Let me expound on something...

[Caedus]

Originally Posted by HRBaker

And I'm happy for you, but don't let your success make you lose sight of the fact you are the exception.

A) 84% of all PT21 players (21,000+) are in the bottom 4 levels. That's about 17,640 teams.

B) 16% of all PT21 players are in the top 4 levels. That's about 3,400 teams.

C) 3% of all PT21 players are in the top 2 levels. That's about 600 teams.

It's reasonable to conclude that the huge majority of F2P teams have not gotten above Iron or Bronze - nor will they.

The question comes down to this... is it better to reach your limit after 4 months of play and quit playing till next year, or is it better to reach the higher levels and find yourself significantly outclassed. I think this is the dilemma the OOTP folks have to address. Maybe from a business standpoint, there is no answer that won't decrease profits. If that's the answer, then so be it - but I would rather believe there is a tweak or two here and there that can make it more competitive for the 84% without damaging their income source.

A very high percentage of those teams are either abandoned or played by people who are putting very little effort in the game.

Completing the LIVE collections alone, and either playing the best cards or selling them, will get you into Silver. A few more upgrades and you're in Gold. All this takes is time.

I play quite casually for an active player. I don't have killer tournament squads to rack up points. I don't play the AH to make money. I have never made the focus of my team-building through purchases. And I still had a modicum of success that has let me enjoy this game. I don't see any solution offered by you that would make the game more fun.

[HRBaker]

Originally Posted by Caedus

A very high percentage of those teams are either abandoned or played by people who are putting very little effort in the game.

The critical question, though, is "why have they abandoned their team(s)".


Although I can't prove it, I would suspect most of it was because the effort seemed insurmountable - which is the point I'm trying to make. OOTP needs to keep the 85% challenged - and they may eventually spend some money on the game. Once they quit, any chance of a paying customer is gone.

[dkgo]

Originally Posted by HRBaker

The critical question, though, is "why have they abandoned their team(s)".


Although I can't prove it, I would suspect most of it was because the effort seemed insurmountable - which is the point I'm trying to make. OOTP needs to keep the 85% challenged - and they may eventually spend some money on the game. Once they quit, any chance of a paying customer is gone.

I think tournaments could have helped with this, but instead they are quickly optimized and dominated by the same highly engaged players. Unfortunately there isn't a big enough userbase to split up by skill level.

A low level player can't just pick out the best silvers from his collection and be competitive.

[bailey]

Originally Posted by HRBaker

The critical question, though, is "why have they abandoned their team(s)".
.

I'm sure many teams will never go beyond opening the starter packs no matter what.

Or, perhaps a player started 3 teams and went with the best draw of starter packs and gave up on the others. Teams are one thing, unique players are much less.

[OMGPuppies]

Originally Posted by HRBaker

1) Too many "super-cards" have been published in PT21
2) These "super-cards" are the specific targets for whales
3) The price of the "super-cards" AND(!!!) the price of the lower cards needed to collect the "super-cards" have gone through the roof.
4) This price increase has gotten so high that most casual players cannot possibly earn enough PP to obtain these cards - thus there is a ceiling as to how far a casual team can go without quitting his job and sitting in front of his/her computer 8 hours a day.

I agree with this. As a f2p I can't get these super cards (with the exception of Thanos who I scrimped and saved for). I have no realistic chance of completing many of the missions. And, the less than ideal cards which I look for to play on my team are either inflated in price on the AH due to missions or locked by teams working on missions.

[OMGPuppies]

Originally Posted by dkgo

I think tournaments could have helped with this, but instead they are quickly optimized and dominated by the same highly engaged players. Unfortunately there isn't a big enough userbase to split up by skill level.

A low level player can't just pick out the best silvers from his collection and be competitive.

Yeah! This chazzycat guy is flat out pwning everyone!

[mayday10]

I think ultimately, as said many times, the systemic problem with Perfect Team this year is the ease of doing the live missions, the high performance level of the SE cards, and the commonality of the cards which results in no value.

Unless you have some sort of self-imposed restriction to not complete the Live Missions, these are a lone and obvious path. This creates a shelf right around Silver/Gold/low diamond where teams go to a purgatory. Improvements in any way, even lateral changes are prohibitively expensive and pp is hard to come by. Even many of those willing to spend $ for pp are priced out.

Above the 'shelf' are those who have spent a lot of money.... and those who have figured out how to use the auction house to grind a lot of pp. I wouldnt mind spending time creating some pp in the auction house, but being restricted to the OOTP software, buying and selling cards is very cumbersome and restrictive.


