Competitive balance discussion

[Westheim]

Originally Posted by matingly23

Gone to Diamond, I made sure neither of my Gold teams would get promoted to evade him last week.

Of my three teams, only one was worth playing last week. It was in a great Silver non-whale league, that was a lot of fun.

I got to the round before the WS and lost to a WC team that was just hot at the right time, it happens. Much better than being swallowed whole by Moby Dick.

Thanks again for confirming that all you are complaining about is not being able to win with every team, every week.

[matingly23]

Originally Posted by Westheim

Thanks again for confirming that all you are complaining about is not being able to win with every team, every week.

Thanks again for showing that maybe there is a language barrier preventing you from comprehending other people's posts and making useful ones yourself.

I want a fair chance to win, that's it. I'm very happy to lose fairly. I'm not happy to lose an impossible battle.

Read that a few times to understand the difference, OK buddy?

[<Pion>]

Originally Posted by matingly23

Thanks again for showing that maybe there is a language barrier preventing you from comprehending other people's posts and making useful ones yourself.

I want a fair chance to win, that's it. I'm very happy to lose fairly. I'm not happy to lose an impossible battle.

Read that a few times to understand the difference, OK buddy?

Difficult maybe, but not impossible. It's been shown to happen too many times to be remotely close to impossible. In fact if anything, I'm surprised how many times the completely dominant team loses in the playoffs. The last league I was in had a couple of 85 win teams battling it out in the championship game.

[Orcin]

Originally Posted by zrog2000

What is funny is that I saw Orcin complain about how he can either spend $500 or never compete at perfect in another thread. That's exactly what I've talked about. But now he's still too stubborn to agree with me that I had a point even though he came to the same conclusion.

Here's the exact post that you refuse to quote.

Originally Posted by Orcin

My team has been so bad this season and I have been unable to fix it. I am really struggling with how to address it. I think I am in that purgatory between too good for diamond and bottom feeder in perfect. Aside from dumping $500 in the team, I am not sure what to do.

Edit: Just went 0-6 against the AquaSox by a combined score of 59-26. They have a better player at virtually every spot on the 25-man roster. Not sure how to compete with that. I don't think $500 would be nearly enough.

As I clearly state in my post, I was thinking about whether to spend another $500 or not. I wasn't whining about pay-to-win. I was thinking about paying MORE to win. I was acknowledging that my team was not up to the standards of this perfect league, and thinking aloud about paying more to compete at this level. My edit was my conclusion, after adding up the cost of the cards that I would need, that I probably couldn't do it for $500 and I don't want to invest more at this time. So again thinking aloud, I decided that maybe it would be best to do nothing and see what happens. I didn't threaten to rage-quit or go crying to mommy about making the game easier for me.

My friends in this league completely understood my point. In fact, some of them were saying the same thing in the same thread because it was really a brutal league. We were also all laughing together about how hard it was and having a lot of fun. To the more open-minded people here, go read the whole thread and you will see. We were all sad to see "whale" season end.

You completely missed the point of my post, and then tried to use it to discredit me. That's a sign of a toxic community where opposing views are bullied into submission. You are the one doing it.

You also did not quote this post from later in the same thread.

Originally Posted by Orcin

Here's the breakdown of the playoff teams in terms of card strength.




The team that I admire most (all are great teams) is NC2 (Thalion). My own team (0/13/12) is not far from his in card strength, but he won 93 games and I won 68. Well done, my friend!

Thalion's success makes me realize that my team is not out-classed in this league. There's no reason why I couldn't win it. However, there is no question that Thalion was better than me because of his management skill and not just luck. The key to success is to deploy your troops in a manner such that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. Thalion did just that this year. I am impressed and better yet, I am inspired.

As you can clearly see from this post (which was less than 24 hours after the previous post), I had decided that my team can compete at perfect level after being inspired by someone else who had a similar roster construction. In fact, I am in a different perfect league this season, and I am in first place at the moment with virtually the same roster as last season. But that doesn't fit your narrative, does it. Someone that failed, picked themselves up, and took another run at it without hand-outs or rule changes or an easy-win button. By all means, distort the truth to fit your own agenda. It's done all the time these days.

