Is there too many Perfect cards?

[Tinkerman]

There are a lot of rubbish pullable 100's. A lot. It makes pulling a playable one incredibly unlikely. I may well die from shock if I do at this point!

When you put that together with such a clear selection of superior cards (mainly SE), it's all a bit meh. There could be a lot less perfects AND a lot more playable ones.

I'd love to see a much lager selection of similar WAR players to choose from. Then we could really use our managerial skills to get the best (or worst) out of our different groups of players, without automatically becoming uncompetitive. I'd also like to see cards ranked by their benchmark WAR so that overalls made more sense. There aren't the hidden gems that there used to be in PT20, so may as well rank cards accurately IMO.

Personally, I'd be happy for historical perfects to quite a bit rarer to pull, if they were guaranteed to be a very good card.

[professor ape]

A big part of the fun is improving your roster. To keep that up over the course of many months you have to have an upward creep of the cards. There is no way around it.

[HRBaker]

Originally Posted by professor ape

A big part of the fun is improving your roster. To keep that up over the course of many months you have to have an upward creep of the cards. There is no way around it.

Yes there is a way to get around it; limit the initial release of cards to Iron through Gold (with maybe a handful of Diamonds). Then as the year progresses add Irons though Perfects "in equal numbers". In this way, the "pyramid card distribution model" never gets upset and everything works just the way it does now. The only difference is Perfects and Diamonds are harder to get and rosters are more varied.

[HRBaker]

Originally Posted by Tinkerman

There are a lot of rubbish pullable 100's. A lot.

LOL, true enough. It also makes one want to hit the thesaurus for words worse than "rubbish" for all those Diamond through Iron cards we pull by the time we reach September. The population of so-called "Perfects" is so large we throw most of them away even if we're in Silver Leagues.

[AdequateRandomGaming]

Originally Posted by professor ape

A big part of the fun is improving your roster. To keep that up over the course of many months you have to have an upward creep of the cards. There is no way around it.

Nobody is disputing there needs to be a power creep. People are debating its pace and distribution. There's a huge difference.

[Hertston]

Originally Posted by HRBaker

Yes there is a way to get around it; limit the initial release of cards to Iron through Gold (with maybe a handful of Diamonds). Then as the year progresses add Irons though Perfects "in equal numbers". In this way, the "pyramid card distribution model" never gets upset and everything works just the way it does now. The only difference is Perfects and Diamonds are harder to get and rosters are more varied.

As a game, that would work best. Unfortunately, as a marketing exercise, probably not. It would be hard to induce people to spend real money on 'Perfect Team' without the chance to acquire 'perfect' cards in packs or at auction. It's a reasonable assumption, if not a certainty, that this years profligate availability of 100 cards had more to do with maximising profit than maximising player experience, particularly of those of us with a decidedly non-cetacean approach.

[Abnerdoubleday]

Originally Posted by Hertston

As a game, that would work best. Unfortunately, as a marketing exercise, probably not. It would be hard to induce people to spend real money on 'Perfect Team' without the chance to acquire 'perfect' cards in packs or at auction. It's a reasonable assumption, if not a certainty, that this years profligate availability of 100 cards had more to do with maximising profit than maximising player experience, particularly of those of us with a decidedly non-cetacean approach.

Except, when that 1:10,000 historical perfect finally shows up and turns out to be nearly worthless, it is not unreasonable to think that some players might react more along the lines of *DELETE GAME*

[Hertston]

Originally Posted by Abnerdoubleday

Except, when that 1:10,000 historical perfect finally shows up and turns out to be nearly worthless, it is not unreasonable to think that some players might react more along the lines of *DELETE GAME*

Quite possibly, but note I was suggesting only that the profligacy of Perfects this year was motivated by attempting to maximise profit, not that it was necessarily the BEST such strategy. The publishers and developers have far more information to reliably assess that than I do.

