Quote:
Originally Posted by Lemandria
Winner.
Quant, I'm sorry if I annoyed your fanbois. Sorry if you felt attacked, that wasn't really the intention.
You're like the leader of a top guild; clearly you have the skills, but clearly it's a set of skills that not everyone can (or should) emulate or duplicate.
It actually leads me to questioning my own time sink investment here. I'm fascinated by the statistics of baseball, but not the auction house game--not any more. Been there, done that, WoW'd the t-shirt, wasted the hours by the hundreds. But WoW had much, much better AH tools.
I love the collecting, I hate the greed. Because it's addictive, in all the wrong ways. Because there might not be anything in Perfect Team that's as important. Maybe the winning auction house game is really just about everything that PL has to offer.
When it stops being fun, it becomes work, right? I butchered my very first team pretty badly, wasting money on incremental upgrades, yup, so more work required, but naw, you'll probably not catch up before XX shuts down. Better to save a bankroll.
Perfect league feels like work, catching up to whales who had 45 seasons of head start. "You can do it!" this whole post screams.
Work and wife and kids and kids and life say, "No, no, you really can't."
FTP is viable! Sure it is, but the currency is TIME. Oh, so very much time.
And when XX shuts down and XXI rolls out? You can swing that massive bankroll and mad skillz and then you WIN!
And when XXI shuts down and XXII rolls out? You can swing that massive bankroll and mad skillz and then you WIN!
Repeat until it shatters.
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I understand this perspective. And I don't blame anyone here for saying "There's no way I could do this, I don't have that kind of time." I made a comment almost exactly to that effect in EK's thread where he detailed his incredible AH exploits. I guess the difference between his approach and mine (aside from him sustaining his PP generation success over a longer period and with more overall return) is that I used the AH mostly as a collections tool whereas he used it mostly as a market tool for its own sake. He said he ultimately plays PT as a market game; I don't. I play it as a teambuilder, with collections serving as a means to an end and the AH only used to serve that purpose.
The common thread, though, is a detailed understanding of the AH and the ability to exploit the flaws in its card valuations for your own benefit. That takes a lot of time to get nailed down, probably more time than it takes to actually go out and buy the cards themselves. I surely spent more time planning and replanning my AH route and my early-, mid-, and endgame team rosters than I did actually actively looking at the AH for pieces. Collections bottlenecks sometimes throttle some progress, but if you're careful to let the AH dictate your strategy rather than pick a strategy and wait for pieces on the AH, it goes by a lot faster than usual. Waiting for one thing that shows up once a week is slow and frustrating, but if you're looking for 10 different once-a-week cards at once and don't care which one you end up buying, things go pretty quickly so long as you're prepared.
The ultimate message to all the F2P players out there is just this: if you think you can win purely off achievement PP, you're just wrong. It's not enough. You need something else. There are a hundred other F2P players just like you who are just lumping achievement PP into their team, and you are never going to get separation from the field unless you are able to get more PP than those masses. Forget about the whales, you just gotta beat the field. If your analytics are really good, you can maybe be a WC threat in Perfect at most. But that's about as good as it gets without some sort of other edge. And whether or not that edge includes doing 100 collections or doing 50 or even just doing some of the starter ones like Twins and LIVE Oak/Phil/Det, you have to do
something. In that sense, F2P success in PT will always have a market game component, because, in one way or another, you'll need to leverage the market eventually to truly be competitive with teams which have a paid-for PP advantage.
Also, I don't get offended at the people who say "I don't have that kind of time." Some people play the game more casually than others, some people have different obligations-- I get that. I'm not demanding that all F2P players match this level of success, or even that other F2P players use collections; everyone has their own goals and the most important thing is to strive to achieve whatever goal you've set out for yourself. I will say that "You must have no life"-type comments are kind of amusing to me though. I have found the amount of time spent on PT during this process to be totally manageable in the context of my family, career, and other hobbies. People who say that just come across to me as reaching for a justification for something they don't understand.