The White Sox Silver Conspiracy (In an old newsie voice)

[Bunktown Ballers]

Originally Posted by MrPibb

I have no doubt that's what's happening.

Not everyone. I have 3 teams in PT21 & 1 one them is a team of dedicated White Sox players & even though I've had a terrible season & will be demoted playing will only my favorite teams players has been the mos fun since I starting playing PT. I had focused everthing on nothing but winning & got the nest cards I could. This is hands down the most satisfying way to play for me. I don't sale any of my cards, but as 1 comes out I try to get it asap with the last one being Lance Johnson 75 card. If you wanna check it out I'm in a GOLD league but will be demoted for next season.

I just wish OOTP would put more relevant White Sox players out for more higher rated cards so many GOLD & Silver & Bronze

ID: cajuncountry
Team: Chicago White Sox

[Orcin]

Originally Posted by jde611

How would a price fixing scheme even work?

Account A (the key account) buys every Tim Anderson on the market at any price (most of them will be under 1000). Account A lists 5 Tim Anderson cards for 1200 bid and 1500 BIN (example). Account A also lists two Tim Anderson cards with an opening bid of 500 and no BIN.

Account B is controlled by Account A. It could be a friend/roommate or just a second account owned by the same person using different IP addresses (to avoid easy detection). Account B will buy the open bid Tim Anderson cards at whatever price, hoping for 1500+, to drive up the last 7. Account B will then list the Tim Andersons it acquired in the same open bid manner with Account A buying them back.

The last 7 will stay at 1500 and the unsuspecting buyers decide that there really is a market for Tim Anderson cards at 1500 so we might as well pay the going rate. So they just buy one of the 5 with a 1500 BIN. Account A will ultimately sell all of its cards at a nice profit. If anyone dares buck the trend and list a Tim Anderson with a reasonable BIN price, then Account A will just buy it and add to the profits later.

[PocketsAintFull]

Originally Posted by MrPibb

I think a lot of you are missing aspects of this. This game is a pay to win, but not everybody is going to drop hundreds of dollars on packs.

I'm sure a lot of people are in the same boat as I am where the only way to make an affordable upgrade to avoid getting curbstomped in the upper levels is to do the missions. So for me to get the yastrzemski that is on nearly every team in my gold league I need to buy the silver collection cards. I can't afford the 60,000 upgrades that most people have.

That being said, silvers in general are too rare and for somebody or somebody's to buy them up and gouge may not be 100% against the TOS, but it's still scummy. I know the game makers need to make their money, but when people like me who won't pay (because I can't) run into paywalls like the sox thing, we get turned away because it means horrific beatings in the upper leagues.

It was fun at first, but the P2W aspect is much worse than I thought. Especially since I plunked down 40 bucks to start out.

There are plenty of F2P players who have completed the live missions. It may take patience and checking the AH more often, but it’s perfectly doable.

As an aside, the OOTP Discord server has many friendly people who can sometimes help players out with cards at ‘L7’ value too, for example (along with game advice).

[PocketsAintFull]

Originally Posted by Orcin

Account A (the key account) buys every Tim Anderson on the market at any price (most of them will be under 1000). Account A lists 5 Tim Anderson cards for 1200 bid and 1500 BIN (example). Account A also lists two Tim Anderson cards with an opening bid of 500 and no BIN.

Account B is controlled by Account A. It could be a friend/roommate or just a second account owned by the same person using different IP addresses (to avoid easy detection). Account B will buy the open bid Tim Anderson cards at whatever price, hoping for 1500+, to drive up the last 7. Account B will then list the Tim Andersons it acquired in the same open bid manner with Account A buying them back.

The last 7 will stay at 1500 and the unsuspecting buyers decide that there really is a market for Tim Anderson cards at 1500 so we might as well pay the going rate. So they just buy one of the 5 with a 1500 BIN. Account A will ultimately sell all of its cards at a nice profit. If anyone dares buck the trend and list a Tim Anderson with a reasonable BIN price, then Account A will just buy it and add to the profits later.

Not impossible, but it seems more likely that buyers are impatient and drive the average up themselves.

All these cards being bought up (by individuals or otherwise) are going on the open market at lower prices for anyone to buy, too.

[Orcin]

Originally Posted by PocketsAintFull

Not impossible, but it seems more likely that buyers are impatient and drive the average up themselves.

