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

[dkgo]

There is a 2.5M bartolo colon? wtf?

[ronhatch]

Originally Posted by Spieler

Was PEAK Bartolo Colon a tournament reward? His bid was up to 2.5m PP, don't know what it ended up going for.

Absolutely.

I was in a tournament with him as the top-tier reward... I was pretty excited once I made it to the reward tier, but I ended up finishing 3rd/4th and got a Jeff Bagwell card that's inferior to the live mission reward I already had.

[DonMattingly]

Originally Posted by dkgo

There is a 2.5M bartolo colon? wtf?

More PEAK "magic" I would assume.

[obseen]

Ditto. There is no way to compete in these tournaments for the average player.

I like the idea of adding draft tournaments where you select from a pool of cards/packs to build a team for that tournament. Kind of like the Madden draft duels or how Hex (obscure TCG reference) opened a pack and each team drafts a card from that pack and it continues until rosters are complete. In that game each team had to buy a pack as the entrance fee and you kept the cards after if I remember correctly.

Originally Posted by dkgo

That answer is also completely inconsistent with the rest of the game. The "rich" get richer by having the best cards to play high-reward tournaments with. Open tournaments with premium card rewards are won by teams who don't need it. They already get more PP during the season through achievements. Which is fine, you want to give people an incentive to buy points because that is what keeps the game going.

[ronhatch]

Originally Posted by obseen

Ditto. There is no way to compete in these tournaments for the average player.

Well, I mean... that may be true in some cases, but not all. The tournament that I was in with the Peak Bartolo Colon mentioned above was limited to only Iron cards... and I made it to the quarter finals without ever having spent a cent on Perfect Points. I haven't even tuned my team all that much yet, since I'm still working on a system for efficiently aggregating tournament stats in a database.

(Granted, once I have such a system it can be argued that sufficient data analysis background to get that kind of advantage is very much NOT part of what makes for an average player. Current team was made only based on the typical rosters I was seeing from tournament winners, though.)

Edit: Oh, and now I noticed you were specifically responding to a post that mentioned open tournaments. So to some degree this doesn't apply. Leaving it up for the record, mostly.

[ronhatch]

Originally Posted by dkgo

There are definitely better ways to seed all the teams, but overall active roster rating is a simple first pass that everyone could understand. Plus it rewards strategically built teams. Once the season has started every team has 100% incentive to win since that earns you the most points while having no negative impact on your future points like the current system.

Hmmm... what if the seeding was based simply on the number of points that went into the team?

Every transaction is a known quantity, so it could at least theoretically be tracked. Pack and card rewards could have a point value assigned to them as well. Could be awkward for those of us that like to collect and have spent a lot of points on cards that aren't making our team better... not sure how to deal with that without leaving an opening for tankers again, but maybe someone else can come up with something.

Some other more out-there ideas I've been mulling over involve the fact that digital assets can be copied and don't have to be in only one place at a time. You could have a kind of mega-tournament that kicks off each week with the winners of each league setting a static roster that will then be used for another full season in a parallel league system of just the winners. Winners of those leagues will then compete with the other winners the following week, until there is one overall champion.

So in that kind of structure, you could be earning points from multiple copies of the same team each week, depending on how far it goes up the ranks.

[DonMattingly]

I was thinking about how people tank/sandbag and have an idea for how to stop it.

Put a cap on the amount of PP a team can earn in any level after they have been there for more than X amount seasons.

This way there is simply nothing to be gained from staying in Rookie forever or constantly tanking in Stone to get back to Rookie. Once you've had more than X amount of years in Rookie and accrued more than Y points, you would get no more.

It would also still allow a team that starts out very strong to have a banner year in Rookie and rake in points in that year.

Then there is no need to report anyone, no need to ban anyone either. The strategy of tanking would just be obsoleted.

[benderguy1]

Originally Posted by DonMattingly

I was thinking about how people tank/sandbag and have an idea for how to stop it.

Put a cap on the amount of PP a team can earn in any level after they have been there for more than X amount seasons.

This way there is simply nothing to be gained from staying in Rookie forever or constantly tanking in Stone to get back to Rookie. Once you've had more than X amount of years in Rookie and accrued more than Y points, you would get no more.

It would also still allow a team that starts out very strong to have a banner year in Rookie and rake in points in that year.

Then there is no need to report anyone, no need to ban anyone either. The strategy of tanking would just be obsoleted.

That's a pretty good idea. I think it would also serve to keep the cost down a little bit on some of the premium cards in the AH. Make no mistake that the more points earned through tanking, the more that pushes prices up. There's still going to be the folks that spend $$ to create the team that they want, but at least ill-gotten PP from tanking won't be creating inflation within the economy of the AH.

[eldur00]

Originally Posted by DonMattingly

I was thinking about how people tank/sandbag and have an idea for how to stop it.

