[Ray_Rockwood]

I'm sure I'll get banned for posting this, but I accept my punishment. I'd hope that by reading this the developers will make it so tanking isn't a valid strategy, instead of trying to randomly punish players from doing it. Also I hope this doesn't get deleted, because offering this information is to help the game, the players, and the developers. Knowledge is power and this isn't about trolling or making people mad or hurting anyone.

First why to tank? This is very simple. The fact is this game is pay to win. One way around this is to constantly tank your team down to Iron where you can earn tons of points as you work you way back up to the divisions and when you make it to Perfect if you can't compete with the whales who have 100 overall players at every position, you then tank back to iron.
Using this strategy you can easily generate 100,000 - 300,000 points on your journey from Iron back to Perfect.
What are your alternatives? Spending real money on points or turning this baseball sim game into a Wall Street Market sim where you spend hours a day on the marketplace buying low and selling high. It amazes me that it's fine to rip off players who are either ignorant to the going rate of players or make a typo and list a player for the wrong amount. Not to mention that the recent sold prices and averages were bugged this year and not accurate. These same people will say tanking is unethical, but have no problem price gouging players who are suddenly needed in sets. I have no issue with this though.

How to tank without getting caught (or having an excuse)
1. Say you are running a theme team but it's a team that you only have the worst players from (example a live only Baltimore Orioles team, or an 1980s only team that you only have Iron and Bronze players from)
2. Put all your high rated players on the auction house for the longest time possible for extremely high prices, they probably won't get sold and they won't show up on your roster.
3. Say you are running an experiment
4. Change your ballpark factors to not help your team (ex: Increase hitting for right handed hitters but only field left handed hitters)
5. Change your player and global strategies to make your players play poorly (Raise a players strategy to bunt all the way to the right on a player who has no bunting ability, raise a player's stealing strategy all the way up on players with no speed)
6. Put relief pitchers at starters and change their pitch counts to 150
7. Right before the playoffs take out all your good players and replace them with Iron and Bronze.
8. Play players at the completely wrong positions in the field. (catchers at CF, first basemen at shortstop)
There are numerous other ways to cause your team to lose that I'm sure you can think of and probably get away with it, at least for awhile.

Should you care if people do this No. I'm sure some will scream that this is against the rules. While teams are tanking and you aren't your team is gaining points by beating them and getting all kinds of achievements. So this is a win/win for everyone except the developers who lose money by players not buying packs. If you want to make up all kinds of rules and play OOTP serious then join and manage a league with like minded players. Perfect team is just about gambling and opening packs. I've seen people post about all kinds of restrictions on roster changes and things based on overall ratings. All that will do is make the game boring and not fun. Isn't this what the game is all about? Having fun? If I want to lose I should be able to. If you want a completely level playing field then make every player card have the exact same ratings. People don't want that though. They want to beat other players by having some kind of edge. Unfortunately this game is 99% about having the best player cards since we don't actively play the games. This isn't Madden or FIFA where a skilled gamer can beat an average player with worse players just because they are better at the game. This is just a sim where we have no control what happens once the games start simming.

Suggestions on how to fix this Ok so now that I'm probably going to get banned for all this I'd like to leave on a positive note and suggest ways to fix these issues.
1. Make it so that you have incentive to stay in the higher leagues. This can be done so many ways. Make each higher league give you a multiplier for achievements. (ex: Iron is 1x, Bronze is 1.5, Silver 2x, Gold 2.5x, Diamond 3x, Perfect 4x.) This way the higher up you are the more points you get for achievements making you want to stay at the higher levels. Yes this will cause a form of inflation, but give players an incentive to still spend money and get to the higher levels so they can earn more.
2. Achievements based on a players overall rating for lower rated players. (ex: An achievement for hitting 20 home runs in a season by a player rated <70 overall, or hiting for the cycle in a game by a player rated <80 overall, players having streaks that are Iron level)
3. More tournaments based on themes. (ex: only players from the 1970s, or only left handed players) Also tournaments that include players training that has already been earned. Tournaments became a way for the richer to get richer since player training didn't matter and it just became about getting certain players which would win you the tournaments almost every time.
4. Giving people daily bonus points and packs for logging in and streaks for logging in consecutive days.
5. Program it into the game that tanking is not possible. You can do this for whatever rules you want. The fact is I'm sure there are players who don't read the forums or the user agreement that are completely ignorant that tanking is even against the rules and just see it as a min/max strategy.
6. Give us actual control of the players during our games or at key moments. (ex. you could tell a player to swing away or a pitcher to walk a certain player)

I'm sure there are an infinite amount of solutions, that don't involve banning people and limiting auction house access. Look if you want to drive players away and just have your game be about getting as much money from them as possible through gambling that's fine. Learn from EA's mistakes/accomplishments then.

I enjoy your game and as a listener of the Press Row podcast since 2012 I love Rich Grisham. (I bought a PlayStation Vita and a treadmill to walk on while gaming because of the guy!) I hope I don't get banned for this post, but I understand and admit I broke the rules and if I'm banned for life for this I'll accept my punishment. I just wish the developers would give us an incentive not to tank as a game developer instead of just saying it's the rules and we have to go along with it.