'Live Open' Weekly Tourney is a F2P sleeper

[HondoLane]

Just wanted to throw out there that this is actually one of the cheapest tourneys to field a max-competitive team (which will never change), and the tourney fields weaker competition than most.

Fielding even a top silver team is half a million to a million (in now prices, was a lot more than that earlier in the year). And that's a 256 team tourney now, so it's dropped to the bottom tier of Weekly's with the Bronze and Iron standard tourneys.

For gold, the top cards are minimum 30-40K, several 100K+ range, and once you get to low diamond and diamond the prices are wild to field an elite team. And of course, next month there will be new cards you'd need to have the best team for any of these.

Now compare this to the Live Open tourney
*field of 128
*roster that will never need an upgrade
*among the weakest competition
*you should already have a lot of the cards you need locked in

To emphasize the lack of elite competition, many of the best teams in PT23 (think: teams that are almost always in Perfect League) with maxed squads in the top tier tourneys are running fairly average rosters (to my surprise!) for the live open tourney. I think this is partially a result of how easy and tempting it is to quicksell the lives for quick PP (with there being little benefit to selling them on the market).

Just by completing all the live missions fairly early on, you should have 10+ perfect cards and a whole bunch of diamond locked in. Your relievers should basically be set already for most guys (you might want to spring for Diaz). The main guys you may need to grab: Trout, Tatis, DeGrom, Judge, Arenado, Freeman, Alvarez, Gausman, Goldschmidt, McNeil. Also Realmuto (diamond). That's 200K and you have a near perfect team. For 300K, you have a maxed roster for sure.

And while it's always very random (I just lost in the second round to an inferior team), when you field elite rosters you absolutely get results over a larger sample. The same people are in the top 25 every week for the weekly's for a reason.

There are currently only a couple tourney formats (of 22 each week) that a F2P can realistically have a top roster - Low Iron Sunday Brunch, Thursday Unsung Heroes and the current Saturday Lab. The problem with these is that EVERYONE is fielding a max team for the most part.

So, to conclude: While the Live Open may not be the actual cheapest, I do think it is the best opportunity for F2P to field an elite tourney team in a format that doesn't have many elite teams. Hope this helps someone!

[Fabtron7]

My Live Open roster is just trash...

[bailey]

The bronze live quick tournament fires frequently and if you can figure out an above average roster and have the time to check every 20 or 30 minutes, you can make real hay in a day. I'd say 30 packs a day are possible if YOU can figure out the meta. Copying is a worthless strategy because almost any random team can win this one and you probably have every live bronze card by now. It only takes 2 hours to win this one versus the 6 hours it takes to win Ace of Bronze. Send me a personal message if you succeed, so I can copy your team.

[Tinkerman]

I run bronze quicks with my third team. The lives don't fill very quickly in the early part of the day (UK) and it surprises me that they're not more popular. Sometime before the final live update, I had a crazy two days when I won about 190 packs(!!) largely from the lives, but that was a freak one-off and came after a long dry spell.

Whatever format you run in quicks, I think you're generally limited to about 25 packs a day average. Get much more than that for a while and things can get funky.

[HondoLane]

Originally Posted by Tinkerman

I run bronze quicks with my third team. The lives don't fill very quickly in the early part of the day (UK) and it surprises me that they're not more popular. Sometime before the final live update, I had a crazy two days when I won about 190 packs(!!) largely from the lives, but that was a freak one-off and came after a long dry spell.

Whatever format you run in quicks, I think you're generally limited to about 25 packs a day average. Get much more than that for a while and things can get funky.

A little more than 750 packs was my best month. Running Irons (16 and 32) and bronze (32), whatever I saw available first. I've never done the live quick tourneys because I always figure my best chance is with the tourneys that require more nuance in building the roster.

I think that's about right, though - maybe you could grab 800-900 on a great month to counterbalance a bad month with 550.

[Tinkerman]

Originally Posted by HondoLane

I've never done the live quick tourneys because I always figure my best chance is with the tourneys that require more nuance in building the roster.

