[professor ape]

While I get your frustrations Orcin, I challenge many of your broad statements.

ORCIN: 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.

RESPONSE: If the game was “completely random” then there wouldn’t be the meta lineups and staffs that we love to complain about. Players’ results in real baseball are still highly random even at a season level. I’ve done studies where you take a player’s expected rates of events and randomly generate 650PA seasons. You get wildly different seasons just based on luck. It’s a truth of the game. While I think that the game mechanics could certainly be improved, I believe they work much better than many of us acknowledge.

ORCIN: 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.

RESPONSE: I don’t know all of the details of the settlement which gave a group of players their windfalls of points at the start of the season but my understanding is that it was a limited number of people involved. Yes, it is very frustrating that those people got a very large head start and I hope that is not repeated in the next cycle. However, to broadly state that this destroyed the game is an overreach which diminishes the effort of the many F2P players who worked to build competitive teams. I have completed all but a few of the most recent missions without being part of that settlement and having dropped only $10 at the start of the season. I found the economics to work well. Completing the missions was challenging but doable for F2P players willing to put in the time. I never felt pressure to spend real money and have been at Diamond or Perfect for 25 straight weeks. I don’t begrudge those who spent real money to build their teams. That’s part of the game and gives the company the revenue to keep developing and improving the larger game.

ORCIN: 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).

RESPONSE: Looking back, the overall pace was fine for me. I might have aimed FH3 to wrap up a bit earlier in October but we got content throughout the season an the FH arc built up well over the months. I don’t want too many top cards early in the season. I like having increments improvements as the season progresses and would actually argue that there were too many top cards early on. There is no right answer to please everyone, but considering all of the variables and challenges I think they did a great job.