Farming Iron Leagues

[Goliathus]

Originally Posted by eldur00

Is it though ?
First, the guy has a .622 W%...how is that tanking ?
Second, we know nothing of the other pitchers on the Reserve. Is he sitting perfect and diamonds ? Or just a bunch of interchangeable bronze pitchers that won't make a lick of a difference whether they are in the lineup or the Irons that are in there ?
Third, Markus himself went on record on these very forums stating that if you wanted to experiment with lesser cards/cards out of position, that it should be done at the lesser levels. You can't go lower than Iron.


Nothing to see here. The most hilarious part of this entire thread is the people that want the player to be reported would be the first ones to applaud him for spending money on the game to get those players if the OP would have instead started the thread to whine about somebody having perfects/Diamond players in their Iron league lineup.

First, depends on the perspective. A team that plays to the best capability of .850 win rate in Iron is tanking by intentionally tanking to ~.600 because the point is clearly to avoid promotion. Of course, we have to look at everything. Position training is fine, theme team is fine.

For your second point, I would be happy to check his team out more thoroughly and form a better opinion but sadly, I can't. Not sure why OOTP doesn't allow players to check out other leagues in the universe that they are not playing in, would like to have that function myself. I guess now we have to wait for downpat75 to get his reserve list so we know what kind of pitchers are down there.

For your third point, I think Markus replied is more about "you can play iron unsung heroes theme team at lower level, but not at perfect because that team will not get you to perfect". As in, it's cool to play theme teams at the lower level. I think there is a fine line between "playing cards out of position to train them" and "do that to decrease win rate".

For instance, if I were to play a 0/0 catcher at C, and all my outfielders(with <10 infield stats) at infield and all my infielders(with <10 outfield stats) at outfield, that's cool too? I do that cuz I think "it's funny and I want to see how bad my defense can be". Is that good enough of a reason? I am not the one to draw the line, of course, the dev does. But there must be one to cut out the extreme? Hey, if any of the dev said the extreme is fine, I am doing that. I just assumed it's not fine because it usually isn't.

Also, report is so that the dev can check, and make a decision. Report =/= "Yes on a ban" button. I personally think he deserves a check, so I said that. If the dev thinks he's fine after a check, then he's fine. Do I think a guy who "runs 3 SP and a full iron bullpen; has godlike hitters but did not promote and had only 2 playoffs in 14 years[I checked his lifetime record]" deserves a check? Yes. Maybe he did build the team slowly through the 14 in-game years and everything's fine. I don't know. I can't know. That's for the dev to find out.

Originally Posted by dkgo

That is definitely not a team you need to spend money on to have by now. I agree with your overall post though, if someone wants to play .600 ball in iron forever then so what. It doesn't affect you, he bought the game and is just playing how he wants. Everyone's reason that tanking is bad is because it unbalanced the league that season when some teams get free wins, but here this guy is just an above average team.

You did said "I don't mind playing the game to make points without moving up but you can't be that obvious playing everyone out of position and without a full pitching staff", which seems to fit the bill even though he's hovering around .600 this season. Not like we know what he did other seasons and what's his win rate there.

I am not sure if intentionally sabotaging a potential .750 into .500 through "playing everyone out of position and without a full pitching staff" is fine or not.

Originally Posted by Dogberry99

One caveat to this is that it is perfectly allowable to own significantly better pitchers that stay on your bench behind scrubs if the team is pursuing a specific theme. If it wasn't, then theme teams could never be collectors.

I agree that running a theme team is fine and the dev did said so. The one OP posted doesn't seem like it though. It looks like "three non-Iron SPs in a 3-man rotation of death, full bullpens of Iron and elite batting" to me.

[DawnBTVS]

Originally Posted by Dogberry99

One caveat to this is that it is perfectly allowable (within reason) to own significantly better pitchers that stay on your bench behind scrubs if the team is pursuing a specific theme. If it wasn't, then theme teams could never be collectors.

Also another thing to point out is that OVR isn't a be all/end all. I've dumped guys who were 70-75 OVR in favor of 60-65 OVR simply because I liked the ratings of the latter in terms of my coaching/team style.

[dkgo]

Originally Posted by Goliathus

You did said "I don't mind playing the game to make points without moving up but you can't be that obvious playing everyone out of position and without a full pitching staff", which seems to fit the bill even though he's hovering around .600 this season. Not like we know what he did other seasons and what's his win rate there.

I am not sure if intentionally sabotaging a potential .750 into .500 through "playing everyone out of position and without a full pitching staff" is fine or not.

