At the risk of being labeled a 'conspiracy theorist' or whatever: any EV calculation which assumes that all cards drop equally often in relation to their rarity (i.e. 1 out of 10 packs has a gold, and 3 out of 10 golds will be non-live, without any other weighting) is incorrect in my opinion.
For example:
- Last year, prior to the last live update, I did nothing but open gold packs for weeks on end (funded by the fact that the average non-live gold went for around 5K at that time.) I had identified 4 live gold cards (including Vlad Jr.) as likely to make it to Diamond with the coming update. By the time I had packed 10 or 11 of each of these 'desirable' cards, there were 8 live golds which had dropped between 20 and 24 (!) times, and a further 23 cards that dropped between 15 and 19 times.
- When it became clear that no further missions were coming out for PT22, I did nothing but open packs for weeks, trying to get one of the three or four meta Perfect cards to drop (Pedro, Ty Cobb, etc.)
I opened so many packs (initially funded through selling a bunch of the Toppers I wasn't using), that I started getting duplicate non-live perfects. These cards drop every 666 (lol) packs, so the fact that I was able to get two copies of 4 different non-live perfects (along with a slew of other unuable ones) to drop in roughly a month should give an idea of how many packs I opened. And yet, none of the actual good cards dropped even once.
- This year, since the 6/6 update, I have packed 304 live golds. There are only 79 different live gold cards at the moment, so each of these should have dropped close to 4 times (3.83.) The only card more or less guaranteed to get to Diamond with the coming update is, again, Vlad Jr.
Among the 304 live golds that I packed, there was just 1 (!) Vlad. And I can tell you that the other cards that aren't immediate quick-sells are dropping less frequently than the worthless ones as well.
- Furthermore, I packed 108 live diamonds since 6/6. There are only 27 live diamond cards. On average, I should have packed exactly 4 of each of them. Instead, I only packed
one each of the cards most likely to make it to Perfect: Alvarez and Goldschmidt.
I could excuse one of the above as 'bad luck' or whatever, but this is a structural issue. Cards are
not dropping equally, and there are only a few explanations for this that I can think of (none of them good):
1) Drop rates are manipulated directly. I hope this isn't happening, but the Dev team has already admitted to artificially adjusting drop rates on one occasion, so this is at least technically possible:
https://forums.ootpdevelopments.com/...63&postcount=2
2) Drop rates are influenced by L10 value.
3) The most benevolent (but still bad) reason: the game is biased towards dropping (live) cards that you don't have. Which causes any cards (like crap live golds) that you quick-sell to be more likely to drop than any cards you might be hoarding multiple copies of.
But anyway, it sucks, and EV calculations based on equal distribution are, IMHO, purely theoretical. My experience (YMMV) has been different, and has been for years.
On top of this:
- There is the ridiculous 50-card selling limit per team, which means you can NEVER extract the full value of whatever it is your packs drop, once you reach a decent number of cards in reserve. (And if the limit was removed, EV would also be lower due to a higher supply of cards.)
- You are forced to quick-sell cards that are worth x times as much, because there is also a 9999 card limit per team, as apparently processing bits of text on a PC still causes enormous computational load in 2022.
- Also, you'd better quick-sell any cards that are at risk of dropping a rarity level during a live update! Yet more EV down the drain.