Let me expound on something...

[Marleigh]

Originally Posted by QuantaCondor

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.

For ''Months''... game released 137 days ago, 7 days later Bench collection was released, 7 days after that Sisler collection was released alongside Appling, 7 days after that Jackie was released, 7 days after Medwick and Whitaker, together with all of those there was the Elite spotlight series and the Negro league cards, all of that time plenty of much stronger cards were available than the live SE cards, If you bought Whitaker/Appling/Jackie you would have a significant advantage over Tulo/Cano/Longoria, and your DH platoon of Sisler and Medwick would be pretty good. Thats just uisng collection cards that were issued in the 1st month.

Yes higher end cards in 21 have been inflated but golds apart from the odd exception have remained at roughly the same power level, and the top end inflation has been so severe that there really is no correlation between reality and PT any more. But I guess that's what the whales want, ever increasing number

[Lemandria]

Suggesting 85% of the player base to "go find something else to do" is a level of ego that I'd rather not deal with, and it's also a terrible business model.

Economics will reply with a very hard lesson about robber baron capitalism.

[QuantaCondor]

Originally Posted by Marleigh

For ''Months''... game released 137 days ago, 7 days later Bench collection was released, 7 days after that Sisler collection was released alongside Appling, 7 days after that Jackie was released, 7 days after Medwick and Whitaker, together with all of those there was the Elite spotlight series and the Negro league cards, all of that time plenty of much stronger cards were available than the live SE cards, If you bought Whitaker/Appling/Jackie you would have a significant advantage over Tulo/Cano/Longoria, and your DH platoon of Sisler and Medwick would be pretty good. Thats just uisng collection cards that were issued in the 1st month.

Yes higher end cards in 21 have been inflated but golds apart from the odd exception have remained at roughly the same power level, and the top end inflation has been so severe that there really is no correlation between reality and PT any more. But I guess that's what the whales want, ever increasing number

Hey sure, let's go through the content. I'll speak to it as someone who has been in PL multiple times, collected a lot of data, and actually has experience in the DL and PL metas. Keep in mind that whales have all the good cards already anyway, so only cards that are better than the next best option matter:

Elite 1 (march 26): Pujols? 2nd tier card. Bench is good but a vL catcher will hardly elevate a team a ton. AND Frank Thomas, great card, totally accessible to F2P teams
Fan Favorites: Bad
Elite 2: Appling; good card, TOTALLY buildable for F2P, even profitable for a while
NL Set: Lots of good stuff. Arguably the one big drop in Pop, Jackie, Gibson, Satch. Of those, Pop and Jackie really have projected; Satch and Gibson good but not the same level. But the packed cards came in slowly, and few Jackies were produced; took a while for those to enter
ESS 3: Zero good cards. maybe Dazzy in the pen at best
April POTM (April 30): 99 Clemente as a 2nd tier vL OF, not good
ESS 4: Bad Ruth, a profitable set for F2P and a bait card for whales. Rolllie (awesome) and Koufax (good but not super elite)
Sporer: Total meh, Verlander is fine but 2nd tier
ESS 5: Randy, great lefty but kind of scales poorly to PL. Still a good card. Crappy TOTD
Memorial Day (May 28): Bad
TOTD 2: Bad
Community Set: Bad
TOTD 3: SE Ted, but also VERY COMPLETABLE for F2P
Summer Kickoff (June 25th): A few decent but not hyper elite Historical Perfects. Basically just adds diversity, not options. Also they were mostly IF which was already cluttered; no big advantage
TOTD 4: Cap, Honus, Babe, Walter. Good cards, again very completable sets for a F2P who is prepared for it
ASG/Boys 2: Totally meh. Some 2nd or 3rd tier 100 SPs, that's it
FOTF1: Gwynn, Brett, Seaver. Great cards; arguably a big infusion to whale rosters
On the Move: Bad
FOTF2 (July 30): Mauer is good but not super dominant, barely an improvement on Yogi. Fernandez fine if you want a 2.5 tier SP. Bad otherwise

So:
April+March: Bench, Appling, NL Cards (Pop, Jackie, Satch)
May: Koufax and Randy?
June: SE Ted, (and some more diversity but not improvements in the IF)
July: Cap, Honus, good Babe, Walter, Gwynn, Brett, Seaver, Mauer, Jose Fernandez (kinda).

