Originally Posted by max venerabel
I am having a lot of trouble wrapping my head around how you play this game as anything other than a mad scramble to get more and more star players on your team. Weather you do that by simply paying for them via cash, or by grinding it out and collecting achievements or auctioning for profit, it amounts to the same thing -- the point of the game seems to be to inflate your team over time until its packed with studs at every position. The whole pyramid system, the endless supply of new players, and the fact that there will always be opponents taking this aspect of the game to heart in any given league, demands this strategy of every player.
I personally get a lot more enjoyment out of playing within a limited supply of some sort, and doing the best I can with that supply. In my solo leagues, that means a self imposed salary cap and careful rules to stop me from gaming the AI, and in online leagues I play in there is a static player pool which keeps runaway roster inflation in check. In PT, I think its more fun to hold only a few stars, balancing them out with a solid all around roster and thinking about maximizing chemistry and strategy, like most MLB teams need to do. However, I don't see a play mode where this is a realistic strategy for winning.
I realize we can all set our own personal "house rules" (like I'm only spending $20, or not spending at all), but it seems like a missed opportunity to not have a game mode which supports this for all involved. The "zero sum" style of play I've described wouldn't be hard to create -- all you'd need is the option of setting a hard cap on overall ratings for your team, or limits on the number of high value cards, and have the server search for others with similar options to populate the leagues you are in.
As PT is structured now, any league you are in is likely to have people all over the map in their strategies, from whales to guppies as they move up and down the pyramid, so there's no way to be certain that you are playing against people that have your same notion of limits to spending. The game seems tilted toward insistently upgrading through free perks or paid ones, rather than finding a balanced roster.
I realize this is a tricky thing for OOTP devs to negotiate, as competitive balance might be seen as antithetical to the lucrative quality of creating pressure to consistently upgrade your team via in game purchases. But, for myself and possibly many others, balance and scarcity is really what makes game play repeatable.
If I find myself doing nothing but searching for ways to get gold players at every position, because there's always a team or two in my league doing just that, I'm going to get sick of this pretty quick.
So anyway I hope its something that they are thinking about.
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