Go ahead now... tell me to shut up like you always do. I will make you a deal. You don't mention me again in this thread and I won't post again in this thread. You can have the whine field all to yourself. But you won't be able to resist because all you want to do here is argue and have people feel sorry for you.

[JasonC23]

Originally Posted by JasonC23

Just out of curiosity, how has your league played out? Has it gone as you figured it would?

Apologies for the obnoxiousness of quoting myself, but this whole discussion would really benefit from specifics and data. For example:

- What is a "whale"?

Is a team with, say, 8 Diamonds, 8 Golds, 7 Silvers, and 2 Bronzes a whale? How about 4 Perfects, 10 Diamonds, 10 Golds, and 1 Silver? Or 10 Perfects, 10 Diamonds, and 5 Golds? Or 15 Perfects and 10 Diamonds? Or 25 Perfects? Or do you just know a whale when you see one?

Also, does it matter whether the team was built from the fortuitous drawing of a highly valuable and valued card in a pack, followed by selling it at the AH for thousands of PP and then using that PP to construct a whale, or whether it was built by buying thousands of PP and acquiring great cards in the AH with those bought points?

- How do you define "competitiveness"? So many in this thread speak of reaching Gold, or Diamond, or Perfect, and having no hope of competing. What do you mean by that? You don't see your team as the favorite to win the Series? You don't see your team as the favorite to win your Division? You don't see your team as being capable of being in the playoff hunt at all? You don't see your team equaling the "success" of the 1962 Mets?

- Finally, circling back to my self-quote above, how did your predictions turn out? When you started a new league, quickly identified the whales, determined you were not one of them, and resigned yourself to not being able to compete (however you defined being competitive), is that how the league actually played out? Did your team finish where you thought it would? Did any teams surprise, positively or negatively? Did the whales all make the playoffs? Did two whales reach the Series? Did the biggest whale win the Series?

Here are 2 real-life examples for you to consider. Unfortunately, being at work, I don't have access to my team, but I know my active roster has 4 Perfects (the most cookie-cutter ones: Trout, Betts, Sale, deGrom), 10 or so Diamonds, and the rest Golds (and occasionally Silver Bob Boone as my backup catcher). I pulled my best pitcher (Spud Chandler), about half my Diamonds, and most of my Golds (and the Silver) from packs acquired with PP earned in-game and from selling unused cards in the AH. I also have spent real money--nothing outrageous, but certainly more than I planned to when I started playing Perfect Team--on the PP necessary to acquire the Perfects mentioned above, as well as some of the Diamonds.

In my first year in a Perfect League, I got off to a horrible start, including a 9-game losing streak stretching from the end of April through the beginning of May. Somehow, I managed to turn things around (lots of strategy and starting lineup/bullpen tweaks, using cards already in my possession) and ended up winning 85 games. I wasn't ever really in position to make the playoffs--every division had 2 teams with better records than me--and I ended up being eliminated the last week of the season, finishing about a half-dozen games behind the second Wild Card team.

This past season, I improved (with further strategy and lineup tweaks) to 90 wins. I finished second in my Division, 1 game behind the Division winner, and hosted the Wild Card game. We won the Wild Card game, upset the #1 seed in the Division Series thanks in part to a miraculous 9th-inning comeback win when we were down 2-1 in the series, and then prevailed in 5 in the League Championship Series to reach the Perfect Series, where we faced a 118-win juggernaut but somehow ended up forcing a deciding 7th game...which we lost.

So...

- Am I a whale? Why or why not?

- Have I been competitive? Why or why not?

[kingcharlesxii]

Originally Posted by <Pion>

Thanks. A couple of questions. Have you already set up some secondary teams? If not, that would give you the opportunity to take more time, not be rushed on your promotions, and build a new team.

Nah, I don't really want to start a second team. It would be so far behind at this point. Note: I don't plan to open this mode again once OOTP 20 releases so that's about 2 months or 8 seasons. In 20, maybe it makes sense to have 2 different teams since they'd have time to catch up but I'm not sure I'd want to spend time managing 2 of them and it seems very frowned upon to not always be competitive all the time with your teams.