So, prior to July, we saw: SE Ted and Appling (totally underpriced and acquirable by F2P who did the sets), some vL catchers, some LHSP, and a big cluttered dump on the IF. This includes a massive void of good cards that basically stretched through May and June. That is all we got from launch to last month. Anyone who thinks Sisler, Medwick, and freaking SE Whitaker made waves on the high levels of the game just doesn't know what the high levels look like.

This is also not even bringing up that the SE Jackie set was really profitable (and probably is now again), or that you could profit off SE Babe either alone or chained with Sisler, or that any locked set diamonds fed into TOTD and FotF and gave engaged F2P players an edge, or that TOTD was ridiculously telegaphed and was easy to pick up PP for anyone who bothered taking 2 seconds to google a top 10 WAR list. So the whales got a few marginal improvements and F2P players got a big hook to build off of the LIVE SEs. This matters, of course, because the gap that matters isn't between whales and silver players, it's between whales and the engaged F2P that was competing with them. And ALL THE WHILE, SE Yaz, SE Bagwell, SE Cano remained playable, SE Ichiro and SE Yogi remained elite, and SE Maddux remained as one of the game's best pitchers. Not to mention guys like SE Randy, Carlton, Piazza, Lyons, Blyleven, BWilliams were all absolutely playable into diamond.

If you had said "The gap between silver teams and whales + engaged F2P teams has grown", I'd agree with that, but like I said, the whales don't care about silver teams.

Disclaimer: When I say "F2P" I mostly mean "F2P who is strategizing well". Your average achievement-points-only team might not be able to complete at 100k set, but a F2P who is sitting on a stack, churning profitable sets, doing the things they should be doing, they should have access to those kinds of opportunities

[Marleigh]

There were better players in the game than the live SEs at launch, therefore whales could already buy an advantage. that advantage has grown larger because of the cards that have been issued within collections and as part of the content releases. The vast majority of F2P players were not in a position to do the Jackie collection when it released as the cost was what 400-500k+ when it launched and there were no cards available a whale was always going to be the first to complete it. And very few of the first bunch were actually auctioned.

Sisler doesn't make waves on the high levels of the game but hit 35 homers, had 122 rbis and led the perfect league in slugging and was 2nd in ISO in 2038 and various SE Sislers have appeared in the top 5 for stats such as total bases over the years

This is a Diamond league from 2025, you can clearly see the dominance of Live SE cards as there were no other good cards in the game, Diamond was the highest level of play at that time

http://1638625850.rsc.cdn77.org/seas...gue_stats.html

you know those popular live SE cards like Brouthers, Connor, King Kelly, Pedro Perfect Maddux etc

[dkgo]

Originally Posted by HRBaker

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

So your teams have a combined winning percentage of exactly .500

It sounds like they are where they should be and you are getting even competition. Isn't that what people say they want? Everyone can't have a winning record.

[QuantaCondor]

Originally Posted by Marleigh

There were better players in the game than the live SEs at launch, therefore whales could already buy an advantage. that advantage has grown larger because of the cards that have been issued within collections and as part of the content releases. The vast majority of F2P players were not in a position to do the Jackie collection when it released as the cost was what 400-500k+ when it launched and there were no cards available a whale was always going to be the first to complete it. And very few of the first bunch were actually auctioned.