All these cards being bought up (by individuals or otherwise) are going on the open market at lower prices for anyone to buy, too.

Ok, but none of us know what is happening. It would be easy for the developers to check the sellers and buyers on these cards to see if a pattern emerges. If they are serious about protecting their ToS, they should invest the time and see what they find.

[JTMorgan]

There could be something being done, but really think it revolves around there only being 28 players in the collection. With 2 diamonds it would force you to get all the gold and below to complete the team. So some teams that have great rewards have high silver prices too, but at least you have options including some cheaper golds. The only real option with the White Sox is to buy Giolito or Grandal which would be 4k+. The prices of everything except the silvers looks normal.

Definitely a situation that it would be good to have them look into, but I think it's more a supply issue and lack of options.

[Eckstein 4 Prez]

Yikes. This whole thing makes me glad I treat PT like a baseball card-collecting game and a tournament-playing game. I wonder if the people who've been working on OOTP since the early years will ever regret making the moral compromise of taking financial advantage of the subset of addicts we call "whales."

Anyway, I may be a small part of the problem. I play tournaments and open packs, and when I get duplicates I put them on the AH. Because I don't really venture into that world much, I just sell the players for whatever they've been selling for. I'm not doing it intentionally - I just assume that someone will buy a player for that price and it's easiest thing for me.

[Orcin]

Originally Posted by JTMorgan

There could be something being done, but really think it revolves around there only being 28 players in the collection. With 2 diamonds it would force you to get all the gold and below to complete the team. So some teams that have great rewards have high silver prices too, but at least you have options including some cheaper golds. The only real option with the White Sox is to buy Giolito or Grandal which would be 4k+. The prices of everything except the silvers looks normal.

Definitely a situation that it would be good to have them look into, but I think it's more a supply issue and lack of options.

You only need 1 of 9 golds to complete the Twins, and the same thing goes on there. Check their silver cards.

[QuantaCondor]

This is such a ridiculous thread. What do you think the actual market value of CWS silvers are? This is arguably one of the most bottlenecked sets in the entirety of the live collections. If you complete the live sets at L7 prices you make a ridiculous amount of PP for a comparatively small investment, so everyone is incentivized to complete these collections. You don't need a friend in a backroom buying CWS silvers at high prices, the market is happy enough to do it on their own.

L7 in this game is frequently, frequently, frequently under what the real market value for the card is. There's regularly no supply for a card, which means that a card even being up on the AH has some value above L7 because, well, time is money and people are willing to pay to not have to wait. L7 gets driven down because clueless sellers (no shame in that; I am usually a clueless seller) just post at L7 which ends up offsetting the L7 value since it's a median price.

I know people who flip live and nonlive silvers. I have flipped live and nonlive silvers. This is relatively popular to do in the BFF community since our rules forbid flipping gold+ cards. It's not some collective scheme or anything, all you do is buy a card at L7 and repost it at what its true market value is, and some buyer out there goes and buys it. Eventually, over a long time, that drives up some of the L7s on cards by a little bit. But CWS silvers, and HOU, and NYY, and ARI, and a bunch of other teams' silvers have regularly sold for 1k+ since the start of the game, including since launch. At no point in th game have these cards had a market value under 1k, despite what their L7 would otherwise say. I can only assume the poster here is just not very familiar with the state of the live silver market since the launch of the game.

And as another poster said, if you want to see true price gouging, look at the NL set. But even there it isn't price gouging; the L7 for some cards just got established higher and the dominoes fell such that they're still 40k (and even doing the sets, you'll see cards sell for 5k+ over L7).

The only cases of illegal market manipulation we see is when someone transfers a card to another account and it cuts the L7 in half or even sets it at the minimum price (or occasionally when a card sells for 100x its L7 price). Outside of that, all of this is fair game.

[Orcin]

Originally Posted by QuantaCondor

This is such a ridiculous thread.

Only the developers know for sure... and then only if they look.

[MrPibb]

Originally Posted by Orcin

Only the developers know for sure... and then only if they look.

It's fairly obvious. I've played enough games with auction houses over the years to recognize when the market is being manipulated. Low supply + High demand = opportunity.

Someone is making a PP mint off this. I said from the beginning it may be legal, but it's scummy. It's the OOTP people's problem for creating an upgrade bottleneck in the first place.

[bailey]

Originally Posted by Orcin

Only the developers know for sure... and then only if they look.

