Is it really necessary to spend money on perfect team to reach a higher level?

[daxing0822]

I am wondering if those perfect and diamond league players spend lots of money on perfect team??
And is there a more efficient method to earn PP

[chazzycat]

It's pretty much either time, money, or luck. Those are your options...but no, money is not strictly required.

[professor ape]

I spent $10 on the first day to get a jump on my Bronze tournament team. I haven’t spent anything since and have built a mid-tier Diamond team. It’s all about getting packs from tournaments, selling duplicates, and working the missions.

[daxing0822]

Originally Posted by professor ape

I spent $10 on the first day to get a jump on my Bronze tournament team. I haven’t spent anything since and have built a mid-tier Diamond team. It’s all about getting packs from tournaments, selling duplicates, and working the missions.

How much time do you spend on this game everyday? And how long have you played the perfect team?

[OMGPuppies]

Have Grandma sit at the computer all day and enter tournaments for you while you're at work.

[Torgonius]

Go went a long way in levelling out the time constraint, especially when it comes to spamming tournaments. Spamming tournaments leads to packs, which lead to the dark side.

If you can't invest the time in the game, you need to either pay a decent amount of money, have a good working knowledge of game mechanics to be able to utilize them to their fullest potential (given lack of time, this seems unlikely), or just be the luckiest person on the planet when it comes to pack ripping.

[tedster]

I think you can use my example as a baseline for what Free to Play can do without particularly good luck and just a lot of perseverance.

- I am entirely F2P
- I am probably the 8-10th best team in Perfect League and this is my 2nd season in PeL
- I am definitely not the top team in PeL
- I've been playing since the 3rd week of PT
- I didn't start doing tournaments until like week 6 <=== don't make this mistake
- My luck with packs and tournaments has been decidedly average - a few really solid pulls but none of the ultra-rares, and I've opened a ridiculous amount of packs due to tournaments
- I've won 2 weekly tournaments for solid Card rewards but not the chase rewards
- I work on my PC so I am basically in 3 tournaments at all times and have done a decent amount of spreadsheeting to optimize my teams about 2/3 of the time
- I could finish all the missions with my current pool of PP and will have basically no money left when I do

So yeah, you can grind your way to the top .01% for sure, but you gotta mash that tournament button

[Bunktown Ballers]

Originally Posted by daxing0822

I am wondering if those perfect and diamond league players spend lots of money on perfect team??
And is there a more efficient method to earn PP

No, but Lady Luck has to be sleeping next to you in bed every night and day. Some players say they have won in Perfect Leagues without ever spending a dollar & I call B.S. on that, unless they the luckiest person to ever rip packs. 100 perfect cards mean nothing. You have to get the right 100 perfect cards to have a chance.



My best advice to you if you not/can't spend a bunch of money is just play your best cards and compete your butt off at whatever level you at. I've won championships at every level and I've usually felt best winning in a GOLD level with about 50/50 Gold and Silver cards. Nobody ever remembers if you win or how many times. Just compete as best you can at any level. Quite fun that way


BB

[tedster]

Originally Posted by Bunktown Ballers

No, but Lady Luck has to be sleeping next to you in bed every night and day. Some players say they have won in Perfect Leagues without ever spending a dollar & I call B.S. on that, unless they the luckiest person to ever rip packs. 100 perfect cards mean nothing. You have to get the right 100 perfect cards to have a chance.



My best advice to you if you not/can't spend a bunch of money is just play your best cards and compete your butt off at whatever level you at. I've won championships at every level and I've usually felt best winning in a GOLD level with about 50/50 Gold and Silver cards. Nobody ever remembers if you win or how many times. Just compete as best you can at any level. Quite fun that way


BB

This is absolutely untrue - if you play in tournaments round the clock and play for long enough you can finish all the missions and that's enough to field a competitive PeL team. You're not particularly likely to win but I've made the playoffs and I didn't start until week 3 of PT22. My most expensive pack pull was about 180k and I've opened a few thousand packs at this point without spending any money.