That's true, I personally think this example is a very tactless way to do it and you should at least field a "real" team even if the player quality is all over the place. But setting my view aside I just don't think it's a healthy exercise to judge if someone is playing the game the "right" way or not since the game structure doesn't give people many options. Whatever happens to this team won't impact me in any way, there are examples of this to various degrees all over the lower levels.

[Goliathus]

I am all for the 30,000 ways to play the game and people can play how they want as long as they don't mess with the rules. Not like I am a rules lawyer or anything - heck, I see myself as quite far away from a lawful good person; I can never be as kind-hearted of a forumer as joehart without faking it - but when I play by the rule, I expect others to not break it. If tanking is legal, and I am being very honest, I will be the first to do it. All 40 OVR pitchers and a great batting lineup. Sub in 40 OVR horrible batters in the middle of a season if I am getting too close to playoff.

[Dogberry99]

Is tanking bad when it makes a team lose more than it should, such as how this team is down to a .600 winning percentage?

Or is tanking bad when it produces an aberrant amount of points for any and/or all teams in the league?


If it is the former, how do we (ultimately the devs, but also us as a collective community, since at a bare minimum the devs listen to complaints [see: 48 hour auction limit]) differentiate between appropriate and inappropriate themes, training (like my Buddy Myer at 3B example), and other roster abnormalities that could potentially lower a team's winning percentage? If it is the latter, how do we differentiate between appropriate and inappropriate strategies (both on the strategy tab and in what players are utilized) designed to game the in game currency system that also result in an overall lower winning percentage?


I think we can all agree that tanking is bad. I do not think we all currently agree on why.

[Goliathus]

Tanking is bad because it goes against the current ranking system that is there to maintain competitive integrity and is there to create an environment that is as balanced as possible to all the players. In an utopia, all the bronze teams would be bronze teams, they will all be playing their best and there will be a high amount of competitive league among the tiers. When said team is not bronze level anymore, it would go up to the proper level. A whale team will start in Iron but will fly to whatever tier it belongs, to keep the competitive integrity intact.

When you allow tanking, several things will happen that oppose what the system is trying to achieve:

(1)Noob Crusher: There are people who just want to crush noobs. If we allows tanking, a whale with that mindset can 140-22 to bronze, then 50-112 back to iron for another Thanos season. Rinse and repeat. When enough whales do this, Iron and Bronze became the land of Thanoses and peons, and you will get more players who are pissed like Findest2001 because there are always teams on the conference that just spoil the game. With tanking being illegal, a perfect caliber team can only crush noobs one time in each tier before they get into perfect and they are likely to stay in perfect. The peon casualties are minimized and the competitiveness of each tiers are maintained to its highest degree.

(2)Profit Consideration: Let's be honest here, a part of why tanking is illegal is because it affects the profitability of the game. If teams can just tank together, even cooperate, then not many will buy PP. Like, why buy PP when we can just find 30 like-minded people, have everyone plays godlike batting and batters-as-pitchers and earn potentially 10K PP a game because there are bound to be some 60+ runs game, like 31-30 for score, that will generates crazy amount of PP throughout a season. Oh we can't team up? Nvm, as long as Iron is full of like-minded F2P players, we are bound to meet some randomly and we will have some games to get those sweet achievements. More F2P players follow and Iron became a PP gold mine. More F2P players and less P2P players is the result. Then, those who played the game fairly will get pissed off by the dev not doing anything about them. The whales too, possibly, and they left. Bam, more profit lost. Also, competitive integrity and competitiveness within each tier are also foregone conclusion. In this scenario, proper competition starts as Bronze and Iron is just an extra week of entry pool for the serious and infinite PPs for the grinders. And before you say this is ridiculous, I don't know if it's PT19 or PT20, but there is a thread I can't find right now, but is there last week, that talks about a lot of teams tanking in the entry pool to generate PPs. It has happened, and with tanking being legal, it will happen more.

(3)Tier power level maintenance: Much like any game, you want teams in every tiers to be as close to 50% as possible. That's pretty much the goal of an ELO system, move player or team up and down the ranking to where they belongs, so most matches can be competitively balanced and fun for everyone. When people are intentionally skewing their performance level, they break the "balance".

------------------------------------------

But let's analyze the point you made. Training is not eternal. You can't tank with training forever, so tanking is perfectly legal to me. Unless said player buys 100 of the same players to pretend to train them whenever he wants to tank, then that's tanking. If a player is legitly training their players, even if they do so for the entire batter roster for a full season, I personally am fine with it. There will eventually be a time those cards will max out, and that team will be back to full power, and improved too, now that he has all the versatile defenders. If said team plays seriously by then, then he will go up and everything's fine and dandy.

