And play tournaments! Put together a solid tourney squad at Iron or Bronze level and you can pull in 5+ free packs per day.
You get five free packs a day from tournaments? I am definitely missing the boat here. If I’m lucky I’ll get five packs a week
I do now that I’m working from home. I make sure I have all 3 of my tournament slots filled at all times. I usually win or place in 2-3 a day per team.
You must be really good at whatever level you’re participating in. I have a silver tournament team that I also enter in multiple times a day and I get a reward no more than every 3 or 4 days. Just started trying to improve it now though, so I hope the results will improve.
This is at Bronze level and I have done a good bit of analysis on the teams that win the tournaments I enter. I ended up seeing a lot of overlap between the winning teams’ rosters. So I bought those players. Rinse and repeat. Now I win more regularly.
While I’ve been thinking about how to set up my game, I’ve been waffling between getting OOTP 21 while it was on sale or sticking with OOTP 20. On my run today I decided I may as well get 21. When I got back the sale was over. :-)
Usually Steam sales go until 1PM US eastern time, so this ending caught me off guard. So looks like I’ll stick with OOTP 20 for now and consider 21 the next sale. That’s OK though, my procrastination saved me $30 for now :-)
21 is on sale.
I own an earlier version of this game but couldn’t figure out what to do - I played tutotials and watched videos on how to play the game (from an interface and technical standpoint) but not what to do when I started a new season.
I’m not looking for you guys to answer me, but was wondering if any of you found yourself in the same situation and how you got past it.
The good news is that they’ve now added a ‘Continue’ button on the top right, which basically takes you to the next thing that requires your attention. That is usually the next game, but will also direct you to important things that need to be done, eg the draft etc. So if you’re wondering what to do next, just hit Continue.
You can also set your homescreen to the Manager’s Office screen, so that’s the first thing you see when you open a session. This might be on by default. So you can see things that might be interesting to you - players on the waiver wire that you can pick up, who is injured, any goals that you have (you should disable Owner Goals at the start because they are really annoying, eg sign the 36-year old first baseman to a new contract).
At the start of the game this will tell you some actions to do. Eg Meet the Team, which gives you a good overview of how good or bad your team is.
You start a couple of days before opening day usually, so look at your roster, open the Free Agency tab (MLB -> Reports & Info -> Free Agents) to see if there is anyone who can fill a hole for you, cut any dead wood.
Look at your pitchers and see if they could be used better. For both lineups and pitching, you can select Actions -> Ask Bench Coach to set lineups/pitching staff. Then you can tinker with this.
Then go to Front Office -> Player Development and see what kind of prospects you have. You can start trading these away immediately if you want. You can click on any player and Actions -> Trade Options -> Shop Player Around. This is hugely helpful for figuring out the real strength of your team, as your own scout might be poor.
Other things to do - hire a good scout and doctor if you can, but usually you’ll have to wait till the end of the first season to get someone decent.
You can just sim the games for now - it took me many years before I decided to play them out - and look at the box scores etc.
For me, I get most fun from the trading/assembling a team part, though the games are fun and infuriating too.
There is also Perfect Team which is an online mode where you assemble a team and compete against other people in an automated manner… You make your lineups and strategy and games are played on their servers. It doesn’t cost extra but there are microtransactions for those so inclined (think of buying extra baseball card packs).
The single best way to learn OOTP is to join an online league. Many leagues are welcoming to newcomers and happy to show them the ropes. Just tell them from the start that you are brand new. This is how I learned and I would strongly recommend it, not just to learn but to find yourself immersed in a great simulation. Look for a league that has been around, that has a good website, and look at the league forum to gauge how other newcomers are treated. Most leagues have to be welcoming because they need new players when others drop out and leave teams without owners.
I know this is counter intuitive. Most people think you need to be good at a game before you leap into multiplayer or online. That is not the case with OOTP, and is truly the best way to learn it.
I had not purchased OOTP21, but today realized that it is available on my shiny new MS Gamepass service. So of course now I’m back to being addicted to Perfect Team.
I still haven’t picked up 21. My team in 20 is currently up 2-0 in their diamond league finals, looking for diamond title #3. They spent quite a few years up in perfect getting beat on before finally getting relegated. Even made it to the playoffs one season up there, which was surprising.
I wish you hadn’t told me that! Now I will feel compelled to go try it out.
Just won my 4th PL title in '20. Had to beat whales in the LCS and the WS. I’ve currently got just enough PP to maybe upgrade one position, but not enough for any of the titans.
