Over 120 packs straight and not one 90+

[DazzyPaige]

Hypothetical that needs an answer. To get through the parts that muddy the waters on these discussions, Hi, yes I'm a whale and I'm sure I will gain little sympathy but I truly have liked this game and would like some clarification.

1. Are the odds of a diamond 1 in every 100 cards or 1 in every 100 packs?


2. Are you as developers OK with a customer paying for and hypothetically opening 1000 packs and never getting a diamond or higher, merely because it is statistically possible? Or do you have triggers in place to prevent for the sake of your customers' enjoyment such a bad experience from taking place.

I ask because I have just opened 125+ packs in a row without a single diamond or higher, which is over 750 cards straight in one sitting.

I purchased the packs for the thrill of seeing some chase teal cardbacks, and the anticipation of what they might be. I understand they are random but its the excitement I pay for. I don't expect a profit, I do expect that as a company you have customers' well-being in mind and would have some bad luck circuit-breakers to insure your customers don't potentially feel robbed, merely because its statistically possible to feel robbed. You should care enough to insure that nobody hits a certain level of bad luck, its a video game, not real-life. We expect some proximity to the stated odds as an experience and you could easily put a downside floor to customer's bad luck experiences. Without some concern to our negative experiences with your game, you will lose customers. Maybe I've become a carebear...

I'd recommend you have account based counters that make sure customers never pass double or maybe triple the odds of 1-100 or 1-1000 before they see a card from that rarity bracket. Not because you cater to whales, but because someone can have really bad luck, like I did, and its an unnecessary negative experience to have in a video game. Which customer should ever be allowed to spend $500 on a game and never see a single diamond or higher, to be left to the vagaries of pure RNG without any accounting for the downside potential?

Just because it IS statistically possible, does not mean that it is the BEST way to treat a customer. I didn't expect anything but a proximal level of luck to the stated odds. Instead I feel like my experience is an afterthought to the money I spend. Maybe I don't understand the odds, and if so I will delete this criticism and own up to my misunderstanding.

But, some stopgap measure on a customer's bad luck would indicate that we are indeed customers that you have a care for, and that we are not in the Serengeti where just because it CAN happen it should be allowed to happen.

If such stopgaps are in place, please let me know what they are. Thanks for the great game, truly, but I'd like some clarification on the customer experience if I'm going to be anything but FTP in PT ever again.

It is your game, I know this. But if the downside risk is truly unlimited, I'd like to be aware of this so I can make more informed decisions on how I approach your game from now on.

[bailey]

Sorry, about your luck. My worst week was 60 packs and 1 live diamond. The true odds are 1:150 cards or 1:30 packs. Note, there are only 5 random cards in any pack. My best week was 84 packs and 6 live diamonds and 3 historical ones. I only went 1 week without getting a diamond, out of 49 packs that week, but 1 live perfect was found, instead.

[dkgo]

Odds are per card (not including the guaranteed bronze).

No pity timers, it is truly random each pull.

125 packs is really nothing in the grand scheme of the game. You get the expected odds in the long run.

If you want to guarantee yourself diamonds and perfects that is what the auction house is for.

[DazzyPaige]

I guess the prospect of unchecked bad luck seemed unnecessarily harsh to the poor customer it will one day happen to. Easy enough to install some quality of life measurements to make sure nobody falls under a certain threshold of bad luck.

[bailey]

Never buy packs, win them in tournaments. That way, there are few regrets. My iron team which cost me 2000 points to assemble has won over 1000 packs since inception. Unfortunately, it's expiration date is next Monday when live cards are updated. I won't bother again with iron tournaments until MLB is over with and stability returns to live card ratings.

[des223]

The odds of not getting a Diamond or Perfect in 125 packs is about 1:150...which, ironically, are the odds that any one card is a Diamond. Neither is terribly likely, but I guess that's the point of the topic - the odds are the odds, and sometimes stuff like this happens.

