Crazy Bad Performances

[alanohio]

My Take on Normalization in Perfect Team

In my opinion, normalization plays a bigger role in Perfect Team than most people realize — not in the sense of making players “the same,” but in keeping the entire environment from blowing up.


If PT ran without normalization, the ratings you see on cards (especially the extreme ones) would produce some absolutely wild distortions. A 170+ hitter in a raw environment would put up videogame numbers, deadball pitchers would suffocate offense, and certain era-quirk cards could create loops where the entire league’s run environment spirals out of control. Fun for a week — but a balance nightmare.


So, to me, normalization isn’t about realism. It’s about compression. It limits the ceiling so the differences between cards still matter, but the magnitude of those differences doesn’t wreck the ladder. Offline fictional leagues can get away with turning normalization off because you’re the only human competing; in PT, hundreds of optimized teams would immediately exploit the most unbalanced eras, and the meta would be unplayable within days.


Personally, I’d still love to see a one-season PT “normalization-off” experiment just for the chaos — imagine a .480 hitter or a modern reliever with a 0.20 ERA — but long-term, I think normalization is what keeps PT a strategy game instead of an era-exploiting arms race.


Just my two cents.

[ROBGISBRI]

Three years in a row losing a tie breaker 163rd game. Really OOTP can we be a little more realistic.....Why do I feel if I buy coins I will amazingly be in the WS next season....Do Better OOTP....This may be the last year I play Perfect Team if a more realistic outcome can't be achieved...There has to be a better way....Ratings seem to mean nothing...past performance seem to mean nothing....Development is non-existent............................

[Fabtron7]

Originally Posted by ROBGISBRI

Why do I feel if I buy coins I will amazingly be in the WS next season.

You won’t. (Unless you buy a lot of them and use them very wisely… but even then probably not).

[daves]

Originally Posted by alanohio

My Take on Normalization in Perfect Team

In my opinion, normalization plays a bigger role in Perfect Team than most people realize — not in the sense of making players “the same,” but in keeping the entire environment from blowing up.


If PT ran without normalization, the ratings you see on cards (especially the extreme ones) would produce some absolutely wild distortions. A 170+ hitter in a raw environment would put up videogame numbers, deadball pitchers would suffocate offense, and certain era-quirk cards could create loops where the entire league’s run environment spirals out of control. Fun for a week — but a balance nightmare.


So, to me, normalization isn’t about realism. It’s about compression. It limits the ceiling so the differences between cards still matter, but the magnitude of those differences doesn’t wreck the ladder. Offline fictional leagues can get away with turning normalization off because you’re the only human competing; in PT, hundreds of optimized teams would immediately exploit the most unbalanced eras, and the meta would be unplayable within days.


Personally, I’d still love to see a one-season PT “normalization-off” experiment just for the chaos — imagine a .480 hitter or a modern reliever with a 0.20 ERA — but long-term, I think normalization is what keeps PT a strategy game instead of an era-exploiting arms race.


Just my two cents.

Thanks for this.

Playing PT for too long, I remember PT19 peaks were the best 5 seasons of a player combined.

Now peak players have outlandish ratings and variants just add higher ratings. The game is more of video game with powerups using real player names. Not as much as real baseball normalized.

[LeeD]

Originally Posted by daves

Thanks for this.

Playing PT for too long, I remember PT19 peaks were the best 5 seasons of a player combined.

Now peak players have outlandish ratings and variants just add higher ratings. The game is more of video game with powerups using real player names. Not as much as real baseball normalized.

There are arguments on both sides of this. Personally, I'm on your side in believing that players ought to mirror their real-life performances rather than have every rating "juiced" to match or exceed the current meta. The counter-argument is that we'd have the same top players every cycle. Can't beat Ruth, Walter Johnson, Cy Young, Mays, and Aaron if we're looking at unaltered career stats. They were dominators who will show up on every all-time team.

PT has clearly come down on the side of fantasy over the past few years. As a content choice, it's sound enough and differentiates PT from the competition. The nagging problem, which is tied to the subject of this thread, is that they're struggling with and appear to have lost control over balance and consistency on the playing field.

[alanohio]

Originally Posted by LeeD

The nagging problem, which is tied to the subject of this thread, is that they're struggling with and appear to have lost control over balance and consistency on the playing field.

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.

[Fabtron7]

Have you read the SLOTS pamphlet??

[alanohio]

Originally Posted by Fabtron7

Have you read the SLOTS pamphlet??

“PT isn’t chess. It’s structured chaos.”

[LeeD]

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.

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.

[alanohio]

Originally Posted by LeeD

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.

I think we’re actually talking past each other a bit.

I’m not arguing that chaos is desirable, or that strict ratings logic shouldn’t matter. I’m arguing that once you combine a simulation engine with a live-service collectible economy, perfect consistency becomes mathematically incompatible with the format, not morally optional.

The 104 Miggy example is exactly why I see this as structural rather than accidental. In a closed system, yes — a card like that should be a steady top-tier performer at Gold. But in a normalized, tiered ecosystem designed to prevent roster cloning and ladder stagnation, something has to give: either outcomes compress, variance increases, or ratings lose their predictive power.

That doesn’t mean the results feel good — often they don’t. It means the design has prioritized league diversity and economic longevity over deterministic outcomes.

Where we differ, I think, is intent. You see a runaway system that’s lost control. I see a system that made a set of trade-offs years ago and now can’t reverse them without breaking the model itself.

That’s why I don’t treat Perfect Team as a long-term simulation anymore. I enjoy it in seasons, and when I want consistency and accountability from ratings, I go back to the core game — where those goals are still central.

If the conclusion is simply that the devs have “lost control,” then the conversation is effectively over — because blame doesn’t tell us what levers exist, which trade-offs are real, or what could actually be improved within the constraints of the model.

[LeeD]

Originally Posted by alanohio

If the conclusion is simply that the devs have “lost control,” then the conversation is effectively over — because blame doesn’t tell us what levers exist, which trade-offs are real, or what could actually be improved within the constraints of the model.

We can't have a conversation about this because it's under-the-hood and proprietary information. I have some ideas about where things went wrong, particularly in terms of the normalization process; but without access to the underlying formulas (which we're obviously never going to get), it's just speculation based on limited data and whatever quirks exist in my own play style.

What we have are card ratings and often-vague descriptions of how the game system fits together. If these can't be trusted to produce reasonably consistent results then the only thing that we, as players, can do is complain about it and hope that someone is listening.

In any case, I'm not expecting these problems to be fixed in PT26. Maybe in 27, maybe not at all. Judging by the number of teams that are well on their way to completing the entire PT Elite mission chain (from my vantage point, which is primarily High Gold to Low Diamond), OOTP must be doing pretty well financially despite the in-game problems.

Frohe Weihnachten.

[Fabtron7]

To fix these problems (in league play) I’m pretty sure they’d have to tear down the engine and rebuild it for PT rather than treating PT as Square-peg-round-hole port/mod of the base game.


Or… SLOTS

[LeeD]

Originally Posted by Fabtron7

To fix these problems (in league play) I’m pretty sure they’d have to tear down the engine and rebuild it for PT rather than treating PT as Square-peg-round-hole port/mod of the base game.


Or… SLOTS

Well...PT is a daily revenue generator. Base game is a once-a-year revenue generator, and we have to purchase base game anyway in order to play PT. Which one should occupy their time?