Community Forum

@YOSHI24_XBL said in Market Inflation!!!:

My biggest take from this for next year: Go after the gate-keepers first. Then „the next wave“ (we knew, Tatis was having a very good first month) … I bought my last gate-keeper as my very last card and luckily got him (Witt) for 190K (and Judge 236K prox 5 days ago)

Ditto. I nabbed Witt in the 170’s, Judge around 230, and Ramirez a little under 120. I decided to strike during the Diamond Flash Sale to take advantage of the seller wave. Glad I did. Overpaid early for Trout at 160 then bit the bullet on Ohtani at 480 to finish, all NMS.

I about sh!t when I saw the prices yesterday! For once I feel like I did this right!

On the flip side, I’m sick of the [censored] market.

Should finish mine today, NMS. Painful Ohtani bid is finally in. Never finished before July. Packs have been atrocious. Skenes, Skubal, Sale. A few low diamonds. That’s it. Working the snot out of the market and got some help by poaching a few buy/sells from the stub-selling transaction scum. That works really well, by the way, if you find idiots who just don’t stop. Just pick up their patterns and adjust. When they finally learn and give it a rest, go do something else the come back. They’re almost always back at it.

No. I don’t feel bad about it. At all.

Yeah, they’re stub transfer transactions and there are a ton of them. I’ve run into this several more times, just this week. Bat Chirp was apparently popular. I jumped into the fray, posting random bids on both their buy/sells. Wound up making 60-80k just f*cking with them. I feel terrible about it. Really.

This is still happening; run into it repeatedly with several unlockables.

Absolutely.

@PriorFir4383355_XBL That’s how MLB chose to handle them this year. Listed like that on the team schedules.

@ace_hardlight28_PSN Jackie isn’t a 99 STL, believe it or not, but you don’t absolutely need that. Obviously Rickey Henderson and the 50/50 Shohei cards are 99 STLs but so is the 99 Joe Morgan. Jimmy Rollins from season 1, too. I got quite a few steals of second from HOF Hank Aaron, Mays, and Jeter. The season 3 99 Mantle and Trout cards will get you those, too. Corbin Carroll is always fun.

Like the other dude, I finished mine in one game without even purposely stopping at first. If you’re going to steal third, take the one poke extra lead and prepare to maybe get picked off. Doesn’t happen often, but it does.

The Baker Bowl would be a trip! 280’ down the RF line with a 60’ high fence! Your list pretty much covers it. I’d be fine with any of the old parks; Tiger Stadium and Ebbets being at the top of my list. Jarry Park/Olympic Stadium might be neat, as would Cleveland’s League Park. With all the stadiums they’ve added b/t the Negro Leagues and Mini Seasons, I have no idea why they haven’t done any of these. Basically the same Classic Stadiums collection as when I started playing in 2010.

@nymets1987_PSN Ditto. Won’t bother.

@Cubsfan217_XBL After finishing that tedious TA, I refuse to use any of them on principle. Horrible notion for a supposed “simulation” game.

There are fewer legends this year than there have been in a long time. Far too many recycled players with multiple cards. Im just speculating but I suspect it has to do with economics. Sony has made cuts across the board b/c growth has stagnated/corrected post-pandemic and the isolation surge. Happening across the gaming environment. Except for the Negro League players, this year’s version of the game has been a noticeable step back across the board. I imagine it has to do with these budget and staff cuts. Seems that would apply to budgets allocated to players for usage rights. Another factor could be the corporate partnership with Topps.

I’m 54 and barely hit 700 for a minute earlier this year before I quit playing online, again. Best ones for me to that point were LS collection Pedro, the 99 Sabathia, and the Angels collection Nolan. The AS Skenes card is ridiculous, too. I P5’d him mostly offline and never gave up a run to the CPU in 100 IP. Retired it to keep the 0.00! Happy hunting!

@dbub_PSN 23

I’ve hit 27 once; non-perfect game, too. I managed to P5 AS Skenes without giving up a run in 100 IP! Kind of surprised and now I don’t want to use him to keep it intact! The 23+ k/9 thing made me laugh, too. It’s funny how most of my stud pitchers average right around 23.3 k/9, seemingly regardless of their K ratings. Explains the “magic innings” where I suddenly can’t get a swing and miss!

On the offensive side, I finally scored 100 runs. Was on my way again with a season-ineligible HOF card God Squad this week when SDS farted and kicked me offline after scoring 40+. Pissed me off and haven’t played since!

*Last year I played well over 100-games in RS. This year: fewer than 20.

*I used to despise the marketplace but now find flipping cards by far the most rewarding and enjoyable part of this beautifully presented digital abortion. In the last week, I’ve made 3-million stubs and purchased Gehrig, Wagner, and Chapman. I’ve yet to use them online and might not!

*In years past, RTTS was my zombie escape mode. Not this year. Thanks for ruining that, too, SDS. Asshats.

*When I occasionally feel like I am “forced” to actually play one mode or another to finish card collecting, it feels like a dreaded filthy chore; one to be endured rather than an enjoyable leisure activity and my day is invariably worse when I turn it off in disgust.

I’m not a gaming expert or anything, but I can’t imagine having your customers hate playing your product is a sustainable business model…unless there’s another factor involved.

At first it was confusing when I realized that I kept playing this steaming slot machine pile despite hating it. Then I learned something about algorithms, group status (Making WS! Getting the banner!), gambling psychology, and ultimately dopamine addiction.

