A couple more thoughts on v25...

[HRBaker]

Since I'm likely to drop following my teams over the next few weeks, there are still some issues I haven't said anything about that I felt needed to be stated "just in case" someone is listening...


Base engine changes;


Back at release time a lot was said about an overhaul to the OOTP base game engine. If I remember right the basic "reason" was to create more variability in stat results - something closer to reality. Although i do think that was(is) good for the basic game, I can't help but wonder if that change is the basis of why v25 Perfect Team is creating stats that can't be relied on anymore. Don't get me wrong... more variation and reality are what the base game are all about and I love the idea of addressing that issue - BUT - I do NOT think that is a good thing for Perfect Team. PT is a highly competitive card game that people spend money on - and some level of consistency is needed to support that. Maybe the classic game and PT need slightly different engines....

Missions;

Something has to be done here... The LIVE missions are absolutely GREAT for getting started building your rosters, but once those are complete - and the balance of the missions simply reward card packs - you quickly realize that the rewards aren't nearly enough to take the time to complete those missions. To be honest, card packs simply are a bad investment once the game is into it's 3rd or 4th month. Somehow, the rewards have to continue to include better players to counter the 6 figure prices you otherwise have to spend to buy them in the card shop.

Ok. Off my soapbox...

[Kushiel]

Ditto!

[Hwilensky]

Ditto...Ditto...Ditto...Combinator cards ruined the game....ditto...ditto..ditto..

[ncap99]

There are negatives to making missions the core building block of competitive rosters too. Cookie cutter rosters and complex, multistep mission programs that make it very difficult if you fall behind to catch up with the meta are a few examples.

It seems to me there was an effort to put the power back into packable cards this year, through the substantial historical rate increase, introduction of combinator cards and missions changing to be more of an occasional nice card and a ton packs (including high end pack like historical diamond packs, etc).

Some people like missions being where you get 80% of your roster, some people like packs. But that means there will be people who dislike one or the other too.

[LeeD]

Originally Posted by ncap99

There are negatives to making missions the core building block of competitive rosters too. Cookie cutter rosters and complex, multistep mission programs that make it very difficult if you fall behind to catch up with the meta are a few examples.

It seems to me there was an effort to put the power back into packable cards this year, through the substantial historical rate increase, introduction of combinator cards and missions changing to be more of an occasional nice card and a ton packs (including high end pack like historical diamond packs, etc).

Some people like missions being where you get 80% of your roster, some people like packs. But that means there will be people who dislike one or the other too.

Packs are a losing proposition since the expected return is much less than the established price. They are, in effect, lottery scratcher tickets, where you hit a big win once in a great while (pulling a valuable historical Perfect or Diamond) and hit a very small return almost every other time (like five Irons and a Bronze, which is the most likely outcome). If this were not so then everyone would convert 100% of their PP into card packs.

Card pack rewards for missions, even if they're high end packs, quickly become log-jammed by speculators (PT is, in many ways, an auction house manipulation game rather than a baseball simulation), which often forces players to pay more for the mission than the expected return on the pack (as above, but this time through card rather than pack purchases).

Go through the card shop, mission by mission, and see that this is so. Yes, you at least get to play the cards you've acquired; but the vast majority of them are not meta cards in any format and are thus substandard or non-optimal choices. Enough of these on your roster and your team fails, whether that be in league or tournaments. In most cases, you could have spent less and done better by simply purchasing cards in the shop without even looking at missions.

This is the nature of the game, which is designed to encourage players to buy points and thus generate income for the company. Neither of us will ever see a time when the playing field between big spenders and non-spenders is level because that would lead to everyone becoming a non-spender, reducing the company's profit on PT to less than zero.

The only exception to the above is multi-tiered missions, which allow players to acquire good topper cards and then leverage their past mission completions into future mission completions. A perfect example is Live Series, which gives you toppers for each team, toppers for each division, and then a topper for completing the level. The second level effectively requires completing the previous level by adding more cards from the same pool, then adds additional team, division, and complete toppers. Mission completions are also rather than exclusively rewarded with card packs.Thus, Live Series eventually (after version-start card prices decline due to supply) becomes a money-maker, where your investment in cards is exceeded by the gains, either in useful cards or the proceeds from selling those cards.

This is why reducing the number of multi-tier mission paths (as PT has done this year) is bad for the game. Without these upward paths to build on, the game becomes an exercise in just buying the best cards available outright whenever they become available. The alternative is converting all points into card packs, which I've already identified as a losing proposition.

[HRBaker]

Originally Posted by LeeD

Packs are a losing proposition since the expected return is much less than the established price. They are, in effect, lottery scratcher tickets, where you hit a big win once in a great while (pulling a valuable historical Perfect or Diamond) and hit a very small return almost every other time (like five Irons and a Bronze, which is the most likely outcome). If this were not so then everyone would convert 100% of their PP into card packs.