[HRBaker]

Originally Posted by tedster

This is absolutely untrue - if you play in tournaments round the clock and play for long enough you can finish all the missions and that's enough to field a competitive PeL team. You're not particularly likely to win but I've made the playoffs and I didn't start until week 3 of PT22. My most expensive pack pull was about 180k and I've opened a few thousand packs at this point without spending any money.

And so the point is, we have to make clear to new PT players that if they want to compete at the top without spending money they need to marry themselves to the computer. Not everyone can do that and it's important we make that fact clear.

[professor ape]

Originally Posted by daxing0822

How much time do you spend on this game everyday? And how long have you played the perfect team?

It doesn’t take much time to keep my teams active in tournaments. Just do a quick check every 30 to 60 minutes to keep three tournaments going. GO makes that easy. Once you have a lineup set it is just a couple of clicks each time you enter a new tourney. It takes way less time to keep your tournament teams active than the average person spends on Facebook. I spend more time in the week or so after each live update to evaluate my tournament roster.

Other than that it is just time spent ripping the packs I win, selling duplicates, and checking on cards for my targeted missions. Once your main team is at a certain level, you aren’t making many changes on it so it runs pretty much on cruise control.

[Hertston]

Originally Posted by daxing0822

I am wondering if those perfect and diamond league players spend lots of money on perfect team??
And is there a more efficient method to earn PP

My team is entirely FTP and I'm currently cycling between gold and diamond having just been promoted to the latter (again), as champions no less. On my first trip there I managed to scrape a division win and so might even have fluked promotion to Perfect. Didn't happen.. which was probably a good thing .

So no, you don't have to spend money. I'm an Anglo-Irish who, while a baseball fan, has never played or managed a baseball game in his life. I'm sure folks rather more baseball savvy could take it to the next level.

The ONLY way for FTP players to earn the PP and obtain players to improve their team is to play tournaments. Lots of them. Concentrate on building bronze level, then silver tourney sides before doing anything else. Enter iron tourneys while doing so but don't expect much - it's a very crowded field. Concentrate on bronze and then silver, and finally gold; you can use the cards to hopefully start moving up the levels too, but that's a secondary consideration. You are constructing your source of future income. There's no need to 'spam' anything, but try and balance regular and daily/monthly tourneys; you are looking to achieve results generating at least ten regular packs a day plus the occasional special edition card or diamond pack. You WILL get the odd perfect card, and enough high-value silver/gold/diamond cards from those packs to help you complete even initially impossible seeming missions. Start with the MLB live ones.

On the subject of spending money, you need to contextualize 'lots'. It might provide a boost up the lower ladders for those with money to spare, but the real money needed to 'buy' a perfect or even diamond level team is phenomenal to us ordinary mortals. Look how many PP, say, Jackie Robinson costs, how much PP cost in the store and you do the math. The money concerned to buy a team would get you a decent season ticket for the Dodgers.

[chazzycat]

Originally Posted by Hertston

The ONLY way for FTP players to earn the PP and obtain players to improve their team is to play tournaments. Lots of them. C

While tourneys are absolutely important, they are not the sole source of income by any stretch.

It really helps to think of it as an investment strategy game rather than a baseball game sometimes. I wish it was a pure baseball sim, but that is just not the case. If you want to play with the big dogs you need the good cards, and those don't come cheap.

The two most common forms of market speculation are collection-based, and live update-based. So if for example a collection is about to drop around the allstar break, and there's a class of cards in the game called all-stars....well smart people (not me) put 2 and 2 together and bought the all-star cards BEFORE the collection came out. You can see based on current prices of all-star cards, that might have been a very effective strategy.

For live cards, it's about analyzing the player performance in real life and predicting whether players stocks are rising or falling, kind of like you do in fantasy baseball. If you can buy live cards close to quicksell value, the risk is limited. Then if they go up to the next tier, you sell for 4X the price you paid.

So generally you start with tourneys to get some income - but then invest that income into those options, rather than just try to upgrade your team in the short-term.