Sisler doesn't make waves on the high levels of the game but hit 35 homers, had 122 rbis and led the perfect league in slugging and was 2nd in ISO in 2038 and various SE Sislers have appeared in the top 5 for stats such as total bases over the years

This is a Diamond league from 2025, you can clearly see the dominance of Live SE cards as there were no other good cards in the game, Diamond was the highest level of play at that time

http://1638625850.rsc.cdn77.org/seas...gue_stats.html

you know those popular live SE cards like Brouthers, Connor, King Kelly, Pedro Perfect Maddux etc

Cherry picking seasons from a card is a really awful way to assess a meta. If a card is popular, like Sisler, and there are 25 copies of it in the league, then the best of those 25 copies is very likely to show up on the leaderboards. Not to mention sheer highroll potential; my 94 Tannehill competed for the ERA crown in my first PL appearance, but I'm not calling him a top tier pitcher. No, high performance in one season by one card doesn't mean it's the best card in the slot; to really assess how PL works, you have to take a dataset of all the players, figure out how the stats scale, and determine which cards are really standing out. I'd call Sisler a borderline card, he's probably not better than Connor or Brouthers, but as a 2nd tier card if he gets a highroll season he's capable of showing up on leaderboards. My opinions aren't based on unreliable leaderboard snippets, they're based on about 8 seasons of hand-collected highlevel meta data spanning the top league or leagues (depending on the timeframe).

And nobody ever said there wasn't a place for Brouthers, King Kelly, etc. on top teams. But there is sure a place for SE Maddux, SE Yogi, and SE Ichiro, especially early on. Totally highlevel competitive cards, where improvements are extremely marginal and extremely expensive (if they even exist; SE Yogi was the best vR catcher forever basically imo). And nobody ever said whales were rolling out a team of majority Live SEs, just that the gap in WAR between Live SEs and the staples on launch was a lot lower than it has been in the past. As someone who has been making WAR models of both PT20 and PT21 since the launch of both games, I can tell you that the Live SEs were WAY more competitive compared to the gap in power from last year regardless of the changes to the stuff and power caps. This is also something we know even without looking at those models, since the devs have said the content was going to be a lot more incrementally released and cards like 100 Cy, 100 Walt, 100 Cobb that were super dominant at release last year weren't present this year.

Finally, I don't think you really get how the high level F2P vs. whale dynamic works. The more time you give the top F2P players to generate PP and work tourneys, collections, the AH, whatever, the more the gap between whales and F2P shrinks. When new big cards land, the gap grows. But the frontiers for whales barely moved at all basically from launch up until the final TOTD sets, whereas during all that time F2P players who were engaged and prepared were able to generate PP and gain a lot of ground. Sure, the gap between whales AND these strong F2Pers has grown relative to silver players, but like I said, that's not what's relevant here. Recently, basically from last TOTD to the most recent FOTF set, I'd say the gap between whales and top F2P who they rub shoulders with has grown. But before that final TOTD set, the distance barely changed and if anything favored F2P (especially because of how easy it was to speculate on TOTD).

Maybe a bit of a tangent from OP's original topic here. But I would really caution someone from commenting on the gap between competitive diamond F2Pers and whales unless they belong to one of those two groups. I expect that the gap between people who only did the Live SEs and nothing else and whales has grown, but of course it has; the game evolves over time and you can't expect cheap cards from launch to carry you months in (even though some of them kind of do still).

[HRBaker]

Originally Posted by bailey

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.

So, what your saying is (using one of my teams as an example (#1)), if I sell off all the live cards (22 of them not counting Trout), use that PP (about 80-100k) to complete live missions, I would field a better team?


I would agree Live Cards aren't as good a Special Editions, but replacing 1 Perfect - 20 Diamonds - and 5 Golds with 1 Perfect - 14 Diamonds - and 10 Golds doesn't strike me as an improvement.


That's what I would end up with by completing 22 missions.

[QuantaCondor]

Originally Posted by HRBaker

So, what your saying is (using one of my teams as an example (#1)), if I sell off all the live cards (22 of them not counting Trout), use that PP (about 80-100k) to complete live missions, I would field a better team?


I would agree Live Cards aren't as good a Second Editions, but replacing 1 Perfect - 20 Diamonds - and 5 Golds with 1 Perfect - 14 Diamonds - and 10 Golds doesn't strike me as an improvement.


That's what I would end up with by completing 22 missions.

Connecting the quality of your team to the rarity of the cards on it is probably the main thing holding you back. Learning that live cards underperform their overalls is virtually the first lesson you'll see in any new player thread.

