Quote:
Originally Posted by ncap99
There are negatives to making missions the core building block of competitive rosters too. Cookie cutter rosters and complex, multistep mission programs that make it very difficult if you fall behind to catch up with the meta are a few examples.
It seems to me there was an effort to put the power back into packable cards this year, through the substantial historical rate increase, introduction of combinator cards and missions changing to be more of an occasional nice card and a ton packs (including high end pack like historical diamond packs, etc).
Some people like missions being where you get 80% of your roster, some people like packs. But that means there will be people who dislike one or the other too.
|
Packs are a losing proposition since the expected return is much less than the established price. They are, in effect, lottery scratcher tickets, where you hit a big win once in a great while (pulling a valuable historical Perfect or Diamond) and hit a very small return almost every other time (like five Irons and a Bronze, which is the most likely outcome). If this were not so then everyone would convert 100% of their PP into card packs.
Card pack rewards for missions, even if they're high end packs, quickly become log-jammed by speculators (PT is, in many ways, an auction house manipulation game rather than a baseball simulation), which often forces players to pay more for the mission than the expected return on the pack (as above, but this time through card rather than pack purchases).
Go through the card shop, mission by mission, and see that this is so. Yes, you at least get to play the cards you've acquired; but the vast majority of them are not meta cards in
any format and are thus substandard or non-optimal choices. Enough of these on your roster and your team fails, whether that be in league or tournaments. In most cases, you could have spent less and done better by simply purchasing cards in the shop without even looking at missions.
This is the nature of the game, which is designed to encourage players to buy points and thus generate income for the company. Neither of us will ever see a time when the playing field between big spenders and non-spenders is level because that would lead to everyone becoming a non-spender, reducing the company's profit on PT to less than zero.
The
only exception to the above is multi-tiered missions, which allow players to acquire good topper cards and then leverage their past mission completions into future mission completions. A perfect example is Live Series, which gives you toppers for each team, toppers for each division, and then a topper for completing the level. The second level effectively requires completing the previous level by adding more cards from the same pool, then adds additional team, division, and complete toppers. Mission completions are
also rather than exclusively rewarded with card packs.Thus, Live Series eventually (after version-start card prices decline due to supply) becomes a money-maker, where your investment in cards is exceeded by the gains, either in useful cards or the proceeds from selling those cards.
This is why reducing the number of multi-tier mission paths (as PT has done this year) is bad for the game. Without these upward paths to build on, the game becomes an exercise in just buying the best cards available outright whenever they become available. The alternative is converting all points into card packs, which I've already identified as a losing proposition.