Combinator cards- Ux experience

[LeeD]

Originally Posted by Vezna31

Unless you can quick sell them, i think they are an absolute waste of time and space. My .02.

Complete waste of time and space unless you're willing to invest somewhere around a million points to build up a tournament juggernaut. Just another way to throttle FTP players, as tournament wins are now a dead issue without the Combinators.


$$$ cha-ching $$$

[Tinkerman]

I'm trying to avoid the 5-star teams. Well built rosters and good RNG can still take you far in most formats.

Largely ignoring CCs and sticking to Plan A -- which is to build as many good rosters as I can -- has really brought the cortisol levels down!

[ChessSafari]

My recommendation is that once you have a combinator card for sale in the card shop at the minimum price for two weeks (for example), and it does not sell, then you can cash it in like a poker chip at some kind of virtual window. Keeps with the gambling theme and would reduce one key source of frustration within the game for many players including me. Could have a simple auto-sell check mark once a reasonable countdown ends.

[Dmb]

I have combined one level to Josh Willingham. Now looking at level 2, none of the teammate links are showing. If I used a teammate link in level 1, can I no longer use that card for those upgrade points again? I hope it's a bug and not the case

[dishnet34]

Originally Posted by Dmb

I have combined one level to Josh Willingham. Now looking at level 2, none of the teammate links are showing. If I used a teammate link in level 1, can I no longer use that card for those upgrade points again? I hope it's a bug and not the case

Any cards you use to boost a combinator card with, regardless of whether or not the boost was successful, are removed from your collection when you attempt a boost. It states in the Combinator screen that it will occur, plus there is a pop-up that says as such, so it is working as intended.

[Lathum]

Originally Posted by LeeD

Complete waste of time and space unless you're willing to invest somewhere around a million points to build up a tournament juggernaut. Just another way to throttle FTP players, as tournament wins are now a dead issue without the Combinators.


$$$ cha-ching $$$

They have ruined the game even more.

[revo]

They really need to add a functionality to remove cards that are on Tournament rosters from being "combinated." In the few times I've attempted to boost a combinator card, I've had to comb through the cards being used for the boost, and every time I've neglected to remove every card -- which you seemingly have to recall from memory -- I have on my tourney rosters, so upon checking, those rosters are gutted.

[Hwilensky]

The talking heads are going to come on here and tell you that the combinator cards are the greatest thing since sliced bread, but the truth of the matter is that it has ruined the game for 99% of the players. You have people who have been on these boards for years, even longer that I have been, and they are saying what a bad idea it was. That being said, the developers just don't care. I have brought 3 people to this game, and had 5 more people lined up this year, and I told them don't even bother. They are driving more and more players away each day, I guess that is a good business. model and works for them.

[Valhoun]

Originally Posted by Hwilensky

The talking heads are going to come on here and tell you that the combinator cards are the greatest thing since sliced bread, but the truth of the matter is that it has ruined the game for 99% of the players. You have people who have been on these boards for years, even longer that I have been, and they are saying what a bad idea it was. That being said, the developers just don't care. I have brought 3 people to this game, and had 5 more people lined up this year, and I told them don't even bother. They are driving more and more players away each day, I guess that is a good business. model and works for them.

Online "gacha" games always drive towards adding new currencies or upgrade materials. It's truly ruined gaming as a whole. I'm sure the OOTP devs would (correctly) say that they are very light on the monetization compared to the worst offenders. But that's pretty cold comfort.

I'm currently in a tournament against a silver combinator team and it's tied 2-2 going into the final game. They beat me one game 27-4. Not super fun.

It is gratifying to be able to (somewhat) hang with that team but I get nothing else from the experience. There is no cool strategy to learn from or anything like that. It's not making me better or more knowledgeable at the game.

[brice]

Originally Posted by Valhoun

Online "gacha" games always drive towards adding new currencies or upgrade materials. It's truly ruined gaming as a whole. I'm sure the OOTP devs would (correctly) say that they are very light on the monetization compared to the worst offenders. But that's pretty cold comfort.

I'm currently in a tournament against a silver combinator team and it's tied 2-2 going into the final game. They beat me one game 27-4. Not super fun.

It is gratifying to be able to (somewhat) hang with that team but I get nothing else from the experience. There is no cool strategy to learn from or anything like that. It's not making me better or more knowledgeable at the game.

100%. Looking at most winners of tournaments I've entered, it's a lot of combinator loaded teams. And I've increasingly been seeing scores for these teams in excess of 20+ runs when playing against teams without combinator cards. It's pretty frustrating as a F2P player.

[DotDash]

Originally Posted by Valhoun

Online "gacha" games always drive towards adding new currencies or upgrade materials. It's truly ruined gaming as a whole. I'm sure the OOTP devs would (correctly) say that they are very light on the monetization compared to the worst offenders. But that's pretty cold comfort.

I'm currently in a tournament against a silver combinator team and it's tied 2-2 going into the final game. They beat me one game 27-4. Not super fun.

It is gratifying to be able to (somewhat) hang with that team but I get nothing else from the experience. There is no cool strategy to learn from or anything like that. It's not making me better or more knowledgeable at the game.

Most Gacha games also ensure that there is some kind of safety net when it comes to 'pull' luck, so players can't run into seemingly endless stretches of misfortune spending tickets, opening packs, whatever. No such mechanism with PT though (despite supposed Korean ownership.)