I like to think that tactics and sliders can make a big enough difference, though I'm never quite sure about that . But, like bailey says, they turn over really quickly compared to the Bo7, and I think that's probably why I've done slightly better from them.

[HondoLane]

Originally Posted by Tinkerman

I like to think that tactics and sliders can make a big enough difference, though I'm never quite sure about that . But, like bailey says, they turn over really quickly compared to the Bo7, and I think that's probably why I've done slightly better from them.

I've never been able to tell, because I only do it one way, lol.

I basically set individual strategies for every player on every tournament roster. I don't know how it goes without doing that because I've never not done it.

EDIT: I guess I just assumed all competitive players do this, and didn't see it as an advantage as much as a necessity. I might be wrong about this.

[Tinkerman]

Originally Posted by HondoLane

I've never been able to tell, because I only do it one way, lol.

I basically set individual strategies for every player on every tournament roster. I don't know how it goes without doing that because I've never not done it.

EDIT: I guess I just assumed all competitive players do this, and didn't see it as an advantage as much as a necessity. I might be wrong about this.

Very similar here, and I've always been convinced that it's made a big difference. But PDs have made me wonder because I've got such a terrible, terrible record in them when I've heavily tweaked the sliders (something I've normally done when I've drafted what I think is a competitive roster). I mean REALLY bad - I've never placed!

[Magus978]

Originally Posted by Tinkerman

Very similar here, and I've always been convinced that it's made a big difference. But PDs have made me wonder because I've got such a terrible, terrible record in them when I've heavily tweaked the sliders (something I've normally done when I've drafted what I think is a competitive roster). I mean REALLY bad - I've never placed!

I don't bother tweaking unless I ended up with less than 12 pitchers. In that case I have to make my starters go until they drop.

Results have been okay-ish, no wins but a few cashes. Someday I'll figure out how to get over the hump and actually win another one, but today won't be the day. Nor will it be anytime soon until only people who are bad at everything like me remain.

[Tinkerman]

I suppose I've done okay-ish too. I'm just puzzled that my better drafts always seem to tank, and I won't be happy until I've won a perfect card from one!

[zevus]

Originally Posted by Tinkerman

I suppose I've done okay-ish too. I'm just puzzled that my better drafts always seem to tank, and I won't be happy until I've won a perfect card from one!

yeah, really, re; the drafts & these times where you somehow lose to a draft team where half their position players are at 0% fatigue

i'm going to presume that it only runs a single simulation for each outcome. should beef up the backend and run multiple sims (per game) for better predictive modeling

[zevus]

Originally Posted by Tinkerman

I suppose I've done okay-ish too. I'm just puzzled that my better drafts always seem to tank, and I won't be happy until I've won a perfect card from one!

A bit of an old thread,

but on a second account, I've just been joining some cap tourneys so I can run an excel sheet on them later (basically one of each .. sometimes two)

I don't mess with these accounts much, one of them inexplicably reached Diamond level (but went 50-112 or some such and -300 run differential, lol) & the other is at silver for the last 20 "Seasons" or such.

...... but joined the 'daily late silver' and got 5th-8th place and 2 gold packs (ed2: double checked that account, was a "Daily Bronze Floor Cap" 5-8th, 1 choice pack "Silver" -- maybe it's a new tourney type, no clue.. could have been other malformed teams). I never even entered the tourney, the AI put some junk cards in the roster (which wasn't full) and all the strategy settings were smack in the middle.

The random factor is through the roof. Is it because too many sims are running at once and the CPU power there isn't enough to run enough iterations to get better results?

I stopped playing for months & started again about maybe a month ago, results seem garbage compared to 5 months ago

(ed: my main account was in gold level still & since I had tons of cards from before, was able to complete a lot of missions, get a "better" team.... so upgraded team, next two "seasons" was still in gold, but this last season, had a 20 game win streak (highest i've gotten outside of "Stone" level, by at least 5 games) .... which was then followed by an 8-18 run. Seems legit)