Not all 95 rated players are alike! Throw out a couple of names and I will tell you why they’re not more expensive. Also, 10k is not chump change for most people, especially if you’re free-to-play.
Ripping packs is for thrillseekers - most of the time you don’t get much but once in a while you hit the jackpot. If you’re just opening a couple of packs you should treat it like buying lottery tickets - you won’t win but it’s fun to try!
I really wish they would improve the auction house interface. Give me some filters like Football Manager uses.
Having used OOTP the past two years, it’s clear to me they don’t have much of anyone involved with UI/UX for the Perfect Team product. It has a lot of usability issues.
Half the time I blow points on packs, because using the AH is so painful.
Continuing a rather desultory single-player playthrough with the Padres. I’m not wholly feeling it as I went back late last year and spent a lot of time with the previous game, so the interval between spells of heavy playtime has been a little too short.
11-5 at the moment, on the back of crazy hitting by the heart of the order (Tatis, Machado, Myers) which won’t last and their inevitable regression to more realistic stats will probably mean a tough month at some point. Main lineup changes have been trading for Nick Solak (2B) from the Rangers and Adam Haseley (CF) from Philly, who should both come good later in the year.
It’s not that 10k is chump change, though you do get that amount at least per season I think (I have 13k after signing up last Tuesday), but that if Diamond players are 1:1000 packs it seems odd that they cost the same as two gold packs or ten regular. Anyway.
It seems like most of the affordable 95+ players are either JT Realmuto or one of a bunch of modern 3Bs (Bregman, Rendon, Chapman). Is there a huge premium on power?
I can’t look at the cards this exact second but one thing that I noticed last year was that live player cards are typically priced a little lower than equivalent historical cards. One reason is because live cards get updated weekly during the season and so you might be buying a player who’s rated 95 now but who may drop to 85 over the course of the season. So the volatility with the ratings lowers the price a bit.
Part of it might be that might also be that all these good third baseman competing for the same spot(s) on a roster (3b, DH, maybe cross training at 1b or 2b). So you can only use so many of these guys!
For fun I will look at the cards later on and see if there’s any more specific reasons they would be priced lower than their peers.
It seems more and more likely that we won’t have to worry about any ratings updates for Live cards this year. However, in my experience, Live Series players are less productive even than non-Live players with similar ratings. For instance, Verlander, DeGrom, and Scherzer are all 100 overall, but their constituent ratings aren’t as high as, say, a 100 Ron Guidry or Bob Gibson. Specifically, their Movement ratings (arguably the most important of the three) are significantly lower. I assume this reflects the fact that more home runs are being hit now than were hit in the past, but the effect here is to make any Live series SP untenable at the top of the rotation above Gold level.
As for the specific players you listed: Bregman and Rendon are bad defensively, and not strong enough offensively in any one area to make up for it. Plus they’re right-handed batters, which tend to be less expensive. Chapman is great on defense, but a Contact rating in the 50s likely means a sub-.300 OBP at the higher levels, even with an above-average Eye rating. Realmuto seems to me like he should be more expensive than he is, given how hard it can be to find a catcher who’s passable both offensively and defensively.
On a semi-related topic, one new thing that annoys me is that they now have multiple “Peak” versions of players, one marked as a Legend and one as a Special Edition. Seems like they could have at least given the new card a less derivative name.
Is the trading AI good enough that I don’t have to worry about taking advantage of it? I’ve made a handful of trades and some of them seemed pretty reasonable and some of them maybe not, though I might be undervaluing decent controllable talent.
Anyway, I wanted to write this game up that I just had because I don’t have anyone else to tell about how great it was. My Rays and Tyler Glasnow against the Yankees and Gerrit Cole. The Yankees about a quarter of the way through the season are 28-12 and two games ahead of us. Glasnow has been pretty bad his last few games but all my other starters are great. I traded for Gallo, but my only other four-star hitter is Austin Meadows who’s been day-to-day for a week with a knee contusion, so I’ve had him benched.
Glasnow started the game K, K, K, HR (Stanton), K, HR (Ford). We got those two runs back in the third with a single and a pair of doubles. I thought it might be a short start for Glasnow with the number of pitches he’d thrown, but the innings just kept going by with nobody breaking through - we got Cole out of there in the sixth but the Yankees have an absurd pen, and Glasnow kept saying he had something left. We had a runner on third with one out in the fifth and had the bases loaded in the sixth and eighth but couldn’t push the run across.
