I wonder if the card packs are rigged?

[boxner1]

Think about it in business terms. Purely random isn't logical.

If a new team owner opens their first packs and fails to get at least one really good card that excites them then they're much more likely to stop playing at that point. It also means they're less likely to buy packs if they do continue playing since they wouldn't think it's wise given their experience. If you do give them a very good card or two they they continue playing and think packs are valuable and are more likely to buy them.

The same thought goes for buying packs with money. If someone buys packs but doesn't get at least something good then they're less likely to buy more packs. Feed the gambler a reward and they come back for more.

However, players who choose to get packs from points are a different story. They provide no income to OOTP at all. There's no business rationale for those packs to be as good as initial packs or packs bought with cash.

I know the odds are printed on the packs but that doesn't mean they can't be tweaked depending on circumstances. At the end, it is a business and not a charity.

Just some random thoughts. :-)

[Westheim]

Feel invited to buy 10,000 packs and open them while doing proper accounting for the results, and see whether they go in one direction or the other by more than a standard deviation. Unless someone will do the dirty work here I will continue to give OOTPD more credit than common crooks, e.g. EA.

[Morug]

You dont need to buy packs now if you start your team today. You can find good gold and silver players cheap.

At day one of perfect team, the more rational move was to sold all the good cards you find in pack and built a bad team for 1 season. Price at day one and two were crazy high. Wait one week or two, because the players begin to fall in price in AH and built your team this way.

I dont put money in the game and I have a great team. Sure I am lucky in the first batch of packs I opened but I played with the AH before building my team.

[SeanBerry]

The Starter Packs are 100% rigged (first card is a Gold but you only get one and then it's rigged from a position perspective so you can field a team) but they haven't shied away from that.

[BoofBonser26]

If you believe in your odds from a business perspective, as a developer, there's no need to rig, even if you buy into OP's thinking. Because for every player who does worse than they "should", you're going to get a player who gets "too" lucky and is incentivized to buy more. If you think the odds aren't right for this, you'd simply establish them at different levels (ie Gold is 1:5 or 1:100 or 1:5,000) from the start.

Absent any evidence to the contrary, and with the only available evidence Markus and OOTP's lengthy history of upstanding character and openness:

No.

[boxner1]

Originally Posted by BoofBonser26

If you believe in your odds from a business perspective, as a developer, there's no need to rig, even if you buy into OP's thinking. Because for every player who does worse than they "should", you're going to get a player who gets "too" lucky and is incentivized to buy more. If you think the odds aren't right for this, you'd simply establish them at different levels (ie Gold is 1:5 or 1:100 or 1:5,000) from the start.

Absent any evidence to the contrary, and with the only available evidence Markus and OOTP's lengthy history of upstanding character and openness:

No.

I wasn't implying anything nefarious. You can be an upstanding character and open while still being a businessperson and making decisions based on business principles.

[BoofBonser26]

Originally Posted by boxner1

I wasn't implying anything nefarious. You can be an upstanding character and open while still being a businessperson and making decisions based on business principles.

You asked if they might consider providing packs whose contents do not match the odds stated. That's certainly nefarious. But fortunately not at all real, so the good news is, it's not worth considering further.

[Kris Jardine]

Originally Posted by boxner1

Think about it in business terms. Purely random isn't logical.

If a new team owner opens their first packs and fails to get at least one really good card that excites them then they're much more likely to stop playing at that point. It also means they're less likely to buy packs if they do continue playing since they wouldn't think it's wise given their experience. If you do give them a very good card or two they they continue playing and think packs are valuable and are more likely to buy them.

The same thought goes for buying packs with money. If someone buys packs but doesn't get at least something good then they're less likely to buy more packs. Feed the gambler a reward and they come back for more.

However, players who choose to get packs from points are a different story. They provide no income to OOTP at all. There's no business rationale for those packs to be as good as initial packs or packs bought with cash.

I know the odds are printed on the packs but that doesn't mean they can't be tweaked depending on circumstances. At the end, it is a business and not a charity.

Just some random thoughts. :-)

The packs are in no way rigged. The odds posted in game are the actual odds that are verified and checked on a regular basis. We do not "juice" packs for new players, content creators or people who use in-game currency versus spent cash. Any attempt on our part to do something against our posted odds would be unfair to our customers and not something we do.

The only packs which have a deviation outside of the store packs are the starter packs which offer 1 gold and the proper positions to start a team

Outside of that, its all RNG within the posted odds

[Ty Cobb]

It's a shame this even got suggested. In all my years of playing (since about 07) I've never seen anything in the character of our development team that would suggest anything dark. I plug these guys every chance I get, because in my experience they are the finest developers about.

[absurddoctor]

FWIW, I don't believe there is any way to buy packs directly with money, you first have to purchase the points. It seems unlikely that OOTP is tracking the source of each individual point, and without doing that there is no way to tell how you came about to own the point.

I also think you might have the gambler psychology backwards. If you really wanted to tinker with the odds to get gamblers to spend money, you'd decrease the odds of those spending money a bit. Gamblers are going to want to keep going until they get that hit; once it happens, there is a greater chance of taking a break for awhile. Quitting before that hit is uncomfortable.

[VARoadstter]

Originally Posted by boxner1

Think about it in business terms. Purely random isn't logical.

If a new team owner opens their first packs and fails to get at least one really good card that excites them then they're much more likely to stop playing at that point. It also means they're less likely to buy packs if they do continue playing since they wouldn't think it's wise given their experience. If you do give them a very good card or two they they continue playing and think packs are valuable and are more likely to buy them.

The same thought goes for buying packs with money. If someone buys packs but doesn't get at least something good then they're less likely to buy more packs. Feed the gambler a reward and they come back for more.

However, players who choose to get packs from points are a different story. They provide no income to OOTP at all. There's no business rationale for those packs to be as good as initial packs or packs bought with cash.

I know the odds are printed on the packs but that doesn't mean they can't be tweaked depending on circumstances. At the end, it is a business and not a charity.

Just some random thoughts. :-)

Passive aggressive nonsense.

So, to your thinking, it's more logical that the developer post the odds of drawing the various colored cards but then cheat their paying customers by lying to them and giving unfair odds to new players. That's not only illogical, it's unethical.

I sincerely hope you aren't a business owner. If you were I would not want to do business with you.

No business rationale for treating all packs equally? How about plain old honesty? How about not killing the golden goose by trying to game your customer base and pissing them off en masse?

Good Lord.

[Mat]

Originally Posted by boxner1

Just some random thoughts. :-)

Indeed!

[Markus Heinsohn]

Kris said it best. We're good guys, nothing is rigged in PT... think about it, customer faith and satisfaction is our most valuable asset which we built up in 20 years, and we would never, ever risk losing even a tiny bit of it.

Case closed.