[QuantaCondor]

Originally Posted by chazzycat

Nailed it.

Not that I blame the flippers. That's how a free market is supposed to work. If the profit incentive is there, it's going to happen.

It's about the incentives. Risk and reward. Speculators have to make a decision and it's based primarily on the structure of the collections. A structure where the goal is "Collect every historical card for every team" just removes all the risk from the equation. All a hoarder has to do is keep their portfolio sufficiently diversified, and their profits are guaranteed. One FOTF reward card may be bad, so the small investor could be wiped out with a bad bet on the wrong team. But it's a guarantee that SOME of them will be OP, worth hundreds of thousands of PP. Surely, the toppers will be as well, and you NEED every team for those. So the card-hoarding class who already owns all the assets is 100% guaranteed to be the chief beneficiary under this structure.

Like in real life, it's a problem when the rules governing society are slanted too far in the direction of benefiting the rich.

Eventually it comes back to hurt the rich as well, when the poor reach a breaking point and stop playing the game entirely. Like the homeless drug addict who isn't contributing to the economy anymore. They saw the rules presented to them, deduced the game was rigged, and gave up entirely.

No one wants homeless people, and no one wants the users to quit PT. But if we don't address the underlying structural issues then both are inevitable.

Sorry if the analogy seems a little over the top. I just couldn't think of a better one.

I don't think this harms only the poor player. As someone who has done a lot of speculation, I don't like the effect it has on my team. It totally destroys any other source of income as being relevant; it's all about the speculation since the payoffs are enormous and the content has been really easy to predict. And ultimately, very few of us, even the speculation power users, come to PT to wanting to play a market game.