Second, do you spend a good deal of your game allotted time to find the over and underachievers, sounds like you have. To refer to a team as having all 90+ teams doesn't really mean anything to me since there are good 90s and bad 90s. I see a lot of teams with bad 90s and a team of gold and some silver can be enough to compete and beat them. Not much you can do against those who both have money and make the best choices though. I certainly don't have the best team, but the team I have that's progressed the furthest (Perfect level) has one diamond, 10 Golds, 10 silvers, and 2 Bronzes. Granted, they only have won 45% of their games in 2 1/5 seasons at Perfect, but with that many silvers and bronzes, I have the choice of upgrading them to Gold and improve the team or wait until they get relegated to Diamond. I've enjoyed trying to beat the teams with all perfect and diamond players with my silver and gold (my diamond is nearly the worst player on my team, I got him in an early pack. I'm thinking of demoting him).

It's extremely difficult to search players since you can't search by ratings (plz add Markus!) and you can't look at players that aren't in the AH. I spend most of my time looking at teams in my leagues with players that have done well. I'm not in front of a computer with OOTP but that team looks better than mine. I had 1 low diamond who was only okay and I sold for upgrades elsewhere, 7ish gold and the rest good silvers. None of the players that would be an upgrade to my team can be had on the AH for less than 10-15K usually. Unless the pack odds are lying to me, mathematically it also seems a waste to open packs (as is typical for most of these games, you pay a hidden tax vs buying exactly the player you want from the AH).

The issue is that even the bad perfect/diamonds are almost always better than the best silver/low end gold (which I would hope they would be in general!). The exception seems to be high defense silvers/golds. I can try to Moneyball around that but at this point, I'd have to blow up my team to significantly switch my strategy and that's considered tanking. If I could reset to entry league with my current roster and start again from there with the PP I've accumulated, I'd do it in a heartbeat.

[xekyn92]

The mode as it exists in OOTP19 is undeniably pay-to-win and there’s nothing necessarily wrong with that (I myself have spent a good amount of money to support the developers).

The issue is the lack of variety, your team is stuck in one league and there’s virtually no skill involved at the higher levels, it’s simply a contest of who spent the most money. The developers aren’t going to hurt their bottom line, nor should they be expected to, but I think they need to find ways to make the game mode more engaging for F2P players so they don’t get stuck in a state of purgatory.

First and foremost we need to be able to enter leagues with our friends, the game right now feels incredibly isolated and the ‘community’ aspect of it is sorely lacking. Even being able to directly challenge my friends teams to an exhibition/showmatch that doesn’t reward any PP would be a nice addition.

Secondly, they need some alternate league/tournament structures that actually involve some strategy/skill and put players on a relatively equal footing, even if the main league system remains the same as it is now. There’s a lot of fun/gimmicky things they could do in this regard:

1) Leagues that only allow you to use iron, bronze, silver, gold etc cards or combinations/limitations of these, restricting the amount of diamond/perfect cards that can be used in order to make it more strategy based as opposed to who can assemble the most overwhelmingly talented set of cards. If i’m only allowed to use 1 perfect card, do I value having an ace more or should it be a position player? This would have the secondary effect of also encouraging players to retain/collect lesser rated cards instead of just autoselling everything that isn’t gold or above, they’ve put so much work into creating all of these interesting historical cards, why not give us opportunities to use them? Card collecting definitely needs more emphasis in PT, maybe give small PP rewards for completing certain historical team collections etc.

2) What about a game mode where we pay varying PP entry fees (like 1k/5k/10k to encourage people to buy PP still) and compete for the entire pot (with a tax skimmed off the top similar to the AH). To make it even funnier, make it entirely random, you don’t enter with your own cards, each participant gets 10-20 regular packs and you have to build the best roster you can with what you unpack (with all of the cards deleted at the end, perhaps the top 3 finishers get to keep one card or something). You could also have free entry versions of this that reward packs / modest amounts of PP as well, obviously you would have a limit on how many you can enter at once.

3) Draft leagues. Again have an entry fee perhaps so OOTP can still make a little money (in addition to prize payouts). Have it so the game randomly generates a random pool of cards from standard packs (like 10 packs for each player in the league) after which the players draft in a randomly determined reverse snake order until their rosters are built. It’ll challenge players to identify good late round card choices and make it so noone has an unfair advantage. Have us compete for a share of the PP, reward packs or maybe the opportunity to keep a card from our roster to be used in the main league.

