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Old 12-09-2019, 02:02 AM   #1
QuantaCondor
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I just took a F2P team from nothing to PeL winners in 8 seasons. Here's my story

The Santa Barbara Golden Gophers -BFF just won their first PeL WS title. They are a BFF team, which means that they are a member of a friends list which includes a group of active Discord and forum users, also including developer Matt Arnold. The BFF League plays under the following restrictions:

1) 100% FTP teams; no PP bought whatsoever
2) No selling of packed gold+ historical cards. If you pull a huge historical card, you can't use that to fund a bunch of upgrades.
3) No using packed gold+ historical cards in collections. The only exception is if you choose to never sell the collection reward. So, if you pull a huge collections bottleneck, you can't use that to fund a bunch of upgrades by just doing the collection.
4) No soliciting of collections cards from Discord/other users, and especially no using your other accounts to influence your collections in any way. If you want to buy a collections bottleneck, you must wait around for it like everyone else.
Edit for clarity: 5) All members of BFF made a new team at the same time (8 seasons ago). So, every member of the league started out on the same level playing field.

These restrictions, together, were meant to fully remove the influence of pack pulls as accelerants on FTP teambuilding, and also to remove the influence of other accounts so there's no advantage to having had another account with a lot of PP on it. This is purely an exercise in how you can build a FTP team, from nothing, using only good decision making, into a Perfect League champion.

================================================== ==

The Golden Gophers were able to accomplish this by attacking virtually every available aspect of the game. I have 92 collections completed, including CWS, Athletics, Twins, Padres, Mariners, and Brewers. I've also completed the sets for SE Brecheen and SE Cash, as well as much of the rest of the DET collections. Also acquired a few cards (namely 99 Kershaw and 98 Dahlen) in pursuit of LAD collections, though I'm a long, long way from completing LAD still. Final notable collections probably include SE Sisler, Cursebreakers, SE Ichiro, Putting the Ball In Play, Nuclear Powered, Hornsby, Votto, Smoke Joe Wood, Yastrzemski, Lofton, Garber, Colavito, the LIVE sets for Athletics, Tigers, and Phillies, and virtually every standard pack collection.

I also have 80 tourney wins, which puts me T-7th in the PT Universe in tourney wins. I'll note that most of those came on 500 PP DoD tourneys, though there have been a lot of 32-man pack tourneys recently. No real notable returns from dailies, just a bunch of quick events. Also maybe worth noting that I was among the top 2 or 3 winners in tourney # during the tourney beta in which I did a lot of grinding of the 2k 16-man silvers.

Finally, I've made something like 250k or so by flipping important collections pieces. I think the *vast* majority of this comes purely from 3 CWS Appling diamonds, and a Kershaw. Though there is also a roughly 40-50k contribution from flipping 4 Haddixes. A lot of this was easier when the L7 values were broken, but I flipped a 90 Averill for roughly 15k a few days ago so there are still opportunities to be had even without abusing L7 bugs. I'd like to note that I explicitly did NOT want flipping to be the dominant strategy during this F2P campaign, so I only flipped cards that were already in my AH collections search strings. I suspect I could have made a lot more flipping if I was searching for all the bottleneck diamonds I know about every time I went to the AH, but I just don't think it's that fun and I didn't want to use that as a crutch.

I don't think I've been particularly lucky with achievements, especially not early on, as I've earned something like 4 gold achievements total (not counting the "Great Score" one) throughout my journey.

Finally, we come to the issue of packs. For the first 7 seasons (that is, Entry all the way through the Diamond playoffs), my best pull was 87 Carew. This is despite pulling 9 diamond packs over the course of those 7 seasons via collections, from which the best player was 93 POTM Bieber (who was never more than an SP4 and now holds a LR/low leverage role). I also probably pulled at least 80 standard packs from collections and tournaments, maybe closer to 100 or more during that time. All other pulls were valued at 7k or less (with two 97 Klubers being the only pulls in the 5k-7k range). In the 8th season of the team (or, more correctly, right at the tail end of the 7th season but too late to make any difference), I pulled a 99 Brown off a tourney pack (L7 is 300k, and my projections put him somewhere between the 10th and 15th best pitcher in the game). More on that later.

===============================================

Despite the pull luck prior to diamond, my collections strategy alone was good enough to make the team dominant. The first full season, and the only season I didn't get a promotion, was in the inaugural BFF Iron League. It's almost a lie to call this an Iron-level league, since basically every team in the league knew what they were doing and built a quality competitor immediately. I'd rank this closer to maybe Silver or Gold at least, in retrospect. I posted the 3rd best RDiff in the league, good enough for a 89-74 record, but got unlucky in the pythag department and lost a game 163 to miss out on the playoffs.