Card pack rewards for missions, even if they're high end packs, quickly become log-jammed by speculators (PT is, in many ways, an auction house manipulation game rather than a baseball simulation), which often forces players to pay more for the mission than the expected return on the pack (as above, but this time through card rather than pack purchases).

Go through the card shop, mission by mission, and see that this is so. Yes, you at least get to play the cards you've acquired; but the vast majority of them are not meta cards in any format and are thus substandard or non-optimal choices. Enough of these on your roster and your team fails, whether that be in league or tournaments. In most cases, you could have spent less and done better by simply purchasing cards in the shop without even looking at missions.

This is the nature of the game, which is designed to encourage players to buy points and thus generate income for the company. Neither of us will ever see a time when the playing field between big spenders and non-spenders is level because that would lead to everyone becoming a non-spender, reducing the company's profit on PT to less than zero.

The only exception to the above is multi-tiered missions, which allow players to acquire good topper cards and then leverage their past mission completions into future mission completions. A perfect example is Live Series, which gives you toppers for each team, toppers for each division, and then a topper for completing the level. The second level effectively requires completing the previous level by adding more cards from the same pool, then adds additional team, division, and complete toppers. Mission completions are also rather than exclusively rewarded with card packs.Thus, Live Series eventually (after version-start card prices decline due to supply) becomes a money-maker, where your investment in cards is exceeded by the gains, either in useful cards or the proceeds from selling those cards.

This is why reducing the number of multi-tier mission paths (as PT has done this year) is bad for the game. Without these upward paths to build on, the game becomes an exercise in just buying the best cards available outright whenever they become available. The alternative is converting all points into card packs, which I've already identified as a losing proposition.

this! This! THIS!

...and why PT is only a 4-5 month experience for F2P players.

[Kushiel]

Originally Posted by LeeD

Packs are a losing proposition since the expected return is much less than the established price. They are, in effect, lottery scratcher tickets, where you hit a big win once in a great while (pulling a valuable historical Perfect or Diamond) and hit a very small return almost every other time (like five Irons and a Bronze, which is the most likely outcome). If this were not so then everyone would convert 100% of their PP into card packs.

Card pack rewards for missions, even if they're high end packs, quickly become log-jammed by speculators (PT is, in many ways, an auction house manipulation game rather than a baseball simulation), which often forces players to pay more for the mission than the expected return on the pack (as above, but this time through card rather than pack purchases).

Go through the card shop, mission by mission, and see that this is so. Yes, you at least get to play the cards you've acquired; but the vast majority of them are not meta cards in any format and are thus substandard or non-optimal choices. Enough of these on your roster and your team fails, whether that be in league or tournaments. In most cases, you could have spent less and done better by simply purchasing cards in the shop without even looking at missions.

This is the nature of the game, which is designed to encourage players to buy points and thus generate income for the company. Neither of us will ever see a time when the playing field between big spenders and non-spenders is level because that would lead to everyone becoming a non-spender, reducing the company's profit on PT to less than zero.

The only exception to the above is multi-tiered missions, which allow players to acquire good topper cards and then leverage their past mission completions into future mission completions. A perfect example is Live Series, which gives you toppers for each team, toppers for each division, and then a topper for completing the level. The second level effectively requires completing the previous level by adding more cards from the same pool, then adds additional team, division, and complete toppers. Mission completions are also rather than exclusively rewarded with card packs.Thus, Live Series eventually (after version-start card prices decline due to supply) becomes a money-maker, where your investment in cards is exceeded by the gains, either in useful cards or the proceeds from selling those cards.

This is why reducing the number of multi-tier mission paths (as PT has done this year) is bad for the game. Without these upward paths to build on, the game becomes an exercise in just buying the best cards available outright whenever they become available. The alternative is converting all points into card packs, which I've already identified as a losing proposition.

Very well said. My old pappy used to say, "Son, don't cut your nose off just to spite your ass."

[DotDash]

Originally Posted by LeeD

Packs are a losing proposition since the expected return is much less than the established price. They are, in effect, lottery scratcher tickets, where you hit a big win once in a great while (pulling a valuable historical Perfect or Diamond) and hit a very small return almost every other time (like five Irons and a Bronze, which is the most likely outcome). If this were not so then everyone would convert 100% of their PP into card packs.

Card pack rewards for missions, even if they're high end packs, quickly become log-jammed by speculators (PT is, in many ways, an auction house manipulation game rather than a baseball simulation), which often forces players to pay more for the mission than the expected return on the pack (as above, but this time through card rather than pack purchases).

Go through the card shop, mission by mission, and see that this is so. Yes, you at least get to play the cards you've acquired; but the vast majority of them are not meta cards in any format and are thus substandard or non-optimal choices. Enough of these on your roster and your team fails, whether that be in league or tournaments. In most cases, you could have spent less and done better by simply purchasing cards in the shop without even looking at missions.

