There are a lot of ways you can have fun in the game - it’s really a sandbox where you define your fun. You can:
try to make the best team you can out of what you get
work the market to try to become rich
create a theme team and collect the players to fill that out
try to make it to the top level of competition
make a slick tournament team in any number of categories
adopt a crazy off-the-wall strategy and see if you can succeed using it
plus there are a ton more.
You will always run into guys who spend more money than you (especially people like me, who treat the game as free-to-play and don’t buy points or packs). My goal is to be competitive with them. Am I going to dominate the Perfect League? No, not at all. But can I make it there? Maybe!
The game gives F2P players a number of ways to improve their teams, including completing collections and competing in tournaments. You can make an iron tournament team for pennies and if it’s good, you will win a bunch of packs every week. You can connect your twitch account to OOTP and get more free packs weekly (on the order of 25 a week). You can play the game regularly every 3 days and win a free pack. All these require an investment of time and some analysis, but no money.
You do get to a point eventually where you can’t really improve your team much, or where the improvements cost way more than you can earn easily. At that point my interest starts to wane. But until then, I’m right in there, doing all the above stuff.
My Red Sox have broken The Curse – by beating my other Red Sox! Bar Harbor beat Concord in a Bronze League World Series, giving me my first championship trophy. Yay!
This season all three of my teams are in Silver .278, so maybe I can repeat by having them play each other again. :)
This is my experience. Two years ago (the last time before this year I played) I made it to and won a Diamond league. I only stayed up in Diamond a couple of seasons, but the climb was pretty cool. By then I was at the point where upgrading was just a crapshoot of “is this 98 rating player better than this 97 rating player”.
This year I’ve had much less luck with the card drops and my team has rarely been horrible, but also rarely been great. My overall record is .521. One Relegation, one Stone level title back in week 3 and four other playoff appearances. Currently in Silver and going to probably stay there (but it’s still early yet).
One thing I’ve found this year vs two years ago is that the AH is pretty stable. Min bids are frequently within 10% or less of Buy Now. So grabbing deals is super hard. I’ve mostly stopped trying to do so and just do the Buy Now. Especially since I’m not doing a lot of roster changes at this point.
I hadn’t noticed that they had added collections and tournaments since I last did this. That should add some extra replayability beyond the basic leagues.
Pulled my first diamond last night, Christian Yelich, not the best but better than nothing I guess. Actually pulled a diamond and gold out of that pack so not a bad deal.
What does everyone do for packs? Just buy the basic pack, save for the diamond packs?
I don’t think I’ve spent anything on packs (either real money or PP) since I first started this year and dropped $10 and got some regular packs to jumpstart my PT team (not that it did any good). You can get plenty just thru tourneys and missions and twitch drops.
Yep, I’ve never bought a pack. Many nights you can get up to five free packs by tuning into the OOTP stream and enabling Twitch drops. (You have to link your OOTP profile to Twitch to do that; there’s info on how to do that upthread.)
And yes, you can complete many Missions pretty cheaply by shopping on the Auction House, using money you gain from achievements that accrue automatically as your Perfect Team plays games.
Finally, make a decent bronze or iron tournament team and just enter tourneys incessantly. It’s free to enter, so there’s nothing to lose, and occasionally you’ll get lucky and win some packs.
Analysis shows that the best value is a regular pack, since the odds of getting a perfect is the same in all cases. If you spend 3000 you can buy one gold pack or three regular packs and so you have three times the odds of getting a perfect card from the regular packs for the same amount of money.
Which cards are best for the bronze tourneys? I’ve had some success with the perfect drafts, but I’m probably 0-40 on the bronze tourneys. Are there some must have cards for these tourneys that I’m missing?
Sorry, I haven’t played a bronze tourney since early May probably. It looks like angered_unicorn hasn’t been doing his shows about it lately either. So I don’t know where to go for info other than the BFF discord probably can give up to date info.
After a couple of weeks of ignoring my team (doing tournaments through OOTP Go but not even many of those) I took a couple of days to dive back in.
Ever since learning about him through Bill James I’ve like Arky Vaughn. So I burned through most of my saved PP to snag him. Which also netted me a useful Curt Flood and thus shored up two big weaknesses. I’d like a better catcher but I’m not going to get Del Crandall any time soon.
Today I totally redid my bronze tournament team. We’ll see how that goes! Only 7 players match @Charlatan’s team above.
Currently in the Diamond League Series, tied 1-1. They are doing a lot better than I had even dreamed. The series is pitting a BFF team vs. my OL team, so next week in Perfect there will be a F2P team no matter who wins. Take that you whales!!
Congrats @Charlatan ! That is awesome. For people that don’t play Perfect Team, there is one Perfect League for the entire system, so this is the top 30 teams in all of Perfect Team.