'21 is a different story. I’m currently entrenched in Gold level, with an outside shot at moving up to Diamond in any given season, where I would immediately be punted back down.
Just like 95% of all other PT players, I completed all of the Live Series collection missions, and those rewards make up a fairly big chunk of my roster. Consequently, '21 seems more monotonous to me than '20 did. It doesn’t help that all of the best cards are out of reach for NMS players, though I suppose that’s the only way to do things in this type of game. Most of the other build-a-team modes have a skill component after you’ve put your team together, but this one is all numbers.
Won the DL title, so now back to PL to be a punching bag.
I’ve never really spent much time with the collection mission stuff or the tournaments. I guess I should look at it more.
Note: I play FTP so most of the advice below is about improving your team without dumping cash into the game. If you want to pay cash to get points to buy stuff, then your path will probably be easier.
The complaint about PT 20 was that collections were too difficult to complete. And that the rewards weren’t that great. So the change for 21 is that they made the Live collections easier and they gave much better rewards. As a result many people complete those collections and so you see a lot of the same players on every team.
My advice to you guys just starting out is complete the live collections as soon as you can. You should pick a league to focus on and then complete the missions division by division since each division gives a pretty good reward and each league completion gives a really good player. Eventually you will have all of the collections complete.
Even if you don’t want to use the rewards you get you can sell them. But it’s difficult to beat the value you get from players like Suzuki or Bagwell or Maddox, who are three players most team hold on to (except for the team I’m running which doesn’t use any special edition cards so I sold all of ‘me on that one!).
When you get to the gold level you’ll see many similar looking teams. And it can make you feel a bit entrenched or depressed about creating your team’s own identity but if that’s a good time to pick a specific theme decide where you wanna go with your team, and so it’s easy enough to sell those SE cards and buy the guys you want (you just won’t get too much for the cards because the market is literally flooded with them).
One other tip is that entering tournaments can be a great way to get packs and for PP. Tournaments are available at every level (iron, bronze, silver, etc) and once you enter a couple and see what teams win it’s not too difficult to build a similar tourney team and compete. The best way to evolve your tean is to complete collections and enter tournaments to generate the PP you need. At higher levels you don’t earn enough PP to purchase anything except once a month or so and that’s not really going to cut it as far as improving your team.
Also, since there’s only one perfect league this year your team has a lower ceiling in 21 than in 20. I have three FTP teams. The one that enters all the tournaments is a high gold/middle diamond team. My second team is a average gold team. My third team, the one that doesn’t play any SE cards, is a high gold/low diamond team. A lot of are you end up will depend on what kind of pools you get in the random packs.
I quite enjoyed developing a theme for my teams and working to improve them within the theme I chose. However, you definitely reach a point of diminishing returns and/or most of the players you need are super expensive. It’s at that point my interest begins to wane. But I have definitely gotten a lot of enjoyment out of it.
That is where I’ve been with 20. I just check in on them every once in a while to season how the season went, and once I have a decent pile of points to spend them improving a position. Not nearly involved as I was in 19 and the beginning of 20.
Maybe it’s early (I started a team last night) but this isn’t grabbing me. I think I’ve learned too much about how the game works. Last time it felt like I could build a team incrementally as a F2P person and have fun. Now I scanned the auction house I didn’t want to buy anyone because I knew that they would be a minimal, short term improvement at best. The diminishing returns and limited pool of optimal players is much more in view this time around.
For me part of that is related to not seeing many historical cards in the auction house.
How do tournaments work? I’m looking at the screen for it, but have no idea what this is. Are these day long tourneys or week-long?
There are two types of schedules for tournaments. One type begins when the required number of teams have signed up. The other type runs on specified schedule (that’s the daily and early daily and weekly tournaments). The ones that run on a schedule show a countdown timer until the start of the tournament so you can see how far away it is.
Games for tournaments are simulated every 10 or 15 minutes and the tournaments run until there is a single winner. The tournament description tells you how it works, many of them are best of three or best of four matches, some of them are round robin some of them are you win and go on, you lose and you’re eliminated.
You see in the description what are the tournament restricts itself to, for instance live players only, historical players only, or no restriction. There are also point Tournaments were the total point value for your team cannot exceed a specified value, and any unfilled roster slots count as a minimum player (40 points). Those can be challenging to assemble.
If you are thinking about entering a tournament what you should probably do is decide what level you want to compete at… You can pick iron or bronze or silver, gold, diamond or unlimited. So for instance if you create a silver tournament team your players cannot have a rating higher than 79. Of course when you’re first starting you can just pick what you have on hand, but you will do better if you build a team that is focused to compete at a specific level.