lucky idiot to do so...

I didn't start playing PT19 until OOTP20 was about to come out so I don't really know how it used to be in the heyday of that version. That being said, it would be tough making any meaningful comparisons between PT1.0 and PT2.0 at this point because the older game is most likely populated by a ton of rudderless zombie teams (like mine). Would need a much bigger sample anyhow.

I couldn't care less about OOTP GO as I'm stuck in the past and not much of a mobile user. Always on a laptop when firing up OOTP.

Tournaments could be interesting, but the devil is in the details as far as implementation.

Agree on the collections. Turned out to be more frustration than fun for me. The cards are not in high enough supply and there need to be more pathways thru each mission so speculators can't pick out 1 or 2 cards per mission and sit on them indefinitely causing bottlenecks. I would also like a system where you can choose from a few different rewards: standard pack, card A, card B type of thing.

Agree on all the AH comments. For the most part it's easy to sort/filter and intuitive to use. Selling all the junk after a pack spree takes too long, but I'm not sure of an alternative other than forgoing lots of PP and auto quick selling most of the garbage under a certain threshold.

I don't mind the PEAK cards and other special issue cards. I think it can get a little bit overkill having 17 versions of the same player, but I also believe that more cards and more variety is generally a good thing.

One thing I would like them to look at some more for OOTP21 is defensive ratings and such. The Raul Mondesi card has a comically low arm strength for example. I have a hard time believing Tim Raines was a bad bunter. Lots of ultra bad baserunners that were not necessarily poor baserunners but just slow of foot. Et cetera. There are some inconsistencies in the ratings that are non-core ratings for batting and pitching.

I'm having a lot more fun by playing the market and just taking my time to build up points in the lower divisions.

In 19 I was completely F2P, started a couple months after release, but still got up to perfect pretty quickly. I saw my team won a championship a couple weeks ago even though I'm not active anymore, but the game stopped being fun once there was no longer any PP income. More than half of that team is still just plain gold players, several from the very first seasons like doolittle, corbin, dierker, etc.

This year the only gold players I would have on my best roster are 89 eckersley and 89 sutter. Seems like there was a lot of player quality inflation. I've spent $15 and have 20+ high end diamonds/perfects due to being able to work the auction house, invest in live cards, and not get promoted too fast. I always have at least a dozen "whale" level cards up for sale at a given time now. Now I'm looking to turn those into just a couple real whale end-game guys like the 250K+ pitchers. Then we will see what happens actually playing the higher tiers, but I was not going to kill the game for me after just a few months again.

I did say "most" - and most isn't "all" :)

I agree that collections were a bust for me too. It is way too tedious and you often find even random bronze cards are price-fixed or simply not available. The reward was almost never worth the point investment let alone the time. But some people like it so I'll just accept that it's a part of the game not meant for me.

1. Auction House - agreed... nice improvements overall. Still room for more of course, but steps in the right direction

2. Ootpgo - perhaps a bit ambitious, but I'd rather have them get it right before it's released than rush out a product not ready for prime time. I wouldn't say tourney/ootpgo or even PT were the reason I picked up v20. After spending at least a couple hours a day almost every day poking around the game, the $35-40 spent is a bargain for the entertainment value; so I have no problem picking up the next version when it's released whether or not they meet their own deadlines for content releases.

3. Collections - unless you're Taneleer Tivan and must collect everything, the key to these are finding the ones that *do* provide a better return on investment than it costs to obtain. I ignore any where the reward doesn't fit my theme, and then look at the ones that do and see if the required cards can be obtained for less than the reward is going for in the AH. If so, it's a fun challenge of patience to catch the right AH offer for those cards (and not just jump on the first outrageous offer that shows up... i.e. - I'm not paying 10000 points for an iron card just to finish a collection).

4. Peak players - I don't mind the frankenstein-type cards that splice together the best seasons of a player into an uber card... just wish if that was the plan it would be for all aspects; as many of those cards have worse defense than their 'rookie' or 'historical' card counterparts. If we're going to build the uber version of a player, go all out.

5. Competitive balance - my 2 cents, the best option here is to find like-minded players and use the friend's list to try and keep out the extremes (from either end) that throw off the balance. I'll have to go back through the historical standings to verify, but I don't think I've seen more than four 100+ win teams in a single season in the leagues I've been in; and some seasons there wasn't any team that reached the 100 win mark.

6 & 7. Shorter auction times/non live filter - the long auctions didn't bother me, and while the non-live filter is a nice addition, I use my own search string for specific years which eliminates the live cards anyway. Once the available auctions have been parsed down to just 6-7 pages, it doesn't take long to scroll through for a deal.

8. More cards - I actually like having more cards available, but I'll echo what HRBaker said in that I'd like to see a limit of say 3 card versions per player (so rather than getting a 7th version of Roger Clemens, maybe some other player who doesn't have a card in the game yet gets added). Also echo having the POTM card only be available for one month (make those a more valuable/rare commodity).

9. Zorro - I'll agree the active community members make things more fun, but it's all in how you interact/etc. I'm having more fun with v20 thanks to the group I hooked up with; and assume some/most/perhaps-all of them will migrate to v21 when it comes out and start it all over again. Hopefully if Zorro is still around these parts, he'll make the jump too.

I’ve enjoyed this year more, though Tournaments are needed ASAP to continue that :p

I think all the small improvements have added up nicely. Collections could be more enticing and viable in some cases, but they’re just an option.

I agree with all of this, and I would add that I really like the faster sim times and never having to wait for my box score.

