View Single Post
Old 08-14-2019, 01:26 PM   #46
QuantaCondor
All Star Reserve
 
Join Date: Nov 2018
Posts: 560
I'm going to offer my take as a player who has a couple of OL teams as well as a few newer non-OL teams at lower levels:

Auction House -- The showing of splits is SO useful, and the overall handling of the auction house with time reductions and everything is great. I think we all agree there.

Collections -- I don't understand how anybody hates these. There's stuff in it for whales. There's stuff in it for theme teams. There's stuff in it that's just fun to collect. And, most importantly, there's a TON of stuff in it for F2P players. Card rewards (Hello Dykstra!), lots of different kinds of packs, and a bunch of bench players who can provide playoff depth and also tournament options. Just a great feature overall, I'm convinced that anybody who dislikes this is just impatient or is not doing enough research.

Peak players/Special Edition/POTM -- I'll offer a different take than a couple players here: I do not care whatsoever what the theme of a card is, or how many cards of a player that came out, or anything. I just want variety. I don't know how anybody could dislike that. Again, whales get to sift through lots of options and pick the best one. So do theme teams. And for FTP players it's a godsend, we get to have a ton of variety and pick the player which matches our specific angle. And the notion that they ruin competitive balance is just laughable to me. There will always be good players, who cares what the specific theme of their construction is?

Competitive Balance -- From a FTP standpoint, this is really excellent. There are lots of options at the top end which provide different FTP team construction approaches. However, I think there needs to be just a bit more care taken for next year's version on FTP pitching balance. The fact that the good lefties are few and far between once you try to get someone better than, say, Brett Anderson, means that the lefty team strategy becomes a little too dominant. I would likely to see a more even balance between competitively viable lefty pitchers and righty pitchers that are accessible to FTP players (~20k PP or less). The only other thing I would really change is adding back in some of the diamonds in the rough like Dierker, etc. Those cards made that lower level FTP push a lot more exciting, and finding a diamond in the rough is a really compelling experience for my type of player.

Most important exclusion in PT19 and PT20: I think the core game as it stands really executes on what it tries to do. There are other features like tournaments and OOTPGO that are obvious extensions to this model, but the core game is solid. Once your core game is good at attracting an audience, you need to think about how to extend its longevity. Most MMOs try to devise some sort of "endgame content" to satisfy this, and I think that's what PT lacks the most right now. There are lots of forms this could take as well. It could be a league filled solely with last week's Perfect League WS winners. It could be offering a beta invitation for next year's edition if they win a Perfect League title (or if they win 2, or 3, or some arbitrary cutoff line to keep in manageable). It could be an obvious global leaderboard of Perfect league titles. You could give teams the ability to reset with a special medal once they've won a Perfect title (a "prestige" system). There are so many devtime-light extensions that can be added to the game that really should be considered here. Whether a player spends $1000 or $0, you don't want a player to feel like they've "beaten" the game and move on, there should always be another objective that they can focus on. In particular, you *really* don't want whales to win a Perfect title and decide they've had enough, because that cuts into the bottom line more aggressively than any other complaint featured here. I just think that's something worth really thinking about which hasn't had enough discussion around it on these forums.
__________________
Former leader of BFF, the definitive competitive PT group for F2P players. DM for info

F2P + restrictions. First F2P winner of PT21 Perfect League


F2P + restrictions. New team -> PT title in 8 weeks
QuantaCondor is offline   Reply With Quote