The following season, I came back to post the best RDiff in the league with something like a 2nd in ERA/2nd in runs statline, good enough for a 105-47 record. I managed to get promoted. And from there, it was downhill. The following seasons shaped up as:

Bronze: 121-41, 1st in runs/1st in ERA. WS win
Silver: 102-60, 2nd in runs/1st in ERA. Lost in CS. (lost runs title to another BFF team)
Gold: 114-48, 1st in runs/1st in ERA. WS win.
Diamond: 124-38, 1st in runs/1st in ERA. WS win.
Perfect: 104-58, 11th in runs/2nd in ERA (+212 RDiff). WS win.

Perfect WS win came in 7 games, but it came nonetheless. I'll note that 99 Kevin Brown was not a large factor in my success in his only full season with me thus far; he posted the worst ERA of any of my regular starters (3.30), and collected the most pitching losses of any of them as well (12-14 record). Not a bad player by any means, but it's not as if my success was being driven by this pack pull.

I run lefty park factors (+Lefty AVG and HR, -Righty AVG and HR, +GAP). I found this to be effective at lower levels where RHP is more common, though I am considering going to a pro-CON strategy (+AVG, +GAP, -HR both hands) at Perfect even after this result.

=============================================

I think that basically does it. Let it be known that there is not *any* level which is not accessible to a FTP player with a good enough strategy. I think we saw the first glimpse of that with ElementalKnight's post earlier in the year, but now I've witnessed in myself and in a number of seasons/weeks that I think would be pretty hard to repeat with 7 seasons being the minimum possible number of seasons to go from Entry to Perfect, and this having been done in 8.

I'd love to hear other exploits in FTP success that are floating out there, or answer any other remaining questions about the philosophy I used to accomplish what I did.
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F2P + restrictions. First F2P winner of PT21 Perfect League


F2P + restrictions. New team -> PT title in 8 weeks

Last edited by QuantaCondor; 12-09-2019 at 04:39 AM.
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Old 12-09-2019, 02:52 AM   #2
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Follow-up with screenshots of the roster. Not shown for the batters are 87 Boggs, 87 Heilmann (who hardly counts... 1 AB in his career, 0-for-1), 86 Smoky Burgess, 82 Ichiro, and 80 Piersall.

Edit: Also should mention that 89 Rollie, 89 Eck, and 84 Garber saw 20+ innings each at Perfect, but got cut in favor of the SP-heavy bullpen strategy for those playoff series. And 97 Newhouser is a new addition; has seen exactly zero time on my team, added after the WS concluded.
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Old 12-09-2019, 03:16 AM   #3
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Don't hurt your arm patting yourself on the back?
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Old 12-09-2019, 03:41 AM   #4
QuantaCondor
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Don't hurt your arm patting yourself on the back?
If you're not interested, that's okay. I just know that piggybacking off various strategies and stories of success I have heard others talk about was one of the main ways I learned about and improved my own game, so I figured someone else out there might be interested too.
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Old 12-09-2019, 04:23 AM   #5
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I think that basically does it. Let it be known that there is not *any* level which is not accessible to a FTP player with a good enough strategy. .
All your post shows is that you can win in a league surrounded by similarly restricted players
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Old 12-09-2019, 04:33 AM   #6
QuantaCondor
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All your post shows is that you can win in a league surrounded by similarly restricted players
The only time I played with similarly restricted players was during my time in Iron; we all made teams at the same time, so nobody had a head start. After that initial week in which everyone was in iron, the league folded out a bit and somewhere between 1-4 BFF teams were at the various levels, but they were always the best teams in those levels (common to see that if, e.g. there were 3 BFF teams in a silver league, the top 3 records were all owned by BFF teams). So in general, BFF teams made the leagues harder, not easier.

By the time I got to Diamond there was only 1 other BFF team there with me. I think they got 95 wins compared to my 124 wins, and we promoted together. At Perfect, we played exactly zero games against one another, so it's like they didn't exist at all.

So yes I played in a friends list with other people, but doing so had absolutely no effect on my week in Perfect and at all the other levels it just made things harder.
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F2P + restrictions. First F2P winner of PT21 Perfect League


F2P + restrictions. New team -> PT title in 8 weeks

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Old 12-09-2019, 05:08 AM   #7
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Completing that many collections in eight weeks is an astonishing amount of time spent in the auction house.

Shrug, grats, to each his own.

"Mom, more Hot Pockets!"
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Old 12-09-2019, 05:20 AM   #8
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Completing that many collections in eight weeks is an astonishing amount of time spent in the auction house.

