Hey, is this tanking, shrewd managing, or just plain unethical?

[lindholmes]

Originally Posted by One Post Wonder

Push to make rewards scale according to the level your team is playing at. It would put a stop to all of these problems within 20 minutes. It really is that simple.

I totally understand this thought, and I almost like the idea, but ultimately it would hurt FTP and new players (in addition to hurting the tankers). It would incentivize spending a lot of money very early on so you can earn higher rewards right away. It would make climbing up the levels much more difficult. The best players would be more expensive on the AH and lower-level players would have less PP to spend.

It's a "rich get richer" solution and while that does reward those who play the game more, it also makes it more difficult to get into and enjoy the game. It would benefit me this year, but if it had been around last year, I probably wouldn't have enjoyed PT enough to keep playing.

All the other solutions I've read are flawed too. A couple thoughts I had:
- a one-time bonus for each new level you reach (i.e. 5k for getting promoted out of Iron, 10k for promotion from bronze, 20k for promotion from silver, etc.), but it doesn't stack (you only get it once)
- an upper limit on the total PP you can get in a given season, so even if you tanked it wouldn't be quite as valuable
- rewards for your overall record at the end of the regular season, where the top team gets 4-5k PP, the teams in the middle get 2-3k, the bottom teams get nothing. Top teams get more, but it also incentivizes you to try for the best finish possible each season for more PP. And you get nothing if you get relegated.
- a restriction on points if your W-L record exceeds some specified limit - if you have a winning percentage of more than .800 after the first 30 games, no more points for you

I'm not sure I like any of my solutions. but I definitely don't think this is an easy problem for them to solve. Finding a way to disincentivize tankers without putting up hurdles for new, casual, and FTP players strikes me as really difficult.

[beckett]

I see the appeal in avoiding promotion, but this is just ridiculous in Rookie level! This team scored over 3500 runs in a season

[lindholmes]

Yeah, makes me think there could just a hard cap on the number of points you can earn in any given season. People playing it straight would rarely earn more than 15k or so in a given year (right? I might have my numbers wrong) but a tanker or somebody like the team above could earn way more than that.

[Torgonius]

Originally Posted by lindholmes

Yeah, makes me think there could just a hard cap on the number of points you can earn in any given season. People playing it straight would rarely earn more than 15k or so in a given year (right? I might have my numbers wrong) but a tanker or somebody like the team above could earn way more than that.

Just achievements playing my F2P team the last 3 weeks...
Entry - 172k
Rookie - 169k
Stone - 137k

And I know others have been doing much better than I have.

[dkgo]

You can do that with all the live special edition rewards against the wasteland of abandoned teams in those levels, but in a balanced league 25K is a reasonable top expectation

[bailey]

To stop tanking for PP, perhaps provide a flat 25K bonus for every promotion to a new level for the first time. 10K to everyone who avoids relegation. That would probably be more points than most people currently earn, but obviously less "fun".

Optionally, achievement points could still be tracked, but can only be collected by making an in game purchase of 1% PP per dollar spent. So, if spend $500 get whatever $500 buys PLUS 500% of your achievement points for that week. Tankers would then have to pay to collect

[emilempenza]

Honestly, I'd just have it so any team that nets over a certain amount of PP in a single season (or maybe even game) gets automatically flagged to be looked at. You can almost instantly tell if someone is shady, it really wouldn't take long to sift through the extreme earners and see who is doing something shady. This game doesn't have THAT many players, the list of teams who earnt more than, say, 100k in a season each week wouldn't be very long I'd imagine.

Same I guess for any team that drops down too many divisions, just automatically flag it and have someone look at it, it wouldn't take more than a minute to see if something is off, as teams who have been up in gold and perfect really should never naturally fall down to rookie, stone etc.

[MaroonAlberich]

Originally Posted by emilempenza

Honestly, I'd just have it so any team that nets over a certain amount of PP in a single season (or maybe even game) gets automatically flagged to be looked at. You can almost instantly tell if someone is shady, it really wouldn't take long to sift through the extreme earners and see who is doing something shady. This game doesn't have THAT many players, the list of teams who earnt more than, say, 100k in a season each week wouldn't be very long I'd imagine.

Same I guess for any team that drops down too many divisions, just automatically flag it and have someone look at it, it wouldn't take more than a minute to see if something is off, as teams who have been up in gold and perfect really should never naturally fall down to rookie, stone etc.

Or the flip side, flag any team that is the cause of massive PP distribution to others. If a team is giving up 10,000K a day, there's a reason.

[beckett]

How is this allowed? The guy has been doing this over 10 seasons now

[BigRed75]

Originally Posted by One Post Wonder

Please stop doing this to yourselves. Push to make rewards scale according to the level your team is playing at. It would put a stop to all of these problems within 20 minutes. It really is that simple.

So you support stratified systemic income inequality, and you advocate others voting against their own self-interest to put such a system in place. And then you use a red herring of an excuse that is a very minor issue in the grand scheme of things to gin up support for this model.