I had someone warming up at the beginning of each inning starting in the eighth, but Glasnow ended up throwing a nine-inning no-hitter after that second home run, with three walks and eight more strikeouts before getting pulled after giving up a single with one out in the 11th. Then in the 12th, we loaded the bases on a walk, single, fly out, and single, and with one out we had Kevin Padlo up, a mediocre hitter who’s had a nice run so far this year. I thought for a little while and finally decided to pinch hit with Meadows, who was still gimpy but I figured I just needed a better contact hitter to get the ball out of the infield.
Nice!
well, I’m glad I typed that up, because postscript: two hours later the game crashed and apparently it never autosaves because I lost five games including that one. I don’t know if I’m going to play again for a while. Grrr.
I’m not sure what the default is for autosave. That’s a bummer that it crashed though. Were you in the 3d mode? I’m not sure if I remember OOTP crashing on me before.
I think the default is a Yearly save on Jan 1, which can be changed to Daily or whatever.
That’s a pity, nice writeup! The trade AI is decent - I go Hard & Favor Prospects and I only have to self-police a little bit. I’ve moved down from Very Hard over the years as a Quality of Life measure - I don’t want to spend so much time trying to get the AI to accept my trades any more.
Awesome game right up! It sucks that you lost it.
I’ve got two teams going in perfect team and wow one of them is doing well I feel like I’ve completely lost my way on the second one.
What I do is pick a theme for my team and then I find players that fit the theme. The team that’s doing well is a defense oriented team. The other one, that’s floundering, is a small ball type team… Trying to focus on hitters who make contact, don’t strike out much, but have very low power. I’m combining that with a pitching staff that has decent stuff and good control but doesn’t worry about movement, so they are weak to homeruns. And then I modified my ballpark to suppress homeruns so the theory is that they may give up flyballs but the outfield should catch it. They did OK in the entry league, playing around 500 ball. Which I expected, given my pitching staff wasn’t that good.
This year is a different story… nobody is hitting and I mean nobody. I think I started out the first two months of PT going 14-50. And I have found it absurdly challenging to find good hitting players of any stripe that aren’t way overpriced in the auction house. I guess there’s no need to rush so I’ve been biding my time and looking for guys to buy but I tell you it’s sad to see that team perform… Or should I say not perform!
Playing Perfect Team for the first time, definitely sticking with FTP. I made two teams (WTF is with the ridiculous antics you have to go through in order to have two separate teams?!), neither started with great players at all. Standard 1 gold each, neither that useful.
One team made the playoffs in my first season and somehow won the World Series. So they’re pretty much doomed to be destroyed next season I’m sure.
The other got lucky as hell and snagged a Negro League player worth 50k. So I sold that and bought a bunch of gold packs to get the team going. Had 1500 points left over so I bought a single pack and the 2nd card out is Monte Irvin! Now trying to decide if I should keep him or sell him as he’s worth a bit over 100k at auction right now. I really love opening packs so will probably sell him but it was fun to pick up a rare card from a cheap pack.
And I’ve officially used up all of my PT luck I think.
Good for you! My two teams, both FTP, have diverged wildly. My defense of first team has gotten stuck in bronze for the second year in a row with a bunch of whales. Last year I’d say six or seven teams won more than 100 games. This year it looks to be a little better but not much. As a result the team is earning almost nothing.
The other team is in Iron and had a game last week where we scored 21 runs and earned around 5000 PP. so I started doing the live collections and have been able to snowball the process by selling most of the rewards. I only have seven left, unfortunately two are expensive ones, but when I finish the process my hopes that I will be able to re-buy two or three of the rewards but I didn’t particularly want to sell.
FYI, I have never gotten a diamond or better card out of the pack so far this year. You must be using my luck!!
Probably a dumb question, but what does FTP mean within the context of OOTP?
Free to Play, meaning you don’t spend any actual money on points to boost your team. For now, I’ve stuck with just opening packs bought with points I’ve earned from achievements. I guess I’ll have to buy players in the auction house at some point if I ever want to complete a collection though.
I expect this will be the best card I’ll ever see! Of course he’s started off a robust 2 for 14 for my team so far.
I’m 100% addicted to Perfect Team. Love it.
The best bang for your bucks is completing all the Live Collection missions. You can get a powerhouse team (at least until you progress to Gold/Diamond level) in 3-4 weeks just by completing those.
