[skepskepskep]

I respect and admire the history of OOTP as an offline baseball simulation tool. In the past few years (really since tournaments were released) the game has become something more than what it once was. No longer a simulation game with an online perfect team mode, this is a perfect team game with an offline simulation mode. That must be understood to make the proper design decisions in how you allot your time.

I realize many will disagree with me here, but they represent the core niche base of the game with very, very little upside for growth. All your growth potential is in the perfect team market, pulling players from The Show and Madden that want to play perfect team in a strategy-based setting as opposed to an action one. With the live head to head championships and the pyramid qualification structure running through leaderboards and special events, you've laid the basis for this becoming an esport some years down the road. That's the direction you need to be going and where your design focus needs to be.

If you were to write down a list of 100 things you need to accomplish by late March to have a successful release, perhaps the first 87 things on that list should be "PT live and functioning the hour of release". I went over the list of changes in the new game and I would be thrilled to trade almost all of it for a working PT. You could literally just resell me OOTP 22 with new cards and tournament leaderboards and I'd be thrilled to buy it. I wonder how much time was wasted on these window dressings that could have been dedicated to core stability testing. You redid the engine...why? It wasn't really broken but it is now. You redid the auction house...why? All I wanted was to filter out cards I own and search by mission. I certainly don't care about pants, I'd get rid of uniforms, logos, facegen, any of that nonsense that slows the game down (those logos take forever to load). The ONLY thing that matters is the numbers flying into each other on time and consistently. You start with that and build from there, but if you don't have that, you don't have anything.

The Show had their stress test weeks out, and it should be obvious now why they took that approach. Why not have two or three stress tests across a variety of builds? Speaking of builds, I've played past betas, this looks more like an alpha build...so I have no confidence we'll actually see the game release anytime soon. It could be weeks or even months given the state of things.

This wasn't a game release, this was a patch to the offline mode that people paid full price for. Perfect team is the game and I'm still waiting for the game to release.