FYI; The typical result of completing the Live-Card Mission...

[HRBaker]

A while back, I was openly complaining about the difficulty to advance being an FTP player. Most of you commented suggestions that made it pretty clear if i wanted to remain FTP, I'd have to put a lot of time into the game taking advantage of the various systems - including the Live-Card mission.


I knew I wasn't going to have the time to invest a lot of labor into the game, so I decided to see what would happen if I simply put in $100 cash and completed the Live-Card mission. I did this in season 2039 (see attached chart).


In effect, the Live-Card mission (which I could have done over time but decided to do all-at-once so I could see its effect) basically improved the team by two levels (Iron to Silver).


So... I can confirm the Live-Card Mission is worth it, although if I didn't want to spend the $100 I should start that collection in Week#1 of the game.


From here, however, I think I will find myself slowly sliding backwards as newer teams continue to invest money and/or time taking our place(s) in Silver.


The only remaining question is will i find myself eventually back in Stone with a roster of Diamonds and Perfects (lol).

[QuantaCondor]

What does your roster look like at this stage?

[HRBaker]

.

[Redleg39]

I'm kinda like you. I spent a little bit when they offered a sale, improved my team a bit, but I've been in a cycle of decline or staying in neutral. I've got 100 rated pitchers who can't get anyone out.

[chazzycat]

Generally speaking if your hitters power ratings are higher than their contact ratings, you're gonna have a bad time. The game engine just favors contact over power. So you're fighting against the tide.

What are your park factors? You may want to consider nerfing contact and boosting power. It might help you a little.

[bailey]

I (mostly) ignored my 3rd team, the Dum Dum Bengals, after completing the live missions. But, a few weeks ago, I noticed it had 250K in the kitty, so I sold off everything not locked down or being used and bought the perfects in the picture (except for Berra) and zoomed into Diamond. Below .500, but above relegation, so far. My pitching is strictly live reward cards except for gold Lew Burdette! No card flipping, no mission chasing, few tournaments.

[QuantaCondor]

@HRBaker: To me, that roster looks like something you might put together if you wanted to maximize the most OVR for the least PP, and weren't trying to make the best team for the least PP. SE TOTD Mays, Cronin, Bieber, Dibble, and Ortiz shouldn't be played over some other alternatives that cost the same amount of PP. There's no reason SE Ichiro shouldn't be on the roster of basically every team that doesn't have an overwhelming amount of assets.

Also, as a general lesson, pitcher control and batter avoidK are really important in this game, and POW (especially POW which is much higher than your contact rating) is pretty bad. Once you get WAY up there in card quality to like FOTF Mays, TOTD/FOTF Ted Williams, and FOTF Hornsby, you can start to think about breaking some of these rules that establish what makes a card usable at higher levels. But: "High contact, high avoidK, POW <= CON, prioritize IF and OF range as much as possible especially at SS/2B/CF" will get a lot of teams to go very far.

Of course, you don't need to make promotion and success in high tiers of the game the thing you worry about. You can roll out players you like, or theme teams, or whatever. These are just tips that someone who wants to get to diamond might care about.

[bailey]

Rebuild took place after the ignominious fall from gold.

[abangs]

Thanks for showing the timeline. It's really interesting to see other teams' movements between the leagues.

I have three teams that are all spending most of their time in Gold and some of their time in Silver, and yours compares favorably to them. Aside from the Live reward Yogi Berra, none of my teams has more than 2 historical perfects on the roster.

As a FTPer, I have wondered whether my teams will start to sink as the teams that pay for a bunch of PP start adding more of the FOTF players that are flooding the market. Los Perros, which first reached Gold several weeks ago, quickly went to Diamond, got demolished, and hasn't been there since, occasionally dipping into Silver since then.

Instead of spending my tournament-earned PP on individual diamond or perfect players, I have been buying the cheapest cards I can find and completing as many FOTF missions as I can. I am finishing up the gold missions, so I haven't yet reached the big payout of FOTF cards, and the 200+ historical packs I have earned so far have yielded very few high end cards (Pop Lloyd is the only one that comes to mind). I'll be done with the gold missions within the next week or so, at which point I'll start buying cheap diamonds. I have no idea how that will play out, as I am close to finishing a few diamond+ missions but haven't even looked to see the going rates for the cards needed to complete them.

[tomnov]

I finally finished all the live card missions, having first completed alot of the other random missions that I found myself close to finishing when I got bits and pieces of them in pack pulls...
The early live card mission rewards were underwhelming, as those lower level SE Gold reward cards were either not any better than what I had already caught for cheap in the AH, or I had already snagged them cheaply.
But wow!! When you get down to the last few toughest teams, and cash in for those SE Diamond players for completing divisions, then leagues, then getting the 100 Berra card for completing the entire live mission set, it's like your team is on the juice. By this time, I had opened a few live diamond cards & snagged a few more in the AH, and the SE cards from the missions looked to be a mild improvement to those, but when I plugged the new SE's into my lineup, I went from a barely .500 Iron league team to winning that league with the best record, coming from behind in the last 3 months in the season, and then going on to win that series, as well as the next season's bronze World series as a wildcard. It helped that the prices of the live cards in the AH dropped when the up/down speculation stopped after the final live update.
On paper, it didn't seem like those SE cards were that much of an improvement to the common Diamond & high gold cards I had, but the proof is in the pudding.
Still, after seeing the values and the prices on the FOTF Gold & Diamond level mission cards, I have probably hit my zenith as an FTP player, as these cards are on a totally different financial level. Oh well, it was fun while it lasted.