There’s a ton of creative ways they can make the game more engaging for F2P players and provide opportunities to earn PP/packs/cards without outright ruining the pay-to-win model they’re using in the main game. They just need to provide people with alternatives to keep things fresh and exciting.

[bobbycockstrong]

Originally Posted by <Pion>

Would be interesting to know how many F2P teams made it to Perfect level. I know of three, but that's only because the information is volunteered. I would guess, but don't know, that there are some people who do not frequent this forum or don't bother posting that are F2P at perfect level as well, but only the devs would know how many there are.

Its not even "F2P" per se. You can not spend a cent, pack an expensive card, sell it for several hundred thousand PP, and while you are still "F2P" you now have the same competitive advantage as people who bought 200k PP.

When it comes to "competitive balance", buying PP is the short cut guaranteed route, but you can still achieve a massive competitive advantage without spending a cent. Thats part of the conversation as well. Its rare, less likely from an odds percentage, but its there for sure to varying degrees. I have not spent a penny on PP, but I have benefited from a massive competitive advantage simply because I packed a 25k PP gold catcher once, sold it, and proceeded to destroy my competition with the competitive advantage gained by spending those PP resulting in 121 wins and a WS. 25K isnt even that much. Imagine if I packed a 400k card or something.

So the conversation, in my opinion, is not solely about money. Its not as simple as "P2W" vs "F2P" because there are other variables as well. Money is just the easy/common factor of separation between the quality of teams.

[<Pion>]

Originally Posted by kingcharlesxii

Nah, I don't really want to start a second team. It would be so far behind at this point. Note: I don't plan to open this mode again once OOTP 20 releases so that's about 2 months or 8 seasons. In 20, maybe it makes sense to have 2 different teams since they'd have time to catch up but I'm not sure I'd want to spend time managing 2 of them and it seems very frowned upon to not always be competitive all the time with your teams.

Being far behind can be a blessing or a curse depending on your end game. If it is to get to Perfect level and compete/win, you're right it is too late (without money). But if it's either to learn from the experience, enjoy the ride, try out new things, there can be value in it. Good luck with OOTP20, it should be fun.

Originally Posted by kingcharlesxii

It's extremely difficult to search players since you can't search by ratings (plz add Markus!) and you can't look at players that aren't in the AH. I spend most of my time looking at teams in my leagues with players that have done well. I'm not in front of a computer with OOTP but that team looks better than mine. I had 1 low diamond who was only okay and I sold for upgrades elsewhere, 7ish gold and the rest good silvers. None of the players that would be an upgrade to my team can be had on the AH for less than 10-15K usually. Unless the pack odds are lying to me, mathematically it also seems a waste to open packs (as is typical for most of these games, you pay a hidden tax vs buying exactly the player you want from the AH).

Have you used the sortable stats? You can export the ratings, bring them into Excel, and sort/filter from there.

Originally Posted by kingcharlesxii

The issue is that even the bad perfect/diamonds are almost always better than the best silver/low end gold (which I would hope they would be in general!). The exception seems to be high defense silvers/golds. I can try to Moneyball around that but at this point, I'd have to blow up my team to significantly switch my strategy and that's considered tanking. If I could reset to entry league with my current roster and start again from there with the PP I've accumulated, I'd do it in a heartbeat.

Not sure I would go as far as "almost always", but yeah many of them are. However, just using one position (starting pitchers since hitters would take into account both hitting and defense and complicates matters) and Ray's excellent eFIP formula, the bottom six rated Diamond/Perfect pitchers have a rating of 4.18 or below. There are seven silver pitchers that beat that. If you add in Gold pitchers, you can find over 40 pitchers with several of the golds being in the 2K to 3K price range.

Anyway, have fun...

[Westheim]

Originally Posted by matingly23

Thanks again for showing that maybe there is a language barrier preventing you from comprehending other people's posts and making useful ones yourself.

I want a fair chance to win, that's it. I'm very happy to lose fairly. I'm not happy to lose an impossible battle.

Read that a few times to understand the difference, OK buddy?

Man, why didn't the 2001 Yankees just go home when they encountered the 116-win Mariners in the ALCS? That was an impossible battle!

My grasp of English is as firm as yours on any sort of point is weak. I also consider your way of patronizing me insulting. But I guess I should have expected to be attacked by someone who is completely cornered, and - still - has no point whatsoever.