I think the changing values for Live cards added some interest this year. I don't use Live cards anymore because I didn't like the uncertainty but I can see where others might think the upside is worth the risk.

Missions are just a money sink but I am glad that I was able to unload all of the useless Live cards that I got in packs for a profit.

I think the biggest problems with PT2 are the oversaturation of Live cards and the "gimmick" cards. I don't think we need PotM and All-Star cards to further increase the ratio of Live to historical players. I have a lot of PEAK cards, but I still wish they didn't exist. The Future Legends are just silly and really a bit embarrassing for a company that prides itself on realism.

This is a game mode that has walter johnson, cy young, and pedro martinez pitching to honus wagner, mike trout, and josh gibson in a league with ten versions of the same player. A pretty good version of royce lewis existing is not what is hurting the "realism."

The PotM and All-Stars don't really add anything to the game since they are all so similar to the existing cards anyway but I don't think it's that big of a problem and I hardly see them available anyway.

Having some upgraded, playable versions of different players though like future legends is good since you can see something different instead of the exact same meta lineups.

I completely agree with Orcin that the thing I hate the most is the "gimmicky" cards (POTM cards, All-Star cards, and Future legends). Cards that are not based on real performance over at least a season should not be played against real historical cards. It really destroys the notion of 'pitting the best players of all time' against each other.

You are correct that it is just one season, but that one season is an example of what I have been experiencing in the open Perfect world in both games. There were not that many 120 win teams in PT19 since there are not mega players in PT1.0. There are great players in PT1.0, but not as great as PT2.0. These extraordinary players I believe have hurt the competitive balance overall.

Thanks for your response.

I'm enjoying 20, even though I just started since I was basically waiting for tournaments to come out and go through shakedown.

That said, a few things that still prevent me form being more than mildly amused are:

1) Seeing three versions of player 'X' leading the lead in every hitting category while my version is at .225 with 9 HRs.

2) Having the fourth best record in my league and being in fourth place because all the better teams are in my division. Happens every third or fourth season, it seems.

3) Seeing my copy of pitcher 'Y' having a top notch season lose to another copy of pitcher 'Y' having a so-so year by 8-0.

4) Similar to 2), missing the playoffs with a record that would have won 2 of the divisions on the other side of the league.

5) Getting the player I had coveted one season after his usefulness ended because of promotion/leagues getting better. This season so far it was High Pockets Kelly.

I don't how any of the above could be fixed, but they all detract from perfection.

you could start by recognizing your massive confirmation bias. sometimes you are in a division with great teams and your copies of a player underperform compared to others. sometimes you are in a division with weak teams and your copies of a player overperform compared to others. it's called variance.

Not gonna comment on balance and whatnot. Just want to say...I like collections. I think too many people rushed into them without really knowing whether it would be worth it or not, and got burned. It seems better to wait until the reward cards are on the AH, make sure they are good, and do the PP math before you start collecting any cards. With a little patience and targeting the right cards to fit your team, collections can definitely add value to a small budget team. Check out my Lenny Dykstra production...it cost me just 20k to complete that collection. Career .344 OBP in perfect with elite CF defense? Good luck finding that for 20k.

https://i.imgur.com/Plnpuys.jpg

I recently completed the Mariners ones as well, and loving my Kaz Sasaki card, which also came at great value after I sold the other two reward cards.

I will say though, I don't care for the Phillies or Mariners whatsoever. So I could see how some collectors would be disappointed in the reward cards for their favorite team or whatever. For me though, this is just about targeting cards that fit my team. So I have to say, I really enjoy the strategic nature of how collections can provide an additional avenue for acquiring impact cards.

Now that we are 20 seasons into the new version, how does it compare to the previous version? Here are some of my thoughts:
1. Auction House. I do like the improvements to the auction house.
2. OOTPGO. Not interested.
3. Collections. Many enjoy this. I am one of them. The key is to pre-collect since every card will be part of some collection. If you don't have a large budget, concentrate on a single team and pray its collection is released sooner rather than later.
4. Peak players – No opinion. Maybe peak years was better
5. Competitive balance – The game IS balanced around players spending money to be competitive. If you want to be competitive, stop spending on xyz and use the proceeds to buy more points.
6. Shorter auction times – minor point with pros and cons.
7. Non live filter – minor point.
8. More Cards – I think there should be more cards especially historical ones at the iron level so you can have an even higher historical drop rate. LIve cards are just incredibly boring to me, but that's what you get 88% of the time in packs. Packs would be more fun if you could get Larry Yellen instead of the 10th copy of Charlie Culberson. There should also be fewer cards of the same player.
9. Tournaments -- Most will be disappointed when they can't win at these, either.

Everyone is too focused on the larger selection of cards. Why has nobody mentioned the increased rate at which points are earned?

Contrary to popular belief, it isn't really about "winning". It has a lot more to do with "embarrassment". It's one thing to compete and lose, and in real life (or classic OOTP), one attempts to fix such issues by getting better.

It's quite another when all your efforts ultimately do nothing more than show your out of your league (Pun Intended), and your ONLY hope to improve is open your wallet.

If OOTP wants PT to be a long-term money maker, they are going to have to find ways to keep the "common" people engaged.

Having said that, maybe the reality is that 1000 big spenders is all that's needed to keep the ship afloat and make a sizable profit. If so, and you can't keep the commoners engaged in some other way, that "number of teams" stat on the PT Universe Page is going to drop from 14,000 to a lot smaller number.

For 20 years, OOTP has been a "work in progress". I just hope that PT is also seen the same way - just because the current game is successful doesn't mean it can't get better.