The Battle for Battle

The price tag for Jadyn Battle is one of the highest Franchise Ball has ever seen.

As it stands on Feb 18, at around 10am Eastern time, the winning bid on the 23-year-old shortstop stands at $160,100,000. He is not currently tied to a multi-year contract by his current club.

The reason I know, is because I made it go that high.

Hi fellas, I'm Greg, better known as the Yonkers Renegades. I've been playing for nearly 70 seasons now, I'm the season 98 World Series champ, a former FB Hall of Fame committee director, a paying Executive Member since its inception, and just this past season, a first-time winner of the Ocean Star.

Throughout my time here, I've been one of Josh's (Seattle Admins and the game developer) biggest defenders when his ideas have been controversial and unpopular.

But the 'battle' for Jadyn Battle may have just pushed me over the edge.

I saw this morning that my bid of a healthy $16,000,000 would not be sufficient, as another bidder had upped the bid to $40,000,000 and tellingly, immediately to $40,100,000.

Enter the auto-bid.

So I thought I'd have some fun. I've got a few hundred million to play with and Battle is without a doubt a great player. "Let's see how badly broken the system is," I said to myself.

I upped the bid to 50. Then 60. Then 75. Then 90. 100. 125. 140. 150. And then finally, 160,000,000.

That's 1,200 clicks of the mouse on the little "+" button, if you're keeping count.

After each bid increase, I was immediately notified that I was auto-outbid.

I don't know by who. You can mask that now.

I don't know how high they're willing to go. You can mask that too.

And even if I did outbid them, they can always swoop in, at *:59:59 on the 26th, and take him out from under my nose anyway.

I suppose the only satisfaction I can gain from this is that whoever has the highest bid on Jadyn Battle will now be forced to spend a HUGE amount of money on him.

And that's where I'm drawing my line in the sand - and issuing a challenge to my fellow community members.

I'm going to spend the next several days identifying players who have auto bids placed on them. And making those bids skyrocket. Yep, I'm THAT petty. If I end up getting a player or two, great. And I encourage all of you to do the same. Jack up the bid values on as many autobid players as you can.

But the real point is to expose how broken the system is. So, if you're one of those guys dropping hundreds of real dollars into a game for currency purposes, be on alert: I (and I hope WE) will make you max out your autobids on every player I possibly can.

Maybe, just maybe, if those real-dollar purchases get you less and less of a reward in-game, you'll stop incentivizing Josh to break this beautiful game more and more with paywall rewards which make it almost inaccessible to free players, and which still render it nearly unwinnable even for Executive members like me who have chosen to almost exclusively play with the money my team EARNS in-game.

I want to be clear, I both blame Josh and I don't. This game takes a lot of time to build, maintain, and expand. He absolutely deserves an income stream from it. And I'm a capitalist. But as with everything else, moderation is necessary. Sure, make some money, but do it by building a game a majority of your players feel is worth investing in, whether it's at the lower-tier or the Executive tier.

But stop punishing loyal players who have been paying you hundreds of dollars to access and enjoy your game, by implementing a new, higher-priced and totally-gamebreaking set of perk tiers.

And players, think about the beauty of baseball, and stop forking over money hand-over-fist to be part of a select group of a dozen or so teams which control 70-80% of the elite talent simply because you can.

Until those principles sink in, I'm going to break the system more, by wrecking the auto-bid experience for the teams that choose to use it.

You have been warned.