This is the nature of the game, which is designed to encourage players to buy points and thus generate income for the company. Neither of us will ever see a time when the playing field between big spenders and non-spenders is level because that would lead to everyone becoming a non-spender, reducing the company's profit on PT to less than zero.

The only exception to the above is multi-tiered missions, which allow players to acquire good topper cards and then leverage their past mission completions into future mission completions. A perfect example is Live Series, which gives you toppers for each team, toppers for each division, and then a topper for completing the level. The second level effectively requires completing the previous level by adding more cards from the same pool, then adds additional team, division, and complete toppers. Mission completions are also rather than exclusively rewarded with card packs.Thus, Live Series eventually (after version-start card prices decline due to supply) becomes a money-maker, where your investment in cards is exceeded by the gains, either in useful cards or the proceeds from selling those cards.

This is why reducing the number of multi-tier mission paths (as PT has done this year) is bad for the game. Without these upward paths to build on, the game becomes an exercise in just buying the best cards available outright whenever they become available. The alternative is converting all points into card packs, which I've already identified as a losing proposition.

It used to be possible to 'prepare' yourself for future missions (during the Build A Legend era for instance) by trying to predict what the next batch of missions would require, and buying those cards while they were still cheap. They even closed off that avenue for players by releasing vital cards along with the missions they are required for, turning them into immediate unobtainium.

Packs are indeed a losing proposition unless you hit it big on a single card (your scratch ticket analogy.)
They could fix this if they just adopted some standard practices from other 'gatcha' games, as I outlined here (TL;DR: implement pity pulls and chronological banners - NOT the ridiculously overpriced 'Spotlight' packs):

https://forums.ootpdevelopments.com/...2&postcount=71

But this developer seems content to have the lifeblood of a pack opening game (players, both F2P and P2W, opening packs to generate the cards that are required for the game to have an economy) be incredibly dissatisfiying 99% of the time.
Example: I am approaching the 800 packs without a single Perfect drop, and the last 10 non-live Perfects I pulled were so crappy that I am convinced that high- and low value cards do not drop at the same rate (I have thought this for a long time, just more so now.)

I feel (though I do not have the underlying data on player count, etc.) that this game is on the path that many failed MMO's travelled - cater too much to whales (=short term profitability), lose engagement from regular/casual players (=long term dependable cash flow), be left with whales exclusively, downsize, then pull the plug once even they eventually hop to another game. I hope I'm wrong and they right the ship, but none of the developments over the last couple of years inspire optimism.

[LeeD]

Originally Posted by DotDash

I feel (though I do not have the underlying data on player count, etc.) that this game is on the path that many failed MMO's travelled - cater too much to whales (=short term profitability), lose engagement from regular/casual players (=long term dependable cash flow), be left with whales exclusively, downsize, then pull the plug once even they eventually hop to another game. I hope I'm wrong and they right the ship, but none of the developments over the last couple of years inspire optimism.

I started with PT22 and have to say that I've enjoyed the game less each year since. Developments over the past couple of years that I find especially troubling:

1. Shrinkage of tournament rewards. Last year, PT went from 32-team quicks with prizes of 10-5-3 packs to 16-team only with the current prize structure of 3-1. The daily and weekly tournaments somewhat made up for this in PT24, but the addition of Combinators in PT25 has wrecked the whole structure by forcing players to choose between spending hundreds of thousands of points on league (which should be the ultimate goal) or hundreds of thousands of points upgrading Combinators in order to win tournaments (which should be a secondary goal).

2. Removal of BaL (Build-a-Lineup/Build-a-Legend) from the mission tree. This has a profound and ongoing effect on the mission cycle, as one of the Big Three (Live Series, BaL, Negro Leagues) is now gone. Sporer has instead moved Future Legends forward; but that was always a part of the tree. In effect, he's backed out BaL by accelerating FL. Net effect is one less way for players to compete. Added to this, the Negro League 1 mission set is reasonably easy to complete, but the vast majority of the top league cards are extras on top of what's required to complete the set and require hundreds of thousands in extra spending.

3. Replacement of login points with packs. So...instead of getting a nice chunk of change every day, we get a scratcher ticket which is usually a loser.

4. Elimination of PT+ from the mix. I really can't comprehend this one. Apparently, the doubling of login rewards (which were already retarded by replacing points with packs) and additional 50% rewards for achievements was such a drag on the system that they had to kill an additional $6.95 a month income from a lot of players.