I have said it before, but an easy fix for next year is perhaps create 'diamond packs' or 'gold packs' that are team-specific to fill-in for the SE reward. Make Divisional ones that are coded to provide slighly higher diamonds from the Division, the League to provide a high-diamond from the AL-NL, and finishing it all gets you an Historical Perfect pack. This would give us variety in teams, provide fun 'lottery' tickets in these packs, and also give everyone cards that arent worth almost a quick-sell, yet arent replaceable.

[bailey]

Originally Posted by mayday10

I think ultimately, as said many times, the systemic problem with Perfect Team this year is the ease of doing the live missions, the high performance level of the SE cards, and the commonality of the cards which results in no value.

And I've disagreed many times. Don't see what harm the live missions have spawned. There are teams in diamond that completed zero collections. The biggest problem is the way collections are designed to encourage hoarding and speculation. Having cards in the game that can overnight go from 8K in value to 80K is just not good. Had there been a historical mission set as well as a live mission set on Day 1 and subsequent collections consist of all new cards, we'd be better off, today. With 78 reward cards there might have been more variety in teams at both top and bottom.

[deejqu1k]

Originally Posted by QuantaCondor

I agree with the message but disagree with the tone. Why bring that?

Wild, we are currently in the same division! What are the odds. Also, why is everyone so anti-antagonistic. It's a literally game about fake baseball players, talking **** and adding some WWE flair gets the juices going.

It's nothing personal, I think everyone in this community is extra extra special.

[chazzycat]

Originally Posted by deejqu1k

Wild, we are currently in the same division!

me too! forum party!


please be gentle, I'm not ready for relegation

[QuantaCondor]

Originally Posted by deejqu1k

Wild, we are currently in the same division! What are the odds. Also, why is everyone so anti-antagonistic. It's a literally game about fake baseball players, talking **** and adding some WWE flair gets the juices going.

It's nothing personal, I think everyone in this community is extra extra special.

Well darn, now I wish I wouldn't have done a 1.5M selloff of my top studs last week. Ah well, PL playoffs probably impossible until post-FotF and I'm not going to worry about it until then.

Originally Posted by Marleigh

PT21 started out with top players having inflated ratings compared to 20, this has then been added to with subsequent releases. This makes the gap between the top teams and ''average'' teams far larger than in 20

Live SEs were talked about everywhere on launch as being potentially too strong too quickly. For months, whales complained that the gap between them and casual players was too small. And it's not like the "lesser" cards didn't get ratings inflation, that they only did it for the top. No, look at Mike Trout's Live from this year and last year, or really any number of qualitatively similar cards. Everything got a boost.

Originally Posted by HRBaker

This price increase has gotten so high that most casual players cannot possibly earn enough PP to obtain these cards - thus there is a ceiling as to how far a casual team can go without quitting his job and sitting in front of his/her computer 8 hours a day.

These are the type of comments that seriously undermine your argument. You just don't understand what a time investment to make your team competitive looks like because you've never done it, and acting like the engaged players are constantly on the AH is really ignorant. For the people that spend truly zero time, just spending achievement PP and barely monitoring the game, well yeah they're never going to go anywhere. And the bar between totally casual and competitive is not that high, assuming you're making a sincere effort to look around and figure out the decisions you should be making. The time barrier, as I have said elsewhere, is probably more in learning the right information rather than the time required to put it into action.

I think there are underlying problems in PT, but everyone should stick to the experience they can speak to. I can't speak to the whale experience, since I'm not one. I can speak to the casual and poweruser experience, since I run teams in both circles. I'd like to think my poweruser experience and a whale's experience become similar since our PP assets are similar, but it's not quite the same thing.

Comments from more casual players are valuable, since everyone engaging in the game needs a voice. But casuals shouting "why would I EVER want to PLAY THIS GAME more often??? Anyone highly engaged must be a no-lifer" is never going to be well received by anyone.

[QuantaCondor]

Also, not to double-post but I think this deserves separate emphasis: The game doesn't really need to care about casual players. It needs to care about maximizing the number of engaged players. Those are who the whales interact with in diamond and who might eventually convert to spenders themselves. There is a key difference in the strategy for appealing to each of these groups, though I guarantee someone in the casual crowd will respond thinking otherwise. The casuals basically just need to have enough of them exist for the game to be well populated at low levels, which is always going to be true because of the large number of abandoned teams created on launch or otherwise that will supply low levels. And there will always be abandoned teams, even if the game's experience is perfect, just because of the nature of online modes like this. The concepts of player churn, retention, acquisition, etc., are always going to occur in online games.