Shrug, grats, to each his own.

"Mom, more Hot Pockets!"
I think I checked something like hourly basically every day. And occasionally more often if I was actively playing the game, like watching a playoff series or making a tourney roster or something. Steam logs have the game time log at 600 hours, the vast, VAST majority of which was spent idle in the background but it did mean having OOTP available constantly during that time. Of course, hourly for 8 weeks turns into a lot of checking, absolutely cannot deny that. Any FTP effort in any game is going to be time consuming, since that's the sacrifice you make for not spending.

But the time consumption thing is a lot more easily managed when you're looking for several collections at once. I had a boatload of PP on hand for any given moment, and I was usually tracking at least 6 or more collections at a time. I found that the limiting factor when you really are going hardcore into collections is not the rate at which you find cards, but actually the rate at which people buy the SE cards you're selling. Doesn't matter how much you know the economy if you don't have any PP to use.
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Old 12-09-2019, 07:35 AM   #9
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A full transaction history would be nice to see.
edit: note to devs: would be nice if you could export that to a file

btw: 600 hours game time? That's almost as much as I have after playing the game since release, half of which was probably idling too
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Old 12-09-2019, 08:15 AM   #10
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A full transaction history would be nice to see.
edit: note to devs: would be nice if you could export that to a file

btw: 600 hours game time? That's almost as much as I have after playing the game since release, half of which was probably idling too
8 weeks = 1344 hours. So roughly half of it spent in the AH.

That's sad news for full time employees:

Pwning PT with your awesum search-fu will forever elude you, because you spend a third of your valuable auction house time working, and another third sleeping.
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Old 12-09-2019, 08:48 AM   #11
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It's easy to do, you just have to spend half your waking hours on the auction house. PT is worse than your generic mobile game in terms of forced addiction to progress
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Old 12-09-2019, 09:58 AM   #12
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It's easy to do, you just have to spend half your waking hours on the auction house. PT is worse than your generic mobile game in terms of forced addiction to progress
Agreed. If you have no other life, you can be elite in a game.
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Old 12-09-2019, 10:27 AM   #13
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Agreed. If you have no other life, you can be elite in a game.
The difference between plausible and feasible, to me.

Can someone do it? Sure it's definitely plausible.

Is it that quick for someone with a brand new ftp team and lacking gobs of prior experience and existing research?

Oh HELL no. Just not feasible for Joe Black to attempt.

'Specially not if MRS. Black has anthing to say about it.
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Old 12-09-2019, 03:19 PM   #14
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One of my favorite quotes from Moneyball is "There is an epidemic failure within the game to understand what is really happening... and this leads people who run major league baseball teams to misjudge their players and mismanage their teams." Reading this thread made me think of that quote.

The BFF league has been a fun experiment and it is difficult to overstate QuantaCondor's achievement here. Yeah, the eight seasons timing has an unreal amount of luck involved (my team has lost multiple seasons, by sweeps no less, in the divisional playoff round to teams that were on paper weaker). But whether it was eight or ten or fifteen seasons, this experience is a data point, combined with ElementalKnight's earlier post, to show that while paying players will always have a fundamental structural advantage, the wallet is not a necessary condition to a title.

There are some incredibly talented, active, and well-known players in that league and QuC devised and executed a strategy well beyond what the rest of the league pulled off. To be fair, I don't count myself one of the better players in the league but I'm a darned sight better than I was before I started. At each and every step, QuC was out in front of what other players in the league were doing. I think I was the third to sixth player in our league to complete Heilman, Dykstra and/or Plank collections. QuC had long moved on to other collections. Because of the unique nature of the BFF league, there was a lot of competition for the same cards on the auction house but he was already two steps past the fray. He got key collections done before market collapses and earned top dollar from them while the rest of us are holding Suzukis and Vidas that may be at best break-even compared to what we put into them.

One thing that's a little unfortunate about the PT universe/structure is that it's tough to see what someone else is doing unless you're in a league with them. And an earlier poster is correct that a new player can't do this. Understanding the systems, what works, and why certain stats/players are better than others takes time. Understanding what collections are profitable and which aren't (at least in the absence of a tool to figure out market prices unless a specific card is presently on the AH) would be a monumental undertaking for a new player.

The BFF league setup is not just Free-to-Play, but F2P with substantial constraints on in-game wealth management. In about eighty packs so far, my team has packed four historical diamonds and quicksold three of them, because they didn't have in-game value, weren't part of good collections, and would have ruined the value of those collections even if I had tried them. So QuC's run is a detailed look into where Perfect Team "wealth" comes from. And it's also a "who's who" into quality-of-life adjustments you've seen out of the Dev Team over the past few weeks, including restructuring tournament rewards (the 2k 16-mans in beta, the 500 8-mans), and apparently fixing the Last-7 bug that has been around for awhile. So QuC probably couldn't do what he previously did, in-game time notwithstanding, as quickly as the first time.

