Went on a nice 8 game winning streak towards the end of the season last night…followed up by going 1-6 the last week to miss the wildcard by a game and a half. Ugh. Had strong pitching most of the year with some poorly timed bad outings though. But my biggest problem was scoring runs. All my meaningful offensive rankings were in the bottom third of my conference. No amount of lineup changes seemed to help. Oh well. On to next year.
Heh, two of my teams just missed the playoffs in similar fashion. This is the first season none of my teams made the playoffs – and none was relegated either. Thta’s sort of a worst-case scenario: no playoff rewards (PP, and pips on one’s OOTP Forum profile); and you stay in the same tough league. Like @Charlatan, I was kinda half-hoping for someone to be relegated.
Ah well. As you say, wait til next year.
I continued to mostly be afk again this week, as I’m still burned out from the bronze tourney work earlier. I did finish the team missions on Texarkana the other day, and finished off BAL Heilmann finally for Cedar Rapids but they are now basically broke. Cedar Rapids finished their run in Diamond yesterday, and will be in Gold this week. Texarkana was just short of the Gold playoffs, and Chandler had an off year of slightly sub 500 ball in Gold. We’ll see this week how Texarkana’s staff does with a full season: Cy, Smoky Joe, Satchel, Robin Roberts, and Sam McDowell. Everyone besides Cy is a new addition in the last couple of days. Chapman also joined the bullpen. I saw the batter NGL missions are still very expensive. I’ll have to see if there are any BAL missions that are close. Texarkana and Chandler both have about 350k PP currently. I haven’t jumped in any tournaments in a while now, so things have been pretty stagnant except for spending earlier winnings to do some of the missions.
Looks like OOTP Go is getting really close to launch. That might help me get back into playing bronze tournaments. Joined a few today and have 1 win so far, and another currently in the semifinals. I guess the meta hasn’t changed much in the past month.
Yeah, my bronze team hasn’t changed that much. A few players did get shuffled out of bronze during the Live update, but that only affected a couple guys in my lineup.
Marcus is saying Go will be available “soon”. It looks like they’re waiting for approval from the Apple and Google Play stores. Reviews in OOTP’s “impressions” thread are generally (though not universally) favorable. It does sound like it sucks down battery life quickly, and a tablet might be the best device. I plan to play with my iPad.
Nothing more exciting than your virtual baseball team clawing it’s way to .500 yet again. At least this season my stats are all mediocre across the board. Usually, my pitching is stellar while my offense is godawful, but this year they’re all entirely average. Last time I checked my runs for/runs against number was 381 to 375. Nice.
I finally dumped two diamond level historical CFs because they have just been horrible for too long. And my 98 rated Byron Buxton is locked so I can’t auction off that sorry excuse for a card. Even my newly perfect Shane Bieber is getting pummeled. Ah well. That’s the way baseball go.
All three of my teams are playing .500 ball, maybe slightly better. It’s as if I’ve found my equilibrium. I hope I can change that.
Texarkana’s pitching staff is doing okay, but they aren’t getting much help from their bats and could end up in silver if they don’t get their act together. Cedar Rapids on the other hand had the best record in the league earlier, and appear they might be heading back to Diamond for some more beatings. Chandler is a little over .500. If they could score runs they would probably be doing great. They have allowed the least runs in the league.
They announced the franchise heroes one (FH1) missions last night. Some really good cards in the list, others, not so much.
The way those missions work is for each team you have to lock the live mission reward, the team’s perfect BAL card and the recent team mission reward card. If you lock those three cards you then get the FH1 reward.You do not have to complete the missions themselves, you just need to lock the reward cards. So if there is a team mission that is particularly expensive to complete it’s an option to buy the reward card off the auction house (i’m looking at you, New York Yankees Team Mission!)
The FH1 rewards include a ton of first baseman, including Wally Joyner, George Sisler, Frank Thomas, and Don Mattingly. There are also two great third baseman in the set, Ken Caminiti and Paul Molitor. Depending on your team needs there may be other cards in the section you are interested in but those are the only cards that my teams are going to go after. One of the problems, of course, is that a lot of the perfect BAL‘s are very good so if you complete that you might not want the FH1 reward. A related issue is that if you want the FH1 reward you will have to complete and lock a BAL perfect that you may not be interested in (like having to complete Ron Guidry if you want Don Mattingly).
On the upside, it doesn’t appear these missions have caused any inflation in prices on the auction house. Also, the FH1 rewards include two diamond packs in addition to the FH1 card itself, so it’s like getting at least an 8000 PP rebate!
