Quote:
Originally Posted by PlayBall2020
at least half are cheeze just on ballpark factors alone without counting those using the pitch count opener/follower exploit
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I'm curious. If park factor strategies are just cheese, what "valid" strategies, in your opinion, are left to differentiate between teams at the highest levels?
Keep in mind, everyone in PL has access to the same top-level cards.
Let's say all parks are mandated to be neutral, like tourneys. What would this theoretical PL look like? Would it not just end up with all teams looking exactly the same? How could it not?
But the strategy sliders! You say. That's where manager skill comes into play right?
Well outside a couple obvious things like employing shifts, and curbing the basestealing aggression for slow guys...there's really not a lot to gain from the sliders. I have spent quite a lot of time fiddling with various sliders and running the sim module, only to end up showing no difference at all. They are mostly window dressing outside the couple I mentioned.
Lineup optimization maybe? Ok...well folks have studied that extensively and lineups matter far less than people think. It comes out to just a handful of runs per season.
So yeah we are pretty much back at park-factor-strategies as the only real strategic tool in the game that actually moves the needle in a meaningful way. Take that away and we lose a substantial portion of the strategic depth available to us. Now all of a sudden there is 1 best option at each position, and everyone will go get that card (just like tourneys)
That sounds boring AF to me!
Don't get me wrong, there are valid arguments against crazy park factors from the realism perspective. 1.1 LHB AVG with .9 RHB AVG is not super realistic. But from a gameplay perspective....I feel strongly these customizable park factors are absolutely a good thing. The main reason being they make more cards viable, increasing diversity of team composition. "All teams look the same" is already one of the top (warranted) criticisms of PT21. Let's not make it 1000X worse please.