Leaving that aside, QuC has avoided the steps of other players in the league that would slow them down (not doing collections, paying for "right now" players, having a balance too low to take advantage of opportunities). He executed an in-game strategy that burns a lot of the pre-Perfect meta to advance quickly. He cut through the BS, saw what made the game tick, and Moneyballed his way to a speedrun PL title.

I think the community is the better for it.
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Old 12-09-2019, 03:51 PM   #15
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Are you saying you completed all those collections in just the last 8 weeks starting from scratch?
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Old 12-09-2019, 03:53 PM   #16
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I think the community is the better for it.
Could not have said it better. I agree completely.

I thought I knew this game pretty well, but playing in this league has really opened my eyes. Park factors and clever baseball strategies are important, but they can only take you so far (for reference: my team is still in bronze, that's how good these players are). The other side of the game - generating PP - can have a far larger impact, especially with regards to collections.

And it's not just about spending a lot of time on the AH. It's more about being thoroughly prepared with the right data, having the vision to map out a plan, and executing the plan in a highly organized fashion. And doing it better than 29 other highly committed, very active owners. That is most the impressive part.

Writing this off as just "spending a lot of time in the AH" might help people feel better about their own shortcomings, but it's just not the truth.
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Old 12-09-2019, 03:59 PM   #17
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Are you saying you completed all those collections in just the last 8 weeks starting from scratch?
Doesn't seem unusual.

But "starting from scratch" is incorrect. The biggest resource you can have is a strategy based on experience with the game and knowing how it works. Give someone who has never played ootp $200 worth of points and they will be behind a current successful user starting a new team within a few weeks.
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Old 12-09-2019, 04:05 PM   #18
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Are you saying you completed all those collections in just the last 8 weeks starting from scratch?
Yes. If you do a Universe "Search User" for BFF you'll see QuC with 92, me at 70, jda at 68, and DK/DaveyG at 67, as the teams that are somewhat leading the charge on missions. At least in the early days before the market collapse, you could generate some decent seed money with the Detroit, Phillies, and As live collections and then just work out from there.

As for dkgo's point about experience, that's absolutely true that experience matters. Nothing in QuC's post suggests that he's a new player; QuC had a couple of OL teams that put him in much better position to me as a wallet player who just kind of ambled his way around prior to this league. I shifted gears fairly quickly but burned a lot of early momentum in Entry Pool and the first couple of weeks spending inefficiently.

That said, I can't imagine a strategy/management game that doesn't require significant understanding to achieve at high levels, so QuC's experience is kind of beside the point.

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Old 12-09-2019, 04:07 PM   #19
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Wow, shame on everyone trying to undermine this unbelievable achievement. I guess they're feeling so inferior that they have to try to tear QuC down.

Let me tell you something, he's not just spending a lot of time on this, he's extremely good at this. Better than me and better than you. I love this game and I'm not ashamed that I have spent a lot of time playing it. The very best players at every video game spend a lot of time playing because that's what it takes to be great at something.

Shame on you for trying to tear him down. He proved that this game isn't just for the whales even at the highest levels, which is most of what people come here to complain about. Stop being jealous and accept that he's better than you or git good.
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Old 12-09-2019, 04:12 PM   #20
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Could not have said it better. I agree completely.

I thought I knew this game pretty well, but playing in this league has really opened my eyes. Park factors and clever baseball strategies are important, but they can only take you so far (for reference: my team is still in bronze, that's how good these players are). The other side of the game - generating PP - can have a far larger impact, especially with regards to collections.

And it's not just about spending a lot of time on the AH. It's more about being thoroughly prepared with the right data, having the vision to map out a plan, and executing the plan in a highly organized fashion. And doing it better than 29 other highly committed, very active owners. That is most the impressive part.

Writing this off as just "spending a lot of time in the AH" might help people feel better about their own shortcomings, but it's just not the truth.
Maybe I'm grossly underestimating how difficult it is to come up with this plan since it all seemed pretty obvious, but at the end of the day generating PP does come down to time on the AH. I have put a ton in myself to do all of these collections, refreshing minute after minute while idling the game. Every under-priced Appling, Faber, Aaron, Baker, Averill, Hiller, Colavito, etc that you are around refreshing the AH for is an instant 60-80K. You can know that the missions are profitable but if you are someone who just checks in when you get home from work you will never see all the cards you need listed.

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