[mcdog512]

I've become more convinced a so called "Pity Timer" is a good idea. If some players knew eventually they hit something they might be willing to keep pressing their luck which could generate revenue for the game. As it is, most players feel it is a hopeless cause.

[willat0660]

I currently have about 3300 cards between my three teams. God only knows how many cards I've sold, at this point it's usually 5 duplicates from each pack. I don't know of any way of tracking that number, I'm sure I have sold thousands of those cards.

Let me quickly tabulate all the perfects that I've pulled... calculating... sorting... summing... exactly zero. That's for 21. I also played 19 and 20. Another goose egg for 19, and, OMG, I pulled 1 Perfect in 20! Wow!

The best cards I've pulled are a 99 Realmuto (bats about .210), 98 Monte Ward (.211), 96 Kluber (5.68 ERA), and a 96 Strasburg (5? 6? ERA).

What I really hate is when they introduce all these great cards, then I realize I'd have to pull 10,000 cards to have any hope of getting one of them.

I play a ton of tourneys and open a lot of packs. So yeah, it would be nice to have a safeguard against going through 3 years of this game and pulling one stinking Perfect card. I'm sure there are plenty others in the same boat as me. God, I'd be pissed if I was buying PP with this result.

[ronhatch]

Originally Posted by DazzyPaige

[...] We expect some proximity to the stated odds as an experience and you could easily put a downside floor to customer's bad luck experiences. [...]

Well, I don't know about "easily". As a programmer, I know that features are never as easy as you would think.

Also, I've seen lots of little details that make me skeptical about the level of skill and/or time available from the developers of this game. For example, the fact that when sorting by Player Name in the auction house, it only sorts by last name and then time... mixing players with different first names but the same last name in together. That's one of those things where the way it is designed is simple, but is NEVER the results that anybody actually using the feature would want. Similarly with the fact that lowercase letters get sorted after all uppercase letters, so for example d'Arnaud comes after Zunino in the sort.

While I completely agree that luck mitigation when opening packs should be in the code, putting it in would be FAR more work than fixing the two examples I mentioned above.

[bailey]

Originally Posted by ronhatch

Well, I don't know about "easily". As a programmer, I know that features are never as easy as you would think.

Also, I've seen lots of little details that make me skeptical about the level of skill and/or time available from the developers of this game. For example, the fact that when sorting by Player Name in the auction house, it only sorts by last name and then time... mixing players with different first names but the same last name in together. That's one of those things where the way it is designed is simple, but is NEVER the results that anybody actually using the feature would want. Similarly with the fact that lowercase letters get sorted after all uppercase letters, so for example d'Arnaud comes after Zunino in the sort.

While I completely agree that luck mitigation when opening packs should be in the code, putting it in would be FAR more work than fixing the two examples I mentioned above.

Along the same lines, is sorting by Buy-it-Now price. In the beginning, cards without BIN were listed first. Then this was fixed, so that cards without BIN were listed last. Now, it was fixed again so that cards without BIN do not show up at all, which IMHO, is the worst thing, because if I have sort by BIN selected and I am checking my watchlist I could easily miss an auction I was extremely interested in.

[DazzyPaige]

Originally Posted by bailey

Along the same lines, is sorting by Buy-it-Now price. In the beginning, cards without BIN were listed first. Then this was fixed, so that cards without BIN were listed last. Now, it was fixed again so that cards without BIN do not show up at all, which IMHO, is the worst thing, because if I have sort by BIN selected and I am checking my watchlist I could easily miss an auction I was extremely interested in.

Unrelated, I just noticed that my team BLM Allies and your Magpies are neck and neck It’s a good finish!

[Torgonius]

I'm not allowed to complain about lousy packs for 2 weeks now. 2nd place pays off!

[Lemandria]

Originally Posted by DazzyPaige

Hypothetical that needs an answer. To get through the parts that muddy the waters on these discussions, Hi, yes I'm a whale and I'm sure I will gain little sympathy but I truly have liked this game and would like some clarification.

