Face of the Franchise is a disaster

[HRBaker]

Auction House = "...but the cupboards were bare..."


It is weird. Every time I go to the AH to look for a player I can afford, the only ones that show up on the first half-dozen pages are the ones I already have.

[The Otter]

theoretically you could but the market is so bare of cards because everyone is hoarding them. And the actual playing value of most diamonds is ignored vs the value for missions, so getting a comparable card isn't as simple as looking on the market for a similarly priced card.

This might be true if, for some reason, the cards you were selling (or were considering selling) were not subject to the same scarcity, and the same market forces, as the ones you were buying/considering buying. Everything true of your "similarly priced card" is also true of the one you're giving up -- if the former is up to 50,000 PP or whatever because it's a crucial part of a major mission, then the latter is too. (Either that or you're trying to sell a card that doesn't have a mission attached, which means it's not comparable, is it?)

In any event, diamond+ historical cards are very rare to begin with (as a group, rarer than diamond+ live cards -- and so many more individual cards.) So it's not "hoarding" or anything sinister -- it's a limited supply + cards being locked for missions.

Of course, there's one group of cards whose market value isn't inflated by collecting for missions, and isn't subject to locking: cards that aren't in missions to begin with. If you're not motivated by finishing missions, you can probably improve your team by selling your mission-critical cards and buying up non-mission cards.

The trouble there, of course, is that almost all cards are now part of some mission, or will be in the next month or two -- the main exceptions being SE cards and live cards. (Of course, live cards do have missions, but most managers aren't using the live cards to fill the missions, unless they were intending to keep them anyway. Still, most of the higher-rated live cards tend to have lower ratings than comparably valued historical cards, so that's not perfect either...)

In any event, I do think increasing the ratio of historical to live cards would offset this to an extent.

Alternately: maybe unlock cards submitted for missions after a certain amount of time? A month, for example, would prevent players from cycling through all the missions in succession, but allow those cards to eventually get back into circulation. This would also give players an incentive to move on/update their rosters, adding the choice between keeping your proven veterans who you've already cashed in for rewards, and selling them to afford new players who can complete missions. (This would also soften the conflict of missions whose reward is a better version of the same player you submitted to complete the mission...)

[Torgonius]

How about this: If you sell the card that was the reward for a mission, you can unlock cards used to obtain it... but you can never complete that mission again with that team.

For cards that were part of a mission where the reward was packs, the unlock price per card is the retail cost of the packs in the reward... so a 1 pack reward would be cards unlockable for 1k each. 3 gold packs was the reward? 9k unlock price. Again, once a card is unlocked from a mission, that mission may never be completed by that account again.

There can also be a max # of cards unlocked from a specific mission, but a card used in multiple missions unlocks from all those missions. You'd need to pay the cost for all missions from which it unlocks.

I could also see a cooldown timer being used.. unlock 1 card every 7 days or so.

[dkgo]

There will never be unlocking cards from missions. Then collections are just "free stuff" and throws off the balance of the economy.

The solution is to relax the requirements so that a specific diamond historical is never mandatory.

[Tinkerman]

Yeah, I would say locking cards is a pretty crucial part of the dynamics! Wouldn't being able to switch a locked card for an unlocked one maybe be a good/reasonable option to have, though?

[Drivehud.com]

FOTF made PT not fun anymore for me personally. Went from spending > $800+ on this game and playing it daily, to just