There's some preamble here, so if you want to skip to an idea I'm working out in real time, I've put some bold text where I start talking about it. If you feel like reading, here's a second content discussion post: Ranked Seasons is fine. It kind of is what it is.
Field a team, win games, eventually, hopefully you can get up to WS and get one of those beast rewards.
To be honest, it feels kind of stale. But what is there to really do? Not a lot. It's pretty straight forward.
Outside of Pennant Race and World Series, the rewards are pretty bunk. The levels between PR and WS get you at minimum, 2 gold cards and a bat skin. Then a couple of standard packs, which, let's be real...are rarely worth much.
Now, as for the format, overall, it's fine. Like I said above, it kind of is what it is.
I'd love to see some sort of shift in the rewards. Maybe bump the PR up a level, or add some sort of specialty pack with a higher chance of getting a decent card in between.
The rewards this year were pretty solid, and I'm sure I'll never taste that sweet, sweet Willie Mays, but I've barely sniffed WS this year. Only made it to CS once. The past 3 years, I consistently made it up to CS, but for some reason, I've just not played as well this year, or something. I think part of the reason is that it doesn't feel worth it to invest that much time. Especially with the amount of great cards in the game this year (how much better is Willie than Griffey, really?)
That said, there is one addition I would love to see in RS. I'll preface this by saying that it's likely not to happen, especially since Events exists. I would like to see a secondary RS that encourages less OP lineups. I'm not sure it's really that possible, I mean, events try to mitigate that, but often, it's easy enough to power your team down enough in lesser needed areas to lift up the lineup, rotation, and bullpen. But here's what I'm thinking:
Secondary Ranked, or what I'm going to call "Capped Rank" would be standard 9 inning games. Each season runs along the same time frame as regular RS with the same ST-WS structure.
This could go two ways: One, Capped Rank could have themes (but then, it just becomes 9 Inning Events, so that's probably not optimal), or two, CR could just limit the cards available, similar to BR, but without the randomness of drafting.
Something like this:
3 90+ Diamonds
3 85-89 Diamonds
8 Golds
8 Silvers
3 Bronze or Common (or 4 if they change to the 26 man roster)
Anyone can build a decent enough team with that, and it would allow for a lot of cards that get released to be relevant for much of the game's cycle, and may even drive up some excitement for more content by way of lesser players who may have been popular, but don't really deserve a diamond card (for all my Craig Counsell fans out there).
The rewards could get pretty fun here, as RS and CR could have mirroring rewards (RS gets a beast Tom Glavine, CR gets a beast John Smoltz, something like that). I dunno. Could be something fun to play with.
This would also be a good mode if they more heavily integrate Evolution. Get that bronze rookie whoever, play some games and gain some stats, and boom, all of a sudden he's a silver breakout...
Anyway, that's about all I got on this, so let me know what you think.
Also, if you managed to read this far: Anne Hathaway is hot.