5. One of your comments that I snipped: the inability to prepare for upcoming missions because so many of the cards needed are released when the missions drop. To go along with this, there are still many, many Gold, Diamond, and Perfect cards which remain missionless. Far more than in previous cycles, undoubtedly due to a combination of this bullet point and Number 2 above. At some future time, all of these will find a mission...or will they? 100 Chuck Knoblach wants to know. He's got a solid card but can't get any playing time because Chase "Demigod" Utley is too good to cut or bench. 100 Eddie Collins also wants to know. Sure, he's in a mission now; but you'd have to be stupid to lock him for a Pack Reward mission that delivers one Diamond pack.

I've already reached the point of creating a new team rather than struggle with keeping my #1 and #3 competitive at the Diamond level. In previous years, I mostly did this as an exercise in speed-burning the development process and to keep up with just how easy it was to complete the early-cycle missions and build a solid team in a couple of weeks. This year, I'm exclusively concentrating on that team (Week Three, 76-21 in Stone .135). This won't last the cycle, and I'm likely out of here sometime before the regular season ends.

[HRBaker]

Yep. Sunday will be my last day for this version. This weeks results confirm there's no place to go as an F2P player from this point forward without chaining myself to the computer 24/7.

My short run with my 4th team already has hit a wall, so there's simply no excitement left.

Before I go, however, I want to stress one more time; PLEASE find a way to keep F2P players involved. Becoming chicken-fodder after 4 months is simply not a long term plan.

[Kushiel]

They need to have a debate moment.

[Bunktown Ballers]

Originally Posted by HRBaker

Since I'm likely to drop following my teams over the next few weeks, there are still some issues I haven't said anything about that I felt needed to be stated "just in case" someone is listening...


Base engine changes;


Back at release time a lot was said about an overhaul to the OOTP base game engine. If I remember right the basic "reason" was to create more variability in stat results - something closer to reality. Although i do think that was(is) good for the basic game, I can't help but wonder if that change is the basis of why v25 Perfect Team is creating stats that can't be relied on anymore. Don't get me wrong... more variation and reality are what the base game are all about and I love the idea of addressing that issue - BUT - I do NOT think that is a good thing for Perfect Team. PT is a highly competitive card game that people spend money on - and some level of consistency is needed to support that. Maybe the classic game and PT need slightly different engines....

Missions;

Something has to be done here... The LIVE missions are absolutely GREAT for getting started building your rosters, but once those are complete - and the balance of the missions simply reward card packs - you quickly realize that the rewards aren't nearly enough to take the time to complete those missions. To be honest, card packs simply are a bad investment once the game is into it's 3rd or 4th month. Somehow, the rewards have to continue to include better players to counter the 6 figure prices you otherwise have to spend to buy them in the card shop.

Ok. Off my soapbox...

I agree 1000% Rating for live cards are just random nonsense most of the time. RP Pitchers with 5.50 era 30 walks in 30 Innings with a 75 control rating is BS at the least and actually a Diamond card. So many others things with rating are bonkers

[steamrollers]

Basically all the points made here have been spot on accurate. 25 has been somewhat of a disaster. They are putting the finishing touches on chasing off all the small players just hoping the whales keep things afloat. The combinator cards have been an unmitigated disaster making even the lowest end tourneys just for whales. And even jumping the shark much earlier than ever before when they go crazy with ratings for cards typically months from now. Perhaps by the end of the cycle we will have card ratings at 200.

I feel bad for all the people that just started playing the last couple years. There was a time they really did a great job for all levels of play in PT. That ship has long since sailed as it's just been horrendous decisions one after another.

[Kushiel]

People are leaving because of the decisions discussed in this forum that are ignored. They can spin it any way they want to, but there are 2 teams per league going to Perfect now. Remember the big hullabaloo about Perfect Level being a league of Champions to fight it out each week for the true king of PT?

[quickstep76]

Just for another viewpoint. I’ve been playing free to play since OOTP 18 and this is by far the best and most enjoyable version of PT. The number of options for tournaments, the wide and varied collections, and the incredible quality of life improvements to card shop have all been the reason. I’ve been fluctuating between Diamond and gold but might finally be able to stick in the higher level. I’ve completed all the collections with the exception of the silver one that dropped yesterday and am having a blast! Yeah, the combinators were a bad decision and I just sell those cards whenever I get them, but that’s really the only negative that I see from this version.



Happy 4th!

[bailey]

Originally Posted by quickstep76

Just for another viewpoint. I’ve been playing free to play since OOTP 18 and this is by far the best and most enjoyable version of PT. The number of options for tournaments, the wide and varied collections, and the incredible quality of life improvements to card shop have all been the reason. I’ve been fluctuating between Diamond and gold but might finally be able to stick in the higher level. I’ve completed all the collections with the exception of the silver one that dropped yesterday and am having a blast! Yeah, the combinators were a bad decision and I just sell those cards whenever I get them, but that’s really the only negative that I see from this version.

Thank you, for a refreshing viewpoint that we need more of around here.
I agree 100% even if I complain a lot which I have to stop doing.