[Orcin]

I have moved on. The fact that it took over a week for me to see this thread and respond says it all about my level of interest.

Game balance in this version is far worse than the previous two. Card performance is so erratic that the game is either (a) designed to be completely random or (b) little more than a game of War with baseball pictures instead of numbers on the cards. True game balance requires the player to believe that he can influence the outcome through better skills/tools. Instead, we have only the frustration that results from no control over the game experience.

The game economy was destroyed for the second year in a row - this time by giving an unknown (but large) number of people a huge (11 million or maybe more) headstart in perfect points. This was not discovered by the player base until the summer, but it explains a lot about how these "free-to-play" teams were able to complete every mission on drop. Pretty easy when you can just buy all of the cards with free money.

The pace of the content rollout was akin to water torture, forcing us to play most of the season without many of the elite Hall of Fame players. The best shortstop in the game was Arky Vaughan for most of the year. Arky Vaughan!?!?!! When those premier cards finally arrived, it was anticlimactic due to game interest being in severe decline among much of the player base (end of baseball season, too expensive, discouraged by random results).

The one saving grace of the ordeal was the Discord community, which made the game more interesting by providing a place to commiserate with other losers in real time. However, that community has been taken over by Internet bullies, and the company refuses to do anything about it. The keyboard warriors have made the game community into an "us and them" faction war between the discord patrons and the forum users - a war which is completely one-sided since no one here knows or cares about what they think.

I am not going to play next year's version. I am convinced that the financial success of this year's game will make next year's into more of what I dislike. It was a great run, but I will be finding something else to do.