I was able to complete many missions yesterday due to having opened a lot of packs previously, and opened 122 packs across two teams: 28 Regular packs, 13 Silver, 16 Gold, 19 Diamond, 1 Perfect, 6 Historical Silver, 28 Historical Gold and 11 Historical Diamond.
I don't know what the Historical packs cost when they are for sale, but I'm pretty sure these packs were worth more than 1 Million PP in total, which is $500 in actual money (which is insane.)

This 1 Million+ PP in packs yielded NONE of the newly released Negro League cards, except for a solitary Iron.

So this is a Gatcha game with no pity pulls and no chronological banner system so that players can at least choose which set of cards they would like to pull from. This means that every new card released becomes progressively more difficult to pull than the last, as the card pool becomes more and more bloated. On top of this, this game's version of a 5-star pull - the Perfect card - has a huge chance to be basically worthless. Last I checked, the average value of non-Live Perfects which can be pulled from packs was around 80K PP, but the two I pulled yesterday (McCarthy and Wright) are worth 27K and 38K respectively, aren't in any missions, and aren't playable even in my terrible teams.

IMHO there should be no Perfect cards which aren't viable at higher levels of play, at least at the time they are released. The concept of 'trash Perfects' which are in the game purely to dilute the card pool even further is Gatcha poison, and turns what should be the most joyous experience in the game (pulling a Perfect) into 90% frustration. These factors - and others - almost make it seem as if this developer/owner is actively trying to dissuade players from engaging with the game, i.e. 'grinding' packs. It's approaching FIFA/EA levels of bad. Baffling.

[Kushiel]

Originally Posted by DotDash

Most Gacha games also ensure that there is some kind of safety net when it comes to 'pull' luck, so players can't run into seemingly endless stretches of misfortune spending tickets, opening packs, whatever. No such mechanism with PT though (despite supposed Korean ownership.)

I was able to complete many missions yesterday due to having opened a lot of packs previously, and opened 122 packs across two teams: 28 Regular packs, 13 Silver, 16 Gold, 19 Diamond, 1 Perfect, 6 Historical Silver, 28 Historical Gold and 11 Historical Diamond.
I don't know what the Historical packs cost when they are for sale, but I'm pretty sure these packs were worth more than 1 Million PP in total, which is $500 in actual money (which is insane.)

This 1 Million+ PP in packs yielded NONE of the newly released Negro League cards, except for a solitary Iron.

So this is a Gatcha game with no pity pulls and no chronological banner system so that players can at least choose which set of cards they would like to pull from. This means that every new card released becomes progressively more difficult to pull than the last, as the card pool becomes more and more bloated. On top of this, this game's version of a 5-star pull - the Perfect card - has a huge chance to be basically worthless. Last I checked, the average value of non-Live Perfects which can be pulled from packs was around 80K PP, but the two I pulled yesterday (McCarthy and Wright) are worth 27K and 38K respectively, aren't in any missions, and aren't playable even in my terrible teams.

IMHO there should be no Perfect cards which aren't viable at higher levels of play, at least at the time they are released. The concept of 'trash Perfects' which are in the game purely to dilute the card pool even further is Gatcha poison, and turns what should be the most joyous experience in the game (pulling a Perfect) into 90% frustration. These factors - and others - almost make it seem as if this developer/owner is actively trying to dissuade players from engaging with the game, i.e. 'grinding' packs. It's approaching FIFA/EA levels of bad. Baffling.

I wish that your post was not spot on! But alas, it is true to the last word. I keep saying that the high pocket players will leave too after they have nobody left to slaughter. They will just move on to the next planet, I mean game, to harvest all the resources from the players that made the game popular to start with. On through the gaming galaxy they go capturing greedy CEO's to aid their purging all life from one game to the next.

[Chico Guilbault]

This is what it feels like to pull the average combinator...

[Hwilensky]

Originally Posted by Chico Guilbault

This is what it feels like to pull the average combinator...

Hahahaha!!

[daveydigi420]

I have somewhat of a conspiracy theory on all of this. I feel like there is something in the algorithm for pack openings that factors in either the L10 value of the card or the type of card. In other words, if you get a diamond non-live card, I always believed the odds of drawing ANY non-live diamond card were the same. When they put out spotlight pack info, that's what the percentages show. But for any other packs, I don't think this is true. There's just no way I have so many duplicates of low priced non-live players within a certain overall rating (say diamond cards) and never would have duplicates of very high priced cards, if getting them at all. I mean, I have four Tony Fernandez (90) cards from packs, L10 4802pp. Is this just horrible luck, or something in the coding that makes higher priced / valued cards more rare? I feel like it's the latter. The odds of you getting a FL Mick Abel (95) L10 72,677pp are not the same as you getting RS Carl Taylor (90) L10 4853pp (which I have two of). I've just never realized this before this year, but feel like I know this is true, deep down in my soul, even if the devs get on here and tell me different. My conspiracy theory is that they increased the non-live percentages but made the release on pack opening of higher valued cards vs. lower valued cards more distinct. Just a theory, but I'm happy to show my current cards to back me up.

[LeeD]

Don't know about this year so much, but last year I would run into stretches where almost every historical card I pulled was from one of the mission sets released three or four weeks prior. I'm not just talking a few packs, either. These would be marathon 30 to 60 pack openings. Worked out great late in the cycle when there were some killer missions. My final team of the cycle shot up to Diamond in the minimum time and ended up being my strongest team.

[erad677]

[QUOTE=LeeD;5108818]Complete waste of time and space unless you're willing to invest somewhere around a million points to build up a tournament juggernaut.

True, but nice much later when you have completed nearly every mission, keep reaching your card limit and need to get rid of a bunch of them, etc. I was initially very against them, but now that they've added a lot more of them and I've reached a much later stage in the game, I like them.