Inappropriate themes. There are no inappropriate themes in my book as long as they make sense. But I expect the theme to be followed by the whole team. If dude is running Iron Unsung pitchers and great batters of all kind, I am sorry, that's not a theme, sounds more like an excuse for tanking. I expect a theme to be a full team. Like if the manager said 1930s only, I expect his whole team to be 1930s, not just some of it are 1930s and some are 40 OVR randoms so he can "tank and pretend to be a theme team". Also according to the dev, theme teams that are around the expected power of each tier will be acceptable to be used at that tier. Iron Unsung is cool on Iron and not cool on Diamond. That is very fair and very clear to me.

Inappropriate strategies. If I were the dev and I see a team with no bunter(everyone's <20 in bunts) and no runner(everyone's speed stats are all <40) and have full right on sacrifice bunt and base stealing. I am going to ask that player and if his reason doesn't make sense, then it's inappropriate and considered potential tanking and self-sabotaging. You better give me a proper reason why you employ that strategy and I am sure every legal and appropriate strategy makes sense on a glance or the managers can explain them with ease and with logic. It's not hard to catch those. Probably harder for pitchers but eh, it's what it is.

[Dogberry99]

I have a lot of thoughts that I may eventually sort out and get to, but for now, 2 issues.

1) I set Buddy Myer to train at 3B. I then proceeded to not log in to that team for a month. You can't train forever, but life happens, and we will need to figure out how to think about teams that are abandoned or put on pause while fielding suboptimal lineups for training.

2) Not all themes can be followed by the whole team. In 19, I started off with the theme of all Groundball Pitchers. Then I started focusing on Movement ratings in excess of 78. There are no direct analogs for batters.

Nor should my pitching choice force me to field a certain type of batter, such as the power hitters that many think would work nicely with those types of pitchers when combined with a tailored ballpark. Instead, I chose to focus on Gap Power and maximizing extra base hits because it was the batting theme I preferred. Even if I have those more optimized power hitters on my bench, it should not be considered inappropriate just because it is both suboptimal and strategically inconsistent.

[HiDesertAce]

No one has ever banned and there never have been any consequences for "tanking."

in 19 or 20.

There have been blatant examples that were well documented on forum in 19. Multiple reported offending team. That team kept on going in perfect team and was not banned.

There may have been one team that was playing catchers as pitchers that was suspended in 19...but that is from memory and i don't recall exactly what happened.

At this point, I think everyone needs to accept that there are some bad apples and move on. Of course this won't happen and the posts will continue.

In my opinion, ppl paid for the game and they should be able to play their cards and their teams however they want.

As far as the roster goes, all someone has to do is put players on inactive and you can't tell what cards they have.

in addition, there are people who get frustrated and sell everythin off and start over.

Since you can't look into someone's inactives and you have no idea what their intentions are...might be best to just worry about your own team. of course, that isn't going to happen...

[mcdog512]

Originally Posted by HiDesertAce

No one has ever banned and there never have been any consequences for "tanking."

in 19 or 20.

There have been blatant examples that were well documented on forum in 19. Multiple reported offending team. That team kept on going in perfect team and was not banned.

There may have been one team that was playing catchers as pitchers that was suspended in 19...but that is from memory and i don't recall exactly what happened.

At this point, I think everyone needs to accept that there are some bad apples and move on. Of course this won't happen and the posts will continue.

In my opinion, ppl paid for the game and they should be able to play their cards and their teams however they want.

As far as the roster goes, all someone has to do is put players on inactive and you can't tell what cards they have.

in addition, there are people who get frustrated and sell everythin off and start over.

Since you can't look into someone's inactives and you have no idea what their intentions are...might be best to just worry about your own team. of course, that isn't going to happen...

How could you possibly know that unless you worked for the company. Why say something so preposterous? You have absolutely no idea.

[Goliathus]

Originally Posted by Dogberry99

I have a lot of thoughts that I may eventually sort out and get to, but for now, 2 issues.

1) I set Buddy Myer to train at 3B. I then proceeded to not log in to that team for a month. You can't train forever, but life happens, and we will need to figure out how to think about teams that are abandoned or put on pause while fielding suboptimal lineups for training.

2) Not all themes can be followed by the whole team. In 19, I started off with the theme of all Groundball Pitchers. Then I started focusing on Movement ratings in excess of 78. There are no direct analogs for batters.