They previewed the structure of the FH2 missions. Those missions will require locking the FH1 reward, two reward cards from unannounced missions, and the reward card from unannounced team mission 2.
So it looks like a lot of the progression this year is going to involve completing long mission chains. I’m not sure how I feel about that.
My two teams are also playing .500 ball!
WAS just spent all of it’s cash completing the Negro League missions, so I received the nice shiny Jackie Robinson card. I was looking forward to having the other rewards - Gibson, Charleston, and Paige - to use on my team as well. But I’ve been seeing some discussion that even though they are good cards, none of those three is a end-game keeper (this is from discussion on the BFF discord and from hearing YourKidnies talk about the cards on twitch). I have seen Oscar Charleston’s performance in Diamond and it’s not great so I sort of agree that he doesn’t seem terribly great in CF. So even though I have no idea who I’d put in there for those 3 guys I’m thinking maybe I sell them all now and reinvest the PP into longer term goals (for instance, completing the BAL Lucroy so I can get Paul Molitor and/or buying the Team Reward Chapman so I can get Mattingly). I believe WAS will be going after Mattingly, Frank Thomas, and either Caminiti or Molitor.
Last night I also pulled Pop Lloyd from a pack so I’m trying to sell him. That will hopefully net around 90 to 100k in addition to whatever the above guys would get me.
ANN has taken a completely different tack and has been completing BAL missions. I’ve got 6 completed BALs there and 6 more diamonds so I guess the strategy there is to focus on completing the BALs that give me the FH1 rewards I want. ANN will be going after Caminiti and Mattingly I guess. I’m out of cash on ANN though so I need to actually win some tournaments to get packs that have good stuff in them!
I’m a few games over .500 now and my division is pretty mediocre so I’m 1.5 back there. Still haven’t had good pack luck and I think I’ve only pulled a single 100. I’ve bought one, and gotten a couple thru missions. And have a couple of Live cards that moved up to 100 (but they’re just awful for me, even though I see them both doing well on other teams). I had a short run of a few days of winning some Bronze tourneys but haven’t won a pack there since Monday.
I’m mostly out on missions these days unless I’m somehow close to completing one and don’t mind the inability to sell any of the cards I’ll have to lock to complete it. Most of the higher quality rewards are for missions I have no way of completing anyway, unless I spend money or suddenly get lucky and start drawing pricey cards I can auction.
I think one of the main ways you improve your team is to enter tournaments → get packs → get lucky drops from packs → sell on AH → buy cards. Assuming you’re not throwing real cash into the game (which I don’t think any of us are). One of the reasons I’ve gotten so much done with my teams is because I spam tournaments like a madman. If people can’t do that, it’s certainly tougher.
Ya. When the new ratings came out I adjusted my team and won a tourney or two every day during the first few days of the month. So I figured I had a decent enough team. But since then it’s been a dry well. So I’m going to have to take a little time and see what I can do to get some more wins out of my Bronze tourney team.
That is definitely the way to do it, but I’m still burned out and haven’t been keeping on top of entering tournaments or tweaking the tournament teams. It is amazing how much PP you can generate doing that.
As F2P it really is pure lottery with some skill in choosing where to invest your lucky winnings.
I pulled Chicken Wolf last night and sold him for enough to complete the Raines perfect card (plus some additional movement towards 2 BAL pitchers). Which also netted me Ryan Zimmerman who isn’t a top tier 3b but is a step up from my current Pie Traynor.
The fun thought is what to do for a DH next season. I have
Enos Slaughter
Frank Thomas
and Joe Kelley
plus Ken Williams who the computer bench coach prefers over Enos Slaughter. Nice decision to have really!
So the game is linking us to a signup for the Perfect Team Championship Series. The web form wants my full legal name. Do you guys do this event? Does it take up a tourney slot for weeks?
Everyone who successfully signs up for the tournament gets a special tournament slot in addition to the regular slots.
Thanks for the info. I’m thinking on it.
Mirabile dictu, two of my three teams won their divisions outright. My Sox played well in September. The universe has gone haywire!
My third Sox team, Concord, had an 81-81 record to place third in their division. So a better-than-expected season all around.
So my River Cats started playing well enough to go on and take my division. Bats lit up a bit and and pitching stayed stable. Crazy. And I think @Spock 's Bar Harbor team is in my side of the playoff tree so if we can both win our first series we’ll get to play each other. Whoot!