I don’t post much but I do lurk. So many complain and say they’re going to quit. Then someone else will predictably chime in saying, “you’ll be back next week/year” or even dig out an old post where the person said the same thing the previous month! Of course they’re almost always right. How many people joke about how the game blows geriatric sheep but how “addicting” it still is?!?

It runs far beyond MLB 21. The Dopamine Drip is designed into all of our contemporary digital simulators, platforms, and devices. In this game, and I assume others, its tube runs from the constantly refreshed content. They know it. This years game is something to be ashamed of. Do you suppose the flood of content, especially with the TA programs, is a coincidence?

I no longer rage at the game. It’s inanimate. It’s SDS itself that deserves the pitchforks.

@suntlacrimae50_psn said in Quad XP:

@dolenz_psn said in Quad XP:

@suntlacrimae50_psn said in Quad XP:

The need to have 4x XP implies that SDS knew the timeframe for the program was a mistake. I don't like time limits to programs. Make it harder to complete AFTER a given date, but don't lock it. Too many players have lives outside of MLBtS.

I am not sure that the timeline was a mistake. They plan for so many innings to happen in a certain window of time. To fit them in one needed to be shorter. I assumed Quad XP had more to do with everyone missing a big chunk of a day worth of play when the servers had issues on a Saturday.

I know time limited content is a big issue for a lot of players but I can see the benefits to SDS.

1. It drives engagement. It keeps more people playing more often. This also goes for double XP weekends.

2. It keeps the boss cards at a reasonable supply.

3. It stops players from procrastinating and never finishing any innings. I know if I had unlimited time then I would procrastinate. Then, after I fell behind two or three innings, I would just give up because the amount of content would be too overwhelming to catch back up.

All good reasons, of course. Especially the boss card supply.

Driving engagement -- yuck. Just despise the attention economy we're all part of now. It's based on addiction theory, ultimately. There's a global psychology experiment happening, we're all part of it, and nobody's explained the fine print to us. Thankfully, people are waking up to it...

I'll just add that, as a teacher, I find it amusing (honestly so) that we now apply the concept of procrastination to a video game. Well done, sir.

Post of the Year. Tho, for every one waking up I’m afraid five fall into a rabidly defensive denial…which is, of course, symptomatic of addiction. Dopamine is a hell of a drug.

Ha! I had the same thought but then just figured it was SDS engaging in subversive price controls. That’s sort of like I assume the fanatical fanboys who pop up in here to sing over-the-top praises of this dopamine triggering bait-n-reward slot machine are SDS puppet accounts!

To be fair, I doubt it’s rational to think that way by default but also don’t care. I despise SDS and happily choose to assume the worst. Fukc ’em.

I finished the LS in June so hadn’t been paying much attention to it. Turns out I had pulled three Petrickas along the way and had them collecting dust. A few people are a bit happier now…

I have a few:

• “A ball that’s carrying!”

• Intentional walk animations that take forever and cannot be clicked thru.

• I loathe these time-suck Moments to begin with, so pitching moments where the pitchers come to bat just to drag the stupid things out even more tend to [censored] me off. It’s doubly annoying when the historical setting features an AL DH-era pitcher in an AL park.

For a relatively cheap option, I had good luck with SS Lofton. He has a surprisingly good bat swinging away against pinched infields, too, not to mention that defense. He’s robbed a few HR for me.

The RS version of this game is an abortion almost all the way around. From “perfectly” released pitches that either miss on the other side of the zone or are grooved down the middle so these ubiquitous steroid-version “post season” cards can hit them to the moon with [censored] timing to base runners behaving like they’re Forrest Gump playing the game for the first tIme ever instead of Hall of Famers. How many times have I seen TY F-in COBB stand on first base picking his nose until the pitcher releases the ball so he can be thrown out stealing. How many times has Kaline...KALINE!... done a little hamster dance before throwing the ball so the runner “just has time” to score? Yes. Quite the simulation you’ve built.

Tonight, I lost to a guy who never timed ANYTHING. Just meatball exploitation and mistimed bleeders all over the field. He came close to nothing in the first two AB’s against Prestige Palmer, went into the pause screen then came back making contact on everything because he obviously missed directional hitting. Right on cue came the perfectly released meatball he completely failed to time with Super Correa and hit out. The ball floated out like the [censored] Hindenburg. With these ridiculous power ratings, that happens all the time.

Me on the other hand? Good PCI placement the entire game with a wad that were timed next to perfect and came off the bat like the ball was made of lead. I’m not playing the game when it goes there. I’m participating in virtual ratfuckery.

There’s another thread I was glad to see, about how this game often ruins people’s entire days because when you “play” it, you‘re constantly reminded how you’re masturbating to what’s little more than a visually stimulating virtual slot machine with addictive content bait built in to keep you coming back for your “reward” hit. It wouldN’t bother me as much if the cards I want weren’t tied to online play...and the PS Plus membership, of course. Then I’d just grind the computer never havIng to tolerate this BS on top of dashboarders quitting half the time just to screw me out of the stats these jagoffasaur developers demand I collect in their online sewer to obtain the cards. Did I mention the toxicity of the online “experience” in general? I mean, they got rid of direct messaging met players, didn’t they? Yet, let’s try to force-herd more players into the cesspool! Brilliant. I digress.

I agree that homeruns “should” be a major part of this game, but a bomb fest shouldn’t be the only way to compete without bunt spamming. It’s obvious that so many players are switching back to directional, just laying on power swing, and are being rewarded for it. Ridiculous.

Someone else pointed out that the devs probably never play the asinine online version unless they’re required to at work. I understand why; who wants to take their work home with them? Grudging empathy aside, it shows.