Quote:
Originally Posted by alanohio
I think this gets at the core tension in Perfect Team, but I’d frame it less as “lost control” and more as an intentional trade-off they can’t easily undo.
Perfect Team isn’t really a historical simulation mode anymore — it’s a live-service collectible game built on baseball outcomes. To keep that ecosystem alive, you have to keep releasing stronger, flashier cards, which inevitably makes balance and consistency fluid. Not broken exactly — just unstable by design.
Once you go down that road, true consistency becomes impossible:
Identical cards can’t perform identically, or upper leagues would homogenize.
Balance has to be managed through normalization, variance, and volatility rather than strict ratings logic.
Historical “truth” gives way to engagement, churn, and card desirability.
So the real question isn’t should they go back to their roots — it’s could they, without collapsing the PT economy and alienating the audience that’s grown around it. I’m not convinced they can, and I’m not convinced they want to.
That’s why I treat Perfect Team as a seasonal experience: fun, chaotic, occasionally brilliant — but not something I expect to feel like classic OOTP. For that, I still go back to the core game, where balance and consistency are goals again rather than variables.
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Context matters. Ratings creep (in itself) has nothing to do with inconsistent outcomes. Sure, someone who's still playing Helton or Pujols at first base will have seen their numbers fall off a cliff; but that's consistent with general increases in ratings due to game trajectory. What's inconsistent is seeing 104 Miggy go from High Gold MVP one week to High Gold replacement level the next. It's still one of the best cards in the set and should
consistently be a top performer, especially at Gold level.
To say that variance and volatility must rule over "strict ratings logic" is hand waving rather than argument. It's also surrendering to the notion that chaos is a desirable and intended result in what is supposed to be a
simulation.
The bottom line is that players have spent a lot of time, effort, and/or money acquiring the cards on their rosters. They/we deserve better, and I reiterate that the dev team has lost control over the outcomes. It's not chaos by intent or inevitability. It's chaos through lack of control. Too many variables, all of them pushed to the upper reaches of their ranges. A runaway freight train.