If only you could realize that your stubborn refusal to own anything makes you look the more ridiculous. The missing T just as much as admitting that games are only fun if YOU win.

Keep snapping, it amuses me.

[Dogberry99]

Originally Posted by Markus Heinsohn

We can set the team to AI and ban the user. However, that would not change much, as this team in question has sold all its good players, and since we do not add fake cards into the universe (that would open a Pandora's box) we can not do much here, other than remove it (deactivate it essentially) after the season has ended.

I fail to see how a situation like the one being described in this thread (selling off the best players) is any different now than it was in Season 1. In both instances, bad teams that meet the game's logic requirements were allowed to gift plenty of points to highly rated squads. But it was okay the first season for the whales to beat up on the people who sold their starting golds and silvers because the promotion/relegation system was going to take care of it. We just had to be patient for the competition level to stabilize. How is this situation any different? What is it about this situation that breaks the existing Promotion/Relegation model in a way that was not broken on day 1?

This is an issue. However, this WAS an issue as well. This is not new.



Further, I don't understand why nobody is discussing an increase to the number of teams being promoted and relegated each season as a possible viable solution. It seems like more fluidity with regard to competition level could go a long way to allaying the fears many have.

That, or at least an increase in the scope of the p/r system. Maybe the ability to raise or drop multiple levels...

[zrog2000]

Originally Posted by Orcin

You need to quit lying about what people say. Either quote me or leave me out of the discussion.

Originally Posted by Orcin

My team has been so bad this season and I have been unable to fix it. I am really struggling with how to address it. I think I am in that purgatory between too good for diamond and bottom feeder in perfect. Aside from dumping $500 in the team, I am not sure what to do.

Edit: Just went 0-6 against the AquaSox by a combined score of 59-26. They have a better player at virtually every spot on the 25-man roster. Not sure how to compete with that. I don't think $500 would be nearly enough.

There it is. The exact point that I was making in this thread that you've argued with time and time again.

[<Pion>]

Originally Posted by zrog2000

There it is. The exact point that I was making in this thread that you've argued with time and time again.

Yikes. Did you see where he already put the quote in context and explained the rational behind it?

[zrog2000]

Originally Posted by Orcin

Here's the exact post that you refuse to quote.




As I clearly state in my post, I was thinking about whether to spend another $500 or not. I wasn't whining about pay-to-win. I was thinking about paying MORE to win. I was acknowledging that my team was not up to the standards of this perfect league, and thinking aloud about paying more to compete at this level. My edit was my conclusion, after adding up the cost of the cards that I would need, that I probably couldn't do it for $500 and I don't want to invest more at this time. So again thinking aloud, I decided that maybe it would be best to do nothing and see what happens. I didn't threaten to rage-quit or go crying to mommy about making the game easier for me.

My friends in this league completely understood my point. In fact, some of them were saying the same thing in the same thread because it was really a brutal league. We were also all laughing together about how hard it was and having a lot of fun. To the more open-minded people here, go read the whole thread and you will see. We were all sad to see "whale" season end.

You completely missed the point of my post, and then tried to use it to discredit me. That's a sign of a toxic community where opposing views are bullied into submission. You are the one doing it.

You also did not quote this post from later in the same thread.




As you can clearly see from this post (which was less than 24 hours after the previous post), I had decided that my team can compete at perfect level after being inspired by someone else who had a similar roster construction. In fact, I am in a different perfect league this season, and I am in first place at the moment with virtually the same roster as last season. But that doesn't fit your narrative, does it. Someone that failed, picked themselves up, and took another run at it without hand-outs or rule changes or an easy-win button. By all means, distort the truth to fit your own agenda. It's done all the time these days.

Go ahead now... tell me to shut up like you always do. I will make you a deal. You don't mention me again in this thread and I won't post again in this thread. You can have the whine field all to yourself. But you won't be able to resist because all you want to do here is argue and have people feel sorry for you.

Sorry, I was at work so I can afford to compete.

I've never whined about anything. I don't need anything handed to me. I'd just like an even playing field at any point of playing PT, where you can truly determine who the best players are without the competitive advantage of spending an unlimited amount of money. That is not whining. I don't have to win ever. I just don't have fun losing when there is a 0% chance of winning. Get it?

