Confessions of a tanker, how not to get caught/why do it/should you care?

[Lemandria]

Originally Posted by daves

LOL. I was wondering if someone will catch that.

Peak outrageous ratings is similar to players on steroids. You can still play the game since all teams have steroid players, but MLB or devs should not allow it.

No one seems to object ( well, not many of us) to the Fan Service Specials that just keep the perfectflation rolling along.

But it has a rather predictable effect on the long-term marketability of the product.

Lessons *not* learned from the Collectibles Collapse?

Baseball (card) fans should be painfully familiar with what happens to those special gold foil laser cards.

[macacks]

...a fine example...

[Hertston]

Perfect Team just isn't rewarding enough to spend either the time on assorted manipulation OR real money, IMHO. Played in '20 and had some fun, but I've no desire to repeat the experience. And with only one Perfect league that is bound to end up whales-only sooner rather than later, there's even less point. Sticking with the regular game in '21. Much more fun.

[Justinw303]

People who complain about tankers need to take themselves a little less seriously.

[KylieH1]

Originally Posted by QuantaCondor

I disagree with virtually this entire section. There are numerous threads logging F2P success, and the existence of teambuilding restrictions like BFF occured, among other reasons (true for me personally), because after learning how to build a successful PeL-title-winning F2P team under normal conditions, it became more fun to try to do it again with a more challenging set of restrictions. Kind of like why people sometimes replay games on higher difficulties after winning on Normal. It's like playing a game on Easy or using cheats; it might be fun for someone who isn't skilled, but it won't last long and shows no personal achievement. There's nothing wrong with playing games on https://parimatchbet.in/parimatch-app/ or with cheats, but for me, that would negate any sense of accomplishment that comes with beating those whale rosters.

Compare that to tanking, which seems hopelessly boring to me. It's just a repetitive algorithm that takes a ton of time, isolates you from the rest of the community, and generates PP in a not-skill-testing way whatsoever. It's playing a game on Easy or turning on cheats; maybe fun for someone unskilled, but not for long and demonstrative of absolutely no personal achievement whatsoever. Nothing wrong with playing games on Easy or with cheats, but for me that would kill any sense of satisfaction that comes with success against those whale rosters.

There are also actual drawbacks to tanking, of course. You ruin competitive balance in the league, denying the Cy, MVP, silver slugger, etc. to your league. You deny division and WS wins to players from lower leagues, which is something a lot of people like shooting for even if it's not a Perfect title. For leagues like BFF, you ruin the competitive balance because those who play lots of games against tankers are unfairly better off compared to others. Even if you're not in a friends list, seeing someone else benefit from playing a tanker a bunch feels bad. I can see why you'd want it to feel like a win-win, that seems like an easy justification to make cheating more palatable.

The perspective is still good, and it's important/useful to have this conversation. For example, I figured tankers were people who thought the game was all a P2W crapshoot about opening the best cards in packs, OVR is king, etc., and that ended up being right in this case. As opposed to, say, min-max types who genuinely try playing after tanking for a cycle or two. And the actual amount of PP is interesting. My F2P BFF team, started at the end of October, is worth about 2M now, with only ~10% of that coming from AH flipping and maybe another ~10% or so from tourney + pack wins. If Tanking generates 200k from Iron->Perfect, that's like ~20k per week after you go back down to Iron. So someone who has been tanking from the beginning will only have ~50% of my current team value if they have been tanking since launch. I would have guessed it would be more than that.

I think probably the communication that tanking is illegal is the most important aspect of this. I bet some fraction of them just think of it as a good, legal strategy.

In comparison, tanking seems hopelessly boring to me. It's just a repetitive algorithm that takes a long time, isolates you from the rest of the community, and generates PP in no way that is skill-testing.