[getalife1798]

Originally Posted by QuantaCondor

Connecting the quality of your team to the rarity of the cards on it is probably the main thing holding you back. Learning that live cards underperform their overalls is virtually the first lesson you'll see in any new player thread.

Just a quick question (off topic), how is Fred Lynn a perfect? I feel like there are some live perfects that are better than him.

[HRBaker]

Originally Posted by dkgo

So your teams have a combined winning percentage of exactly .500

It sounds like they are where they should be and you are getting even competition. Isn't that what people say they want? Everyone can't have a winning record.

No, my issue is this. Choking off the Perfect level to only 40 teams pushed a lot of decent rosters down the pyramid. 85% of all teams are in the bottom few levels. In that configuration, most teams reach their limits within a few months without $$$ or time. I'm not saying they should do better with little investment, but I would hope that the "engagement", even for those teams, would last more than 3 months. Opening up the Perfect Level would push teams up and elongate engagement for a month or two more.

[HRBaker]

Addendum...


I think the best thing for me to do is quit talking about this issue. I'm obviously in the minority here, and it's unlikely I'm going to change the minds of anyone. I just think somethings wrong when (1) the strongest teams in the game are almost always alike, and (2) what use to be decent teams (rosters with mostly Diamonds) can't break the Bronze barrier.


That said, I'll just drop this conversation.

[QuantaCondor]

Originally Posted by HRBaker

Addendum...


I think the best thing for me to do is quit talking about this issue. I'm obviously in the minority here, and it's unlikely I'm going to change the minds of anyone. I just think somethings wrong when (1) the strongest teams in the game are almost always alike, and (2) what use to be decent teams (rosters with mostly Diamonds) can't break the Bronze barrier.


That said, I'll just drop this conversation.

I think the issue with teams looking alike at the very top is how the world works, though I'd argue diamond has the most diversity of anywhere since it occupies the space between the PL meta rosters and the gold/silver Live SE rosters where people find interesting solutions. I want a stronger push for the tourney series, and to run in unique and even bizarre formats to force people to not conform to meta builds, to try to counter this effect a little.

And I think another poster said it best when they brought up the raw statistics: the bottom piece of PL teams last year belong in silver this year. That's just the reality of having a proper pyramid.

[Marleigh]

Originally Posted by QuantaCondor

Cherry picking seasons from a card is a really awful way to assess a meta. If a card is popular, like Sisler, and there are 25 copies of it in the league, then the best of those 25 copies is very likely to show up on the leaderboards. Not to mention sheer highroll potential; my 94 Tannehill competed for the ERA crown in my first PL appearance, but I'm not calling him a top tier pitcher. No, high performance in one season by one card doesn't mean it's the best card in the slot; to really assess how PL works, you have to take a dataset of all the players, figure out how the stats scale, and determine which cards are really standing out. I'd call Sisler a borderline card, he's probably not better than Connor or Brouthers, but as a 2nd tier card if he gets a highroll season he's capable of showing up on leaderboards. My opinions aren't based on unreliable leaderboard snippets, they're based on about 8 seasons of hand-collected highlevel meta data spanning the top league or leagues (depending on the timeframe).

And nobody ever said there wasn't a place for Brouthers, King Kelly, etc. on top teams. But there is sure a place for SE Maddux, SE Yogi, and SE Ichiro, especially early on. Totally highlevel competitive cards, where improvements are extremely marginal and extremely expensive (if they even exist; SE Yogi was the best vR catcher forever basically imo). And nobody ever said whales were rolling out a team of majority Live SEs, just that the gap in WAR between Live SEs and the staples on launch was a lot lower than it has been in the past. As someone who has been making WAR models of both PT20 and PT21 since the launch of both games, I can tell you that the Live SEs were WAY more competitive compared to the gap in power from last year regardless of the changes to the stuff and power caps. This is also something we know even without looking at those models, since the devs have said the content was going to be a lot more incrementally released and cards like 100 Cy, 100 Walt, 100 Cobb that were super dominant at release last year weren't present this year.