[HRBaker]

Originally Posted by Hertston

As a game, that would work best. Unfortunately, as a marketing exercise, probably not. It would be hard to induce people to spend real money on 'Perfect Team' without the chance to acquire 'perfect' cards in packs or at auction. It's a reasonable assumption, if not a certainty, that this years profligate availability of 100 cards had more to do with maximising profit than maximising player experience, particularly of those of us with a decidedly non-cetacean approach.

It could still work, however... take a look at my diagram.


Disclaimer: I'm not trying to represent actual numbers - just a concept.


If the left pyramid represents the initial distribution of cards. then the right side graphic would represent the added cards throughout the year. The KEY here is to maintain the pyramid rather than make the distribution of cards become top-heavy. I suspect this would result in a lot fewer high end cards being released than this year - and it would drive the price up on more Diamonds and Golds. A "perfect-pull" or "perfect-reward" would mean a ton more than it does now because it's unlikely something better is right around the corner.


"Cetacean" players would still buy the best cards available - even if they weren't supermen.

[professor ape]

Keep in mind that many of the perfects were mission rewards. My feeling is that maintaining the pyramid is most important for the packable cards.
Also, if you limit the number of different top cards then you will have more cookie cutter lineups which is another common complaint.

[canadiancreed]

Personally I'll throw my weight in on too many perfects, but outside of my daily team I never use them. There's no point in going into tournaments that use them due to the amount of whales. I personally prefer using my Gold and Bronze cards. More challenge and variety that way.

[dbqs]

My two cents - packable perfects should be highly desirable in some way, either very good stats or important for good missions rewards or tournaments. We have far too many ultimately entirely useless ones this year (at least so far, unless a ton get important for some late-game missions in this last month or so of content)
It's such a rare event, it's kind of a huge bummer for a new player for your first "big" card pull from a pack to be something on the level of Maris/Candy Cummings/etc. this year. It completely makes sense for mission rewards to get stronger as the year goes on, but to be releasing packable perfects later on that are completely outclassed by existing cards is a bit disappointing. I did like this last week's set because they mostly have utility in some weekly tournaments, so the other side of this might be that it could be mitigated by more focus on new tournament formats and better rewards so that even those "bad" perfects can find a niche use. e.g. Ian Kinsler is still a pretty good choice for a Modern tournament, but it only comes around once a month... Or it's nice that Pujols or Eddie Mathews were used for a couple new missions and are now decently valuable.

[quizkid]

Pyramid has been maintained all year, Kris talks about the Diamonds thru Perfect cards (and a few gold) on his stream, but there have been 3 releases of "lower tier" cards throughout the year, that were 200-300-ish silver to Iron cards (with a few gold) each. So, not sure where the concern with the maintaining the pyramid comes from.

[who]

This is only my first year playing ootp, but weren't people complaining about the opposite in the beginning of the year. I personally thought it was boring when every team had the same exact players. Now there's actually a variety of players you can start or design a team around.

[Hertston]

Originally Posted by who

This is only my first year playing ootp, but weren't people complaining about the opposite in the beginning of the year. I personally thought it was boring when every team had the same exact players.

To me anyway, it's much less varied now than it was then. FH3 standardized most lineups in Diamond, and the only differences now are which one or two metas somebody might have. Well, that and whether they are using the full-on 'leftie cheese' variant or not, which FH3 made even more effective. My lineup is somewhat different as this week I went all out small-ball just to see if it could be done, but even then the pitching and half the offence still consists of the same players as everybody else.

[Fenixdown]

Originally Posted by who

This is only my first year playing ootp, but weren't people complaining about the opposite in the beginning of the year. I personally thought it was boring when every team had the same exact players. Now there's actually a variety of players you can start or design a team around.

What teams are you looking at? The teams all look the same the higher up you go. Once you get to Gold +, you see the same pitching staffs and same lineups (with maaaaaaybe a few player distinctions from team to team, but overall the same core nuclei). And if you don't have that cookie cutter, have fun losing 100+ games and going back down to silver. Where everyone has the same teams again, but they're not Gold worthy teams, they're just "forever silver" teams with the same "forever silver" comps.