[OMGPuppies]

Originally Posted by deejqu1k

Wild, we are currently in the same division! What are the odds. Also, why is everyone so anti-antagonistic. It's a literally game about fake baseball players, talking **** and adding some WWE flair gets the juices going.

It's nothing personal, I think everyone in this community is extra extra special.

We are in the same league! I am getting smoked.

[chazzycat]

Originally Posted by deejqu1k

Wild, we are currently in the same division!

just curious, are you the Tarzana Trillionaires or the Boring Company?

[kq76]

My best team, which admittedly is a theme team and ranges from a 100 to a couple silvers, is in bronze and we're getting our asses handed to us by teams with almost nothing but diamond cards. I have to imagine that silver and up leagues are almost nothing but 100 cards. I can't help but think that that is a bit of an issue. Not that we're getting smoked (that's fine), just that so many teams have so many diamonds and 100s. It's silly.

[HRBaker]

Originally Posted by QuantaCondor

You just don't understand what a time investment to make your team competitive looks like because you've never done it, and acting like the engaged players are constantly on the AH is really ignorant.

I knew it was just a matter of time before someone would claim I simply didn't know what I was doing - but that's ok, I can handle it.

Originally Posted by kq76

My best team, which admittedly is a theme team and ranges from a 100 to a couple silvers, is in bronze and we're getting our asses handed to us by teams with almost nothing but diamond cards. I have to imagine that silver and up leagues are almost nothing but 100 cards. I can't help but think that that is a bit of an issue. Not that we're getting smoked (that's fine), just that so many teams have so many diamonds and 100s. It's silly.

Your not alone. Here's my 3 teams;


1) Bronze, 26wins - 25losses, 1 Perfect - 20 Diamonds - 5 Golds
2) Iron....., 22wins - 28 losses, 14 Diamonds - 12 Golds
3) Bronze, 27wins - 22 losses, 11 Diamonds - 15 Golds


All three teams have less than 10k PP, nothing in the AH that will help, not enough PP to complete any affordable missions, and the reward cards aren't any better than what I already have. I entered some tournaments but never did better than a standard pack.


I will admit I kinds stabbed myself in the back by starting out as theme teams, which turned out to be a bad choice, but at this point, the only thing left is open packs and hope for a Babe Ruth to finance the team.


Oh, and just for fun? ...the #2 team above is currently on the Relegation list to Stone...

[OMGPuppies]

Originally Posted by HRBaker

I knew it was just a matter of time before someone would claim I simply didn't know what I was doing - but that's ok, I can handle it.





Your not alone. Here's my 3 teams;


1) Bronze, 26wins - 25losses, 1 Perfect - 20 Diamonds - 5 Golds
2) Iron....., 22wins - 28 losses, 14 Diamonds - 12 Golds
3) Bronze, 27wins - 22 losses, 11 Diamonds - 15 Golds


All three teams have less than 10k PP, nothing in the AH that will help, not enough PP to complete any affordable missions, and the reward cards aren't any better than what I already have. I entered some tournaments but never did better than a standard pack.


I will admit I kinds stabbed myself in the back by starting out as theme teams, which turned out to be a bad choice, but at this point, the only thing left is open packs and hope for a Babe Ruth to finance the team.


Oh, and just for fun? ...the #2 team above is currently on the Relegation list to Stone...

Show your rosters. We can help

[deejqu1k]

Originally Posted by chazzycat

just curious, are you the Tarzana Trillionaires or the Boring Company?

Look to the wind young child

[bailey]

Originally Posted by HRBaker

I will admit I kinds stabbed myself in the back by starting out as theme teams, which turned out to be a bad choice, but at this point, the only thing left is open packs and hope for a Babe Ruth to finance the team.

.

Actually there is something you could do, but you have refused to do it. Sell all your live diamonds and complete the live missions. Now is a very good time to do it even cheaper than ever. Buy up all the irons and bronzes, then wait for next week's update. Chances are many of the silvers will now be bronze, so you can finish things up on the cheap. I know by looking up your usernames that you have completed just 1 collection across 3 teams.

[QuantaCondor]

Originally Posted by HRBaker

I knew it was just a matter of time before someone would claim I simply didn't know what I was doing - but that's ok, I can handle it.

By your own admission, you're having trouble moving up the ranks. There are many cases of F2P success at high ranks, and the time investment is lower than you'd think... assuming you know what you're doing. So if you are putting the time in, but not reaching those high ranks, you either don't know what you're doing or are actively choosing to not to do the things that lead to competitive success. Not that there's anything wrong with that; you're still allowed to have an opinion, but you shouldn't act like it's impossible for F2P to succeed on a relatively small time commitment just because you can't. Those are just the facts.