What are they supposed to look for? They must have looked at me because I now only have 16 total pages of transactions where I sold live silvers when before I know I had 4 pages of selling Sean Murphy alone.
I could have used some help sopping up all the excess Sean Murphy's at 750 because I never liked to have more than 5 of anything at one time.

That market is dead now-- it takes days now to sell a card that used to sell in minutes. It was hard to keep some cards in stock. Each team, even each card within a team, had its own "market personality". It was a fun time.

As far as conspiring to raise L7--that would be the stupidest thing to do because it would kill supply! It was the sellers who were L7 slaves, not buyers.

[Orcin]

Originally Posted by bailey

What are they supposed to look for?

Multiple accounts acting as both buyers and sellers for the same card on many occasions with prices in a narrow range.


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[bailey]

Originally Posted by Orcin

Multiple accounts acting as both buyers and sellers for the same card on many occasions with prices in a narrow range.

Why would they do that? Maybe for 100K+ it might make sense to raise the L7 somehow, but each transaction costs the conspirators 10%. But for CWS silver cards? Seriously?

[Orcin]

Originally Posted by bailey

Why would they do that? Maybe for 100K+ it might make sense to raise the L7 somehow, but each transaction costs the conspirators 10%. But for CWS silver cards? Seriously?

I am just asking for it to be investigated. If you think it is a waste of time, then you are certainly entitled to that opinion.

[MrPibb]

Originally Posted by bailey

Why would they do that? Maybe for 100K+ it might make sense to raise the L7 somehow, but each transaction costs the conspirators 10%. But for CWS silver cards? Seriously?

I don't think anybody is manipulating prices with multi accounts. I do think one or a few people figured out that if they buy silver sox for 1000, they can resell them for 2-3k.

I've noticed that most of the time there is no more than one of each silver up at a time. Three max but never more than that and never for very long. The prices do fluctuate if you keep refreshing your search so that means they're getting bought and put right back up.

That's called cornering the market and it's bottlenecking all but the big money spenders. They need to put more sox out there. Ted Lyons is only selling for 5-7 thousand and he's a relief pitcher on most of the gold teams anyways, so I don't think they need to gate him behind a paywall at this point.

[AdmiralTrey]

Originally Posted by bailey

If you want to see real price gouging try doing the negro league collection.

This. Exactly this.

I was excited when they announced the Negro League player cards and immediately started thinking about building a full team of them... Then I saw the prices and realized I'd never even have a single Negro league player on my team unless the magical pack gods deemed it so.

[deejqu1k]

Originally Posted by AdmiralTrey

This. Exactly this.

I was excited when they announced the Negro League player cards and immediately started thinking about building a full team of them... Then I saw the prices and realized I'd never even have a single Negro league player on my team unless the magical pack gods deemed it so.

Whats the difference? One mans mansion is another mans shack, chill with the "thats ridiculous" keyboard jockey stuff. I was asking what the community thought the limits of gamesmanship versus "taking advantage" was and it seems pretty split.

What if there was a limit to how many of a single card a person can hold. Would it reduce game play if it said you could never hold more than 3x of a certain card (Silver, Gold, Diamond and Perfect)? I'm sure we're gonna get mask refusing "but ma' freedum!" crowd, but think seriously, would it reduce the enjoyability or gameplay for the vast majority of the community?

[bailey]

Originally Posted by MrPibb

I don't think anybody is manipulating prices with multi accounts. I do think one or a few people figured out that if they buy silver sox for 1000, they can resell them for 2-3k.

I've noticed that most of the time there is no more than one of each silver up at a time. Three max but never more than that and never for very long. The prices do fluctuate if you keep refreshing your search so that means they're getting bought and put right back up.

That's called cornering the market and it's bottlenecking all but the big money spenders. They need to put more sox out there. Ted Lyons is only selling for 5-7 thousand and he's a relief pitcher on most of the gold teams anyways, so I don't think they need to gate him behind a paywall at this point.

This bottleneck is only there because MLB did not start on time. Had MLB started the ratings of the cards would change--some of those silvers would be bronze by now and new players would be added every week as rosters changed. No one would have had to buy any live silver or gold after the first two weeks and those collections would be dirt cheap by now.

[Orcin]

Originally Posted by deejqu1k

0I'm sure we're gonna get mask refusing "but ma' freedum!" crowd

Is that comment really necessary?