Put a cap on the amount of PP a team can earn in any level after they have been there for more than X amount seasons.

This way there is simply nothing to be gained from staying in Rookie forever or constantly tanking in Stone to get back to Rookie. Once you've had more than X amount of years in Rookie and accrued more than Y points, you would get no more.

It would also still allow a team that starts out very strong to have a banner year in Rookie and rake in points in that year.

Then there is no need to report anyone, no need to ban anyone either. The strategy of tanking would just be obsoleted.

So a FTP player with a struggling team gets penalized and has extremely limited ways to improve their team and eventually quits?
No thanks. Don't punish the majority of your player base. That has turned out great a grand total of 0 times in gaming history.

[BertBDJ]

Originally Posted by Kris Jardine

Just for the record, that team has been reported a grand total of 0 times. Not a single time. Other than in this post.

Interesting, I was under the impression it has been. Unfortunately, I think this is an example where rookie teams don't 1) understand the game yet, 2) don't see it necessarily as tanking because there is no league to drop to, and 3) are enjoying the points that they are racking up against the team.

So, while it's not tanking if you have nowhere to go, it is creating point escalation and skewing point distribution. The team, btw has 8 all stars in the running, and will pocket the 800 points for that, while having no chance to win. This takes those points out of the other players hands and shifts competitive balance.

I'm not sure what you would report him for? Intentionally losing I guess, but I don't think it's officially tanking if you aren't trying to move down.

Question Can you train pitchers? Are those position players going to eventually become real pitchers?

edit: I've submitted a report, since it is effecting the competitive balance in the league.

[dkgo]

If the cap is like 25K then it only hits teams that are dropping back to win 120 games, someone struggling has zero impact from it. I think it is a good idea as a quick bandaid

[stan-theman]

Not sure i fully understand the TANKING issue.
A=It seems to me if you paid for the game you should be able to do as you please
B=As far as i know there are no cash payouts so who cares if someone loses 115 games
C=I for like to change my roster alot try different guys mainly ones i liked as a kid 1950's and 60's or older ones than that
D=I lucked out and caught like 5 100's ina weeks time sold them bought a bunch of players got bumped up to Diamond league but cant compete with teams that have nothing but 100's...i am trying to get down to gold so at least i can compete dont care about winning championship but dont want to spend next year in a league where i win maybe 40-50 games a week
E=And for what its worth real baseball today is pretty sad so this game is my baseball fix..thanks

[Syd Thrift]

F. Bull****, there are not "fantasy worlds" in which everyone loves starting Jeff Bagwell at shortstop.

Why are there so many people in here writing apologia for cheating?

[DonMattingly]

Originally Posted by eldur00

So a FTP player with a struggling team gets penalized and has extremely limited ways to improve their team and eventually quits?
No thanks. Don't punish the majority of your player base. That has turned out great a grand total of 0 times in gaming history.

A F2P player with a struggling team won't be raking in PP now, will they?

If you set the cap high enough it won't be an issue for a team like that.

It's the teams that unleash Diamond level teams in Rookie and rake in 10s of thousands of points that would get caught by the cap. You'd just need to set it sufficiently high so as not to affect struggling teams.

I don't know what that level should be, I am open to suggestions. I would say if you're in Rookie for something like more than 4-5 years and you've made over say 50-75 thousand PP, you get capped.

Or it could just be something that looks at how much you've made in any year in Rookie and if you've made over X more than once, you can't ever earn in Rookie again. No struggling new team is going to rake in tons of PP in Rookie more than once, at that point it's almost a sure sign of tanking.

Something can be implemented that would work.

[Orcin]

Originally Posted by stan-theman

Not sure i fully understand the TANKING issue.
A=It seems to me if you paid for the game you should be able to do as you please

No, you still have to abide by the Terms of Service that you accepted when you made your Perfect Team account.

Originally Posted by stan-theman

C=I for like to change my roster alot try different guys mainly ones i liked as a kid 1950's and 60's or older ones than that

This might not be tanking at all, depending which player(s) are swapped and which players replace them. You might actually be improving your team. You would have to be more specific. If you are swapping perfect Pedro for an iron pitcher, then that's a little more than "trying different guys".

Originally Posted by stan-theman

D=I lucked out and caught like 5 100's ina weeks time sold them bought a bunch of players got bumped up to Diamond league but cant compete with teams that have nothing but 100's...i am trying to get down to gold so at least i can compete dont care about winning championship but dont want to spend next year in a league where i win maybe 40-50 games a week

This is clearly tanking, and runs afoul of the clause in the ToS that says "losing on purpose". You could be clever/subtle and achieve it without being caught. However, it is still tanking even if you get away with it.

[eldur00]

Originally Posted by DonMattingly

A F2P player with a struggling team won't be raking in PP now, will they?