Finally, I don't think you really get how the high level F2P vs. whale dynamic works. The more time you give the top F2P players to generate PP and work tourneys, collections, the AH, whatever, the more the gap between whales and F2P shrinks. When new big cards land, the gap grows. But the frontiers for whales barely moved at all basically from launch up until the final TOTD sets, whereas during all that time F2P players who were engaged and prepared were able to generate PP and gain a lot of ground. Sure, the gap between whales AND these strong F2Pers has grown relative to silver players, but like I said, that's not what's relevant here. Recently, basically from last TOTD to the most recent FOTF set, I'd say the gap between whales and top F2P who they rub shoulders with has grown. But before that final TOTD set, the distance barely changed and if anything favored F2P (especially because of how easy it was to speculate on TOTD).

Maybe a bit of a tangent from OP's original topic here. But I would really caution someone from commenting on the gap between competitive diamond F2Pers and whales unless they belong to one of those two groups. I expect that the gap between people who only did the Live SEs and nothing else and whales has grown, but of course it has; the game evolves over time and you can't expect cheap cards from launch to carry you months in (even though some of them kind of do still).

I was using specific examples to disprove your anecdotal evidence, which all seems to centre around you thinking you know better than anyone else.

And the last paragraph is sublimely arrogant. Done with this conversation as you clearly only care about your own opinion and the last paragraph is basically trying to silence anyone elses opinion

[QuantaCondor]

Originally Posted by getalife1798

Just a quick question (off topic), how is Fred Lynn a perfect? I feel like there are some live perfects that are better than him.

There are a couple historical perfects that are truly garbage for whatever reason. You can't have every historical perfect be OP, I guess; there have to be better and worse HPs no matter where you set the lower bound on quality.

From a game design point of view, it's also a chance to show some skill/knowledge. Having some exceptions to "historical perfects are all good" gives some nuance to roster choices.

[dkgo]

Originally Posted by HRBaker

Addendum...


I think the best thing for me to do is quit talking about this issue. I'm obviously in the minority here, and it's unlikely I'm going to change the minds of anyone. I just think somethings wrong when (1) the strongest teams in the game are almost always alike, and (2) what use to be decent teams (rosters with mostly Diamonds) can't break the Bronze barrier.


That said, I'll just drop this conversation.

I don't see how to change point #1. Some cards are always just going to be better than others, and we have all the data needed in order to figure out which those are. The strongest teams will have those best cards. This isn't a trading card game where you can pick a specific class to play with and they all have a different identity. If you are talking about the initial Live Collection SEs I think that is an opportunity to tune them back to not be so strong so quickly that there is nothing comparable to look at.

And as said before, those decent teams in PT20 were bad perfect teams who got pummeled by the highly engaged players they drew in the league each season. Now they are in bronze/silver with comparable teams which seems like a good thing.

[QuantaCondor]

Originally Posted by Marleigh

I was using specific examples to disprove your anecdotal evidence, which all seems to centre around you thinking you know better than anyone else.

And the last paragraph is sublimely arrogant

I can see why my assessments of the content releases looks anecdotal; I apologize for not making it clear that there was data behind it, and I can see why you responded with anecdotal evidence in kind.

I am just 100% driven by data. It's hard to get good, solid data, hard to analyze, hard to present. It's also hard to disagree with good, solid data; it speaks for itself. I don't think I'm all-knowing personally, I just trust what the data says as being accurate, and if someone presents contrary data, I'll change my view. I realize I haven't been super quantitative in supporting my arguments here, so if Joe Forumer who also has good, solid data and analysis wants to discount my arguments, that's totally defensible. Just know that all the player assessments pop out of game models, all the economic assessments pop out of historical price trends tracked over a long time.

Another aspect of my understanding of the whale-diamondF2P gap is that I've been tracking the roster costs of each group, both for the relatively wealthy and relatively poor F2Pers. My opinions are informed by that data; for example, I know some of the more fruitful F2Pers now have roster costs in the 5M PP range, which starts to rival whales (playoff whale rosters have historically costed a bit more than ~7M PP under my tracking). That was impossible early on without some ENORMOUS, UNTHINKABLE bout of luck.