The only people I'm arguing with in this thread are the people who tell everyone who has an opinion or suggestion for change that they're completely wrong and to stop whining about not having everything handed to them. Wanting to have more than a 0% chance of winning is not wanting everything to be handed to them.

With enough time, every single perfect league is going to be filled with perfect teams. Have fun with that unless you do decide to waste a few thousand dollars.

[zrog2000]

Originally Posted by <Pion>

Yikes. Did you see where he already put the quote in context and explained the rational behind it?

Obviously not. I read and reply from the last unread post and hadn't gotten there.

[<Pion>]

Originally Posted by zrog2000

Obviously not. I read and reply from the last \unread post and hadn't gotten there.

Seems like a reasonable explanation on his part

[zrog2000]

Originally Posted by <Pion>

Seems like a reasonable explanation on his part

Except that I've never whined about paying to win, so we basically have the same freaking point that no one wants to acknowledge. I paid to win in bronze, silver and gold! There are many people who see the purgatory that a lot of players get put into when they stop spending money and that is the point when they lose interest in the game. That is a problem, whether you want to call it whining or not.

[Dogberry99]

Originally Posted by Mormo

I still think there's no reason to be in the higher leagues. This model is based off of real life soccer leagues with promotion and relegation. However, in real life when you're in the top division you get sponsorships, TV deals and exponentially more revenue. Being relegated in real life means you can't afford to pay your stars and being promoted means your profit margin is about to go up.

Nobody in real life would care to be amongst tougher competition with absolutely no financial compensation. Imagine a game that only rewards you relative to your performance and as you do well the difficulty increases and your rewards are reduced. That is Perfect Team.

(added emphasis is my own)

This post from 2 pages ago faded into the background far too quickly as the rampant personal attacks on all sides continued unabated. It perfectly captures the reality that is earning points via achievements, whether that is your only source of points or not.

This game penalizes promotion. This is a problem.

[<Pion>]

Originally Posted by zrog2000

Except that I've never whined about paying to win, so we basically have the same freaking point that no one wants to acknowledge. I paid to win in bronze, silver and gold! There are many people who see the purgatory that a lot of players get put into when they stop spending money and that is the point when they lose interest in the game. That is a problem, whether you want to call it whining or not.

My response was in regards to his "reasonable explanation" of the $500 comment. Had nothing to do with anything other than that, so not sure why you felt the need to defend against whether or not your whined. Nothing in my post addressed that.

[eldur00]

Originally Posted by zrog2000

Except that I've never whined about paying to win, so we basically have the same freaking point that no one wants to acknowledge. I paid to win in bronze, silver and gold! There are many people who see the purgatory that a lot of players get put into when they stop spending money and that is the point when they lose interest in the game. That is a problem, whether you want to call it whining or not.

It may or may not be a problem. All OOTP has to do is retain the top 5 to 10% of its biggest spenders.


I've read a few articles in the past year about microtransactions in games. They were both basically saying the same thing, which is that in pretty much any game you play, there are people that won't spend a cent, some that will spend a little bit, and then the whales. In both articles I read, it was established the top 5 to 10% of people who do spend money spend more than the remaining 90% combined, which means all OOTP has to do is cater to that small percentage to continue making money while finding ways to make the whales spend more, because it was also mentioned the whales are a lot more likely to spend extra money than the guy who put 20$ in.


Sadly I don't have the links to the articles as I read them quite a bit ago, but that was pretty much the jest of it.


Since the goal of the company is to make money, the small amount you spent does not justify them catering to what you want, or need. The company should focus mostly on that select group of people that provided most of the money. That doesn't mean a few things they will do won't also affect you positively, but rest assured that in a game mode where the sole purpose is to PTW and generate money, the money that will be reinvested in the game mode will be spent in a way that will lead the people who already spend the most to spend more. The byproduct of that might enhance your enjoyment of the mode, or it may make it seem even more like a carrot dangling behind a paywall.



That's what successful microtransactions games have done in the past. That's what will more than likely happen here too.


And that's why this mode is not for me. And it's ok to get to that conclusion, too. I'll be spending my few extra bucks where my skill can help me close the gap on a few opponents, at least from time to time.