I feel like I've seen this playbook done before, but I can't quite put my finger on where that might have been...

[eldur00]

Originally Posted by BigRed75

So you support stratified systemic income inequality, and you advocate others voting against their own self-interest to put such a system in place. And then you use a red herring of an excuse that is a very minor issue in the grand scheme of things to gin up support for this model.

I feel like I've seen this playbook done before, but I can't quite put my finger on where that might have been...

The rich are already getting richer, except for a very small handful of FTP that have to make this game their second job to make it profitable.


Now, I am not advocating for getting everything for free without any investment. That's not what it's about.


There's a reason so many games use a ladder system with rewards going up in value the higher up you are - because it works.


When's the last time you've seen someone lose on purpose in The Show, MUT, FIFA or even battlegrounds in WoW ? You don't, because it would slow your progress. All of these games have their sets of issues. But the rewarding system is not one of them.


This is just for the sakes of discussion anyway. Markus already replied in a similar thread (could even be this one) stating he really likes the pro/rel system. At least, I can say Markus is definitely smart enough to figure it out and make it work better. This year's version is just filled with bottlenecks. Not only in the standings, but in the AH as well. Which creates bottlenecks in collections as well, leaving pretty much only tournaments for someone that wants to see constant progression.


They already made the game better than it was 3 years ago. This year they tried some things that really ended up not being super optimal. I pretty sure they are learning from that, and that next year you will all see a better structure behind it all. Sometimes ideas look great on paper, then when it's out in the wild, it's too late to take it back.


I'm 97.075% certain the product will be better next year, at least as far as all those bottlenecks go.

[dogtired75]

Originally Posted by beckett

How is this allowed? The guy has been doing this over 10 seasons now

I wonder if that "report this team" button works.

Sent from my Pixel 4a using Tapatalk

[Ty Cobb]

There was a guy in D366 this week...20+perfects sitting on his reserve roster, and he lost 140 games. I know he was reported at least twice...crickets.

[beckett]

Originally Posted by dogtired75

I wonder if that "report this team" button works.

Sent from my Pixel 4a using Tapatalk

If it did then I wouldn't have posted again at the end of the week.

Or it does work and that type of play is allowable. I don't know.

Cheaters user name is Calemi.

[bailey]

Originally Posted by beckett

If it did then I wouldn't have posted again at the end of the week.

Or it does work and that type of play is allowable. I don't know.

Cheaters user name is Calemi.

Has he completed any collections? If he has then he must have better pitchers locked up and would be cheating by playing less than the best cards available. If he has not completed collections and sold off all of his pitchers but these few then that would be a strategy. Since you boldly gave this user's name in violation of forum rules, I checked. He has completed zero collections, therefore I conclude this is a strategy and not cheating.

[dkgo]

That is a bold, zero ****s given level of sandbagging. Most teams Ive seen at least try to balance the line a bit.

Pretty hilarious that is the type of play the game encourages but if you can print 200K PP a week why not

[pstrickert]

No doubt this is cheating. I've seen other users do the same thing. Stack your roster with good offense. But use mediocre (at best) pitching, place the starters on a pitch limit, and keep few (always tired) arms in the bullpen. The result is plenty of PPs because of the offense; but not enough wins to get promoted because of the lousy pitching. And enough "plausible deniability," in case you get reported.

[BigRed75]

Originally Posted by pstrickert

No doubt this is cheating. I've seen other users do the same thing. Stack your roster with good offense. But use mediocre (at best) pitching, place the starters on a pitch limit, and keep few (always tired) arms in the bullpen. The result is plenty of PPs because of the offense; but not enough wins to get promoted because of the lousy pitching. And enough "plausible deniability," in case you get reported.

I had a team - loaded it up with home run hitters, brought the fences in as close as possible. Signed Bobby Bonds as my leadoff hitter to maximize both the "Leading off in style" achievement and to try and get him a 40-40 season every year. Also picked up known 30-30 threats as well. It was a point generating machine.

Didn't spend any money on pitching. Only rule for pitching was that they had to be groundball pitchers. Extreme groundball pitchers, even better. Thinking was, while I wanted to hit balls over the fence in my bandbox of a ballpark, I didn't want the opposition to.

But if you looked at my roster, and the overalls, you would have seen a bunch of gold and diamond hitters (plus silver Bonds and perfect Trout) and iron and bronze pitchers. And thought I was "cheating"

Guess what? We were kinda competitive. Bounced up and down. My starters had a few 20-win seasons and even won a Cy Young one year.

Eventually, I accumulated enough PP to complete the Negro League mission as a FTP player, and now it's my Negro League theme team playing in a "normal" stadium

tl;dr: it's not cheating, it's a strategy

[dkgo]

Did you have a full staff of pitchers or did you force four relievers to throw 60 pitches a game each?

[dboeyr12007]

Idk if there is a way this could work or not, but maybe there could be something set up that you could lose points. Like you would only lose points in extreme circumstances but say you give up 20 runs in a game so many times, and then you start losing 3000 points every time it happens after the quota is hit.