1. Are the odds of a diamond 1 in every 100 cards or 1 in every 100 packs?

Cards. 129 decks, 5 cards each deck that 'count' (are not guaranteed bronze cards), 645 cards drawn.

N=645 P=0.01 K=0 p(0)=0.00153 odds approx 653:1 against.

Believe it or not, those are not impossible odds. Unfortunate, but no sign that anything is broken. Thousands of PT users, a dozen of them have luck every bit as bad (or worse) than you.

Need to calculate a binomial probability easily? I recommend vassarstats.

[Lemandria]

Originally Posted by DazzyPaige

I guess the prospect of unchecked bad luck seemed unnecessarily harsh to the poor customer it will one day happen to. Easy enough to install some quality of life measurements to make sure nobody falls under a certain threshold of bad luck.

From a micro-transactions standpoint, they already have. That guaranteed bronze card in every deck means that the absolute minimum deck return cannot fall below 35pp, that's 16.7% better than 30pp!!! Wow, absolutely free, now that's some generosity.

Of course it also drastically cuts your odds of drawing the top end bad boy cards. 5 pulls at p .001- is much, much worse than 6 pulls at p .001-. [But shhhhh, people who don't speak math aren't supposed to notice that part.]

Let's use the "perfect, any perfect" draw as an example.
For one pack without a guaranteed bronze, N=6 K=1 P=.001 p=.00597
For one pack with a guaranteed bronze, N=5 K=1 P=.001 p=.00493
That single guaranteed bronze card cuts your "top end" card draws by 17.4+%

So is it a throttle, or a brake?

[dkgo]

The guaranteed bronze is obviously terrible. It would be much better if it could be anything since nearly all the equity in a pack comes from the chances of extremely high value cards. It's close to a third as valuable as a random card.

But of course it is simply a factor in how they balanced the value of a pack. Asking to get rid of the guaranteed bronze or a pity timer is simply asking for more free stuff by improving the average return of a pack. Yes we all want free stuff but the current value was set for a reason. Over thousands of pack openings I've noticed that the balance is perfectly fine as is. If you open packs instead of spending points on the auction house you know you are gambling and dry spells are a part of that.

[mayday10]

I had a terrible run of luck and honestly, it drove me away from the game a bit. Talking like 300-400 packs with nothing better than a live Diamond. I have unopened packs, it doesnt even seem like its worth the time investment to open them.

[webdox]

Same here. Posted over on discord but yes, for me, I had a run of over 300 packs I cashed in from having so many Futures cards left over and pulled no historic diamonds.

I pulled a LIVE Verlander on the first card and went 0 - the rest on getting any historic diamond or above. My LIVE diamond pulls were very low, too.

But I did get a boatload of historic gold cards that will fill missions one day.

I opened about 10-15 packs on a one of my pack only teams and pulled 2 historic diamonds, nice ones at that.

So you never know...

[professor ape]

Originally Posted by bailey

Never buy packs, win them in tournaments. That way, there are few regrets. My iron team which cost me 2000 points to assemble has won over 1000 packs since inception. Unfortunately, it's expiration date is next Monday when live cards are updated. I won't bother again with iron tournaments until MLB is over with and stability returns to live card ratings.

Agreed. My packs come from my Bronze tourney team. I use a historic only roster to avoid issues of players suddenly moving up to Silver and not being available.

[Ben Music]

Originally Posted by professor ape

Agreed. My packs come from my Bronze tourney team. I use a historic only roster to avoid issues of players suddenly moving up to Silver and not being available.

Just curious, as I've been spamming Bronze tournaments as well, how many packs a week would you say your winning?

[Leo_The_Lip]

Personally, I don't believe the Negro League player cards exist. My three teams have over 3000 cards between them, likely over 6000 cards opened (at least) and never seen a one.

So let's get back to the real topic, Diamond cards exist, but Negro League cards are a figment invented by the developers to get your money.