[Play4Thrills]

I'll add that you don't have to upgrade to higher tournament categories to get lots of packs. Higher level tournaments have fewer participants, so they can take anywhere from 20 minutes to 2+ hours to begin. That slows tourney income quite a bit, even if payouts are 10 packs. Also, competition at those levels is equally tough if not tougher.

On the other hand, iron tournaments start almost immediately. I've been running exclusively iron tournaments (and perfect drafts) in my F2P account and have been able to pull in 40+ tournament wins over the past 3 weeks. I've spent way too much time trying to figure the game out so this isn't a fair benchmark for new players, but I wanted to see how well I could do with a F2P account, and it's been far more successful than I anticipated. In just 3 weeks, I was able to put together a team that can get to gold and maybe diamond, even if I did nothing with it for the next 3 weeks. Position upgrades slow down a lot once you are spending 50k+ per card, but if you want a brief illustration of what you can do in a short time with a F2P approach, here's my current lineup (which is leading its iron league with a 16-1 record):

C 100 Gibson
C 93 Santop
1B 97 Mattingly
1B 95 Sisler
2B 100 Kinsler
3B 99 Pendleton
SS 100 Trammell
SS 99 Lloyd
LF 96 Cruz
CF 100 Edmonds
CF 90 Dykstra
RF 100 Slaughter
RF 95 Rose

(and pitchers of a similar caliber)
Note: this is not necessarily an endorsement of these cards. They are what I could afford and what I pulled in packs (the Pop Lloyd was the best one by far). It's intended for a lefty cheese composition, and I'd replace every one of them with better cards if I could!

[Drivehud.com]

Originally Posted by tedster

This is absolutely untrue - if you play in tournaments round the clock and play for long enough you can finish all the missions and that's enough to field a competitive PeL team. You're not particularly likely to win but I've made the playoffs and I didn't start until week 3 of PT22. My most expensive pack pull was about 180k and I've opened a few thousand packs at this point without spending any money.

Hehe.. I've played over 2 years now, and haven't pulled a pack card worth more than 60k. And I've opened thousands of packs.

Luck is hard to quantify in a game of incomplete information w/o perspective.

[ubernoob]

There is far more PP floating around this year.

Last year even pulling non-live diamonds that were worth 25k+ was pretty rare.

Thanks to the collections this year, there are a lot of cards that are keeping value. Golds hovering between 8-15k, diamonds between 15-40k and perfects hovering from 40k+ generally. There are many more cards you can pull this year to bring in a payday compared to years past.

That said my pack luck has been better this year compared to all the past versions. That's just how it works sometimes.

[Magus978]

Originally Posted by Hertston

The ONLY way for FTP players to earn the PP and obtain players to improve their team is to play tournaments. Lots of them.

...and when the tournament packs dry up? I've been in a massive slump since I qualified for PTCS bronze and haven't sniffed the cash spots anywhere near I feel I should be. I've even done all the adjustment things smart people usually try and do, and still can't break through. There are only so many adjustments that can be made that when you exhaust those, a point of "screw this" surely gets reached.

At what point do you just throw up your arms and say enough is enough after yet another week of early exit after early exit after early ****ing exit, and not having seen a successful tournament in weeks? When does it become acceptable to be angry about not having any success?

[ubernoob]

Depends on how long you gathered data for each change, how long you let each change play out and how many different strategies you've tried doing each of the above.

[professor ape]

Originally Posted by ubernoob

Depends on how long you gathered data for each change, how long you let each change play out and how many different strategies you've tried doing each of the above.

Yup. I find that it takes a solid week of work after the live update changes to get my tourney roster set for the month.

[ubernoob]

Originally Posted by professor ape

Yup. I find that it takes a solid week of work after the live update changes to get my tourney roster set for the month.

I have to do work on my silver team, I haven't won a damn thing in like 2 weeks. My low diamond team has been putting in work in the meanwhile, but silver and gold I need to go through again. Just procrastinating you know.