Just because they added some new eye candy to the game didn't fix that problem. It just made the problem involve new eye candy.

[Ballyhoo]

Originally Posted by Fenixdown

What teams are you looking at? The teams all look the same the higher up you go. Once you get to Gold +, you see the same pitching staffs and same lineups (with maaaaaaybe a few player distinctions from team to team, but overall the same core nuclei). And if you don't have that cookie cutter, have fun losing 100+ games and going back down to silver. Where everyone has the same teams again, but they're not Gold worthy teams, they're just "forever silver" teams with the same "forever silver" comps.


Just because they added some new eye candy to the game didn't fix that problem. It just made the problem involve new eye candy.

I'm was in a silver two weeks ago, one guy had an entire team of perfects. I'm lucky to get one in a pack.... well almost never. All but 3 of the perfects I have (I only have 10) I bought on the AH with points.

Opening packs is just soooooo boring. Opened 20 packs today/yesterday and zero cards I can use in Silver PT.

If you watch the weekly twitch stream that perfect team league, so many of the same players.

[mpatt75]

Why does Mario freaking Soto deserve a Perfect card? Because he almost threw a no hitter and was a 3 time All Star?

Suppose I have a different definition.

[ojoe]

Originally Posted by Abnerdoubleday

Except, when that 1:10,000 historical perfect finally shows up and turns out to be nearly worthless, it is not unreasonable to think that some players might react more along the lines of *DELETE GAME*

I'm thinking along these lines.

I ignored missions until very recently, so I understand that I'm a bit behind the curve. But I've been paying attention to the missions for about 10 weeks now, and for the last three or four I've had a roster comprised entirely of 100-rated cards. That got me up to the Gold Level, where I've done very well.

I've had four seasons at the Gold level, and won 87, 106, 101, and 95 games. I missed the playoffs in that 87-win season but made it the other three. And two of those seasons got me bumped up to Diamond League.

My record in Diamond League with the same players who won me an average of 97 games over four seasons at Gold?

41-121 the first year, and currently 14-69 in my second go. I get that I need to keep improving my team to win at Diamond level, but does the team have to be THAT bad? Do those same cards that got me this far have to be THAT uncompetitive? Rube Waddell is 0-13 with an ERA of 10.09. I asked AI to set up my roster and it put Juan Marichal in as my closer - he's 1-11, 10.30. A closer. 11 losses before the end of June.

Yeah, yeah, yeah...I need to keep improving. Fine. Whatever. But 14-69? We could keep the thing where you need to keep working towards better cards without making previously-successful cards suddenly turn into...I don't even know what level of team you'd expect to go 14-69 against Major Leaguers? I feel like a AAA team would do better, even a not particularly good one. AA? A? A really good high school?

Point is, I don't feel that I need to step up my game so I can win at the Diamond level. I feel that this is mocking the effort I've put in so far, and so I should just mock right back and replace all those 100s with the iron level players that got locked up while I completed all those missions. And I feel like I'm probably out on PT next year.

[Hertston]

Originally Posted by ojoe

Point is, I don't feel that I need to step up my game so I can win at the Diamond level. I feel that this is mocking the effort I've put in so far, and so I should just mock right back and replace all those 100s with the iron level players that got locked up while I completed all those missions.

You'll only get banned for 'tanking' if you do that.

The trouble is that completing missions IS the game, not an optional extra that can be ignored... although, granted, that isn't exactly made clear other than through experience. It is the only realistic way to progress your team(s) through and beyond a certain level unless your tourney success is truly remarkable or you have spare $1,000s in disposable income.

Would you feel any differently if '100' cards had been limited to a very few multi-mission toppers, random drops (and possibly major tourney rewards) until FH3?