Nor should my pitching choice force me to field a certain type of batter, such as the power hitters that many think would work nicely with those types of pitchers when combined with a tailored ballpark. Instead, I chose to focus on Gap Power and maximizing extra base hits because it was the batting theme I preferred. Even if I have those more optimized power hitters on my bench, it should not be considered inappropriate just because it is both suboptimal and strategically inconsistent.

If you did not log into the team for a month, I am not touching that team either. Good tanking team needs to login and check and ensure his team doesn't promote. A team that is abandoned for a month has a random chance to actually promote despite suboptimal setup. A good batting lineup + horrible pitcher isn't enough to stay on iron forever so a tanker would not fake disappear. He also have to abandon the other way to snowball PP in the AH if he chose to fake disappear and not login. As I believe that is very ineffective tanking to not login, I am not going to care about a team that has not been logged in for long. If a tanker wants to set it up that way, have fun.

I am not sure if all Groundball Pitchers or "Movement >78" count as a theme to me, especially Movement >78. While I have no doubt you are not a tank commander, but those reasons just seem to so easy to be twisted to tank. Say I put up a horible pitching squad and a godlike batting lineup to tank, and I am reported and the dev made enquiry on me. I can just look at my pitching stuff and made up a theme. Say I saw all my pitchers have lower than 40 movement. Okay, "hello dev, my theme is horrible movement, I just want to say how they do cuz I read the forum and many said movement is crucial, haha". Should I be off the hook because of that? I would probably just treat those teams you described as a non-theme team with a more specialized strategy, which is no problem.

As for gap power vs power hitter, I think it depends on a lot of things. Firstly, your transaction history as a legit player is going to make more sense than a tanker. I would check that to see if it makes sense, but it will take a lot of words to explain how I would examine it and I am not in the mood to type so much so I will skip that. If you chose to focus on Gap Power, I expect your batting team to runs the best gap power batters you have and that those gap power batters indeed gap power batters, like >70 on gap power. Not some bullcrap trying to run 40-60 on gap power and say "I am going with a gap power team" while there are 10 lineups of vastly superior batters sitting on the bench. I will also compare the bench to your hitters. If you are playing 60 contact 70 gap batters instead of your 60 contact 70 power batters, that's cool. That is indeed "I chose to focus on gap power over power hitter". If you are playing 30 contact 50 gap power instead of a 60 contact 80 power batter and I see a lot of those 60/80 on the reserve, then I call bullshat.

Also, let's be honest here, many tankers are not smart and that is why they get caught. Smart ones are harder to be discovered. As you said, if one were able to fake it by actually putting a very logical lineup that can be easily explainable yet still cannot move above Iron while still have the potential to earn a lot of PP. Hey, you have solved the formula for "PP farming". All the power to you. But look at those teams that are posted on the forum, these are fellows who use 100 OVR dudes left and right, or run a full iron squad while leaving a boatload of 100 OVRs in the reserve. These people don't even try to fake it, so getting caught is to be expected.

Originally Posted by HiDesertAce

At this point, I think everyone needs to accept that there are some bad apples and move on. Of course this won't happen and the posts will continue.

In my opinion, ppl paid for the game and they should be able to play their cards and their teams however they want.

As far as the roster goes, all someone has to do is put players on inactive and you can't tell what cards they have.

in addition, there are people who get frustrated and sell everythin off and start over.

Since you can't look into someone's inactives and you have no idea what their intentions are...might be best to just worry about your own team. of course, that isn't going to happen...

In online games, you don't accept bad apples and move on if those bad apples are breaking the rules. You move on from bad apples that are not breaking the rules(like rude people who are just toxic in chat, but has not done anything wrong law-wise). There are games that died because the devs don't care about cheaters and only care about money.

Also, no one will care if anyone do whatever they want in a single player game. But this is an online mode, and people do care how others play. Just like you can't go into CSGO with an aimbot and say, "hey, I bought the game I can play however I want". You want to use aimbot against bot in a single player match? Go straight ahead. That's the difference. And I know CSGO has gone free-to-play now, but aimbot is still illegal even when people don't pay for the game just like they are illegal when people have paid for an account before last year. As I said on first page, people can play a game 30,000 ways as long as those ways are not rules-breaking. "Paying for the game and they can do whatever they want" is a horrible argument. We might as well allow PP transfer through cards then? I would be happy to feed my OL team with my other two teams and I certainly paid for the license for all three teams to do whatever I want with them, and having two of them farming for my main team is one way to play the game -- effective too.

[BigRed75]

Whatever happened to "It's your game, play it your way?"

[old timer]

Originally Posted by BigRed75

Whatever happened to "It's your game, play it your way?"

I believe that was "It's your single player game, play it your way."