I'm not trying to sound arrogant, like the things I believe are true just because I'm better. It's just about the data, and I'm always open to accepting more perspective so I can improve the data I have before me.

[Orcin]

Originally Posted by dkgo

And as said before, those decent teams in PT20 were bad perfect teams who got pummeled by the highly engaged players they drew in the league each season. Now they are in bronze/silver with comparable teams which seems like a good thing.

This IS a good thing, and it is precisely what the same group of people were asking for last year. Now they have it, and somehow they are still not satisfied. They have a great and affordable upgrade path (live missions) to gold level and, for some reason, they refuse to take it. It is hard to understand really. I don't know what else the development team could have done to make this year's game more enjoyable for the casual player. They (casual players) really should stop trying to re-design the game to kill whales and just enjoy the competition at their current level.

[chazzycat]

Originally Posted by HRBaker

So, what your saying is (using one of my teams as an example (#1)), if I sell off all the live cards (22 of them not counting Trout), use that PP (about 80-100k) to complete live missions, I would field a better team?

I would agree Live Cards aren't as good a Special Editions, but replacing 1 Perfect - 20 Diamonds - and 5 Golds with 1 Perfect - 14 Diamonds - and 10 Golds doesn't strike me as an improvement.

That's what I would end up with by completing 22 missions.

All diamonds are not created equal though. Far from it. 99 Maddux, Ichiro, and Yogi are far better cards than any lives, and several others of the SEs are better as well.

The reason your live cards are struggling has to do mostly with how the game is set to a 2010 run environment. I'm sure this has been beaten to death on the forums already, but for the record - in 2019, MLB hit a total of 6776 homers, compared to 4613 in 2010. That's an increase of 47%. When you take players from 2019 and stick them in 2010, those extra 2,000 homers just evaporate. Hence, live hitters suck.

That's why Ichiro and Yogi are such good cards. They have very strong contact and AvoidK ratings. Contact/AvoidK holds up in 2010 much better than power. They also defend well. Defense is the flip-side counterpart to contact, and always plays.

For pitchers it's kind of the opposite, but they aren't spared either. There's just so many homers being hit nowadays that no modern SP are able to put up any decent movement rating. So they end up giving up tons of homers even in 2010.

That explains why 99 Maddux is so friggin good compared to lives. His movement rating is probably 25 points better than any live card.

Understanding how the game actually works is pretty important to F2P players looking to be competitive. It's complex and takes some time & effort to learn this stuff. If you ask nicely we usually are willing to explain. But just throwing up your hands and saying F2P is impossible...is not the answer.

[bailey]

Originally Posted by HRBaker

So, what your saying is (using one of my teams as an example (#1)), if I sell off all the live cards (22 of them not counting Trout), use that PP (about 80-100k) to complete live missions, I would field a better team?


I would agree Live Cards aren't as good a Special Editions, but replacing 1 Perfect - 20 Diamonds - and 5 Golds with 1 Perfect - 14 Diamonds - and 10 Golds doesn't strike me as an improvement.


That's what I would end up with by completing 22 missions.

You need to complete ALL 30 teams and the remaining 9 missions are completed automatically. So 39 missions and 39 reward cards. That's 1 perfect and mostly diamonds.

Why don't you just take 1 team and try it? Sell EVERYTHING except live irons and bronzes and just buy the live irons and bronzes you need and gradually complete the missions? You can do Baltimore right now for less than 500 points, and get a card worth 1000, then KC, then the Angels. (Note: I would hang on to any historical cards, too, as these come in handy for completing the lower levels of the FotF and some of the name game missions.)

[OMGPuppies]

Originally Posted by HRBaker

So, what your saying is (using one of my teams as an example (#1)), if I sell off all the live cards (22 of them not counting Trout), use that PP (about 80-100k) to complete live missions, I would field a better team?


I would agree Live Cards aren't as good a Special Editions, but replacing 1 Perfect - 20 Diamonds - and 5 Golds with 1 Perfect - 14 Diamonds - and 10 Golds doesn't strike me as an improvement.


That's what I would end up with by completing 22 missions.

Offering again to help you out if you post your team. Starting to think you are trolling us.