If you set the cap high enough it won't be an issue for a team like that.

It's the teams that unleash Diamond level teams in Rookie and rake in 10s of thousands of points that would get caught by the cap. You'd just need to set it sufficiently high so as not to affect struggling teams.

I don't know what that level should be, I am open to suggestions. I would say if you're in Rookie for something like more than 4-5 years and you've made over say 50-75 thousand PP, you get capped.

Or it could just be something that looks at how much you've made in any year in Rookie and if you've made over X more than once, you can't ever earn in Rookie again. No struggling new team is going to rake in tons of PP in Rookie more than once, at that point it's almost a sure sign of tanking.

Something can be implemented that would work.

Except it wouldn't. Once the tanker has raked up all the points they can over 4 weeks (takes 8 weeks to go up and down) at Stone, then he will start doing it at Rookie for another number of weeks, then will move up the problem to Bronze for a number of weeks, then up to Silver all the way up to the release of OOTP22.
You're not fixing the problem, you're just making it move around.
The way to fix the problem is to stop relying on the players to play police and ban the culprits outright.
If you give people leeway with a cap number of points, they will cheat until they reach that number, then move on to the next level and cheat until they rack up the points there too. Once they have run out of time/room to do it, they will do it on a second team. Then on a third.

[DonMattingly]

Originally Posted by eldur00

Except it wouldn't. Once the tanker has raked up all the points they can over 4 weeks (takes 8 weeks to go up and down) at Stone, then he will start doing it at Rookie for another number of weeks, then will move up the problem to Bronze for a number of weeks, then up to Silver all the way up to the release of OOTP22.
You're not fixing the problem, you're just making it move around.
The way to fix the problem is to stop relying on the players to play police and ban the culprits outright.
If you give people leeway with a cap number of points, they will cheat until they reach that number, then move on to the next level and cheat until they rack up the points there too. Once they have run out of time/room to do it, they will do it on a second team. Then on a third.

Which is better than someone living in Rookie for dozens of years with all three teams like they can right now.

[eldur00]

Originally Posted by DonMattingly

Which is better than someone living in Rookie for dozens of years with all three teams like they can right now.

Better - maybe, but far from enough. These individuals must have their licenses blocked from accessing PT. Period. I'm tired of having a league wrecked by a tanker taking full advantage of a system that is too docile to have them made accountable for their despicable behavior.
The Dinos guy is STILL around making a joke of the whole thing despite being reported, pointed out, made fun of, argued about, for WEEKS. I don't care it's not on the same team, it's the same behavior, block his license and move on. Don't give him the opportunity to have a max amount of points at each level he can get because guess what ? He'll see it as a challenge to get that max at every.single.level. And it's going to ruin the fun of a lot of other players in the process.


So better ? I'm not sure...that's still several weeks of abuse for someone like that, where they will plan their every move to ensure they get the max amount of points at every level as they can. They won't see it as punishment, but as a reward to claim before they move on to the next level.

[DonMattingly]

Originally Posted by eldur00

Better - maybe, but far from enough. These individuals must have their licenses blocked from accessing PT. Period. I'm tired of having a league wrecked by a tanker taking full advantage of a system that is too docile to have them made accountable for their despicable behavior.
The Dinos guy is STILL around making a joke of the whole thing despite being reported, pointed out, made fun of, argued about, for WEEKS. I don't care it's not on the same team, it's the same behavior, block his license and move on. Don't give him the opportunity to have a max amount of points at each level he can get because guess what ? He'll see it as a challenge to get that max at every.single.level. And it's going to ruin the fun of a lot of other players in the process.


So better ? I'm not sure...that's still several weeks of abuse for someone like that, where they will plan their every move to ensure they get the max amount of points at every level as they can. They won't see it as punishment, but as a reward to claim before they move on to the next level.

There would still be a report button, but it seems like from many peoples' experiences many teams are slipping through the cracks. The game could also auto-ban instead of just deny PP. That would stop it at Rookie.

Plus the value of tanking goes down with each higher level - Rookie is really the best mining platform. Every level higher means better teams and less PP to mine.

[eldur00]

Originally Posted by DonMattingly

There would still be a report button, but it seems like from many peoples' experiences many teams are slipping through the cracks. The game could also auto-ban instead of just deny PP. That would stop it at Rookie.

Plus the value of tanking goes down with each higher level - Rookie is really the best mining platform. Every level higher means better teams and less PP to mine.

I'd be fine with a system that flags an account (not just a team) and prevents that account from getting PP. I have a problem with a system that may accidentally affect someone playing legitimately but having progress potentially halted/disrupted by a system that is really meant to catch a few select individuals.
So in the case of your PP limit per level, I could see it work if an account was flagged as cheating, then make it a zero sum for them. Not just the standard for everyone, because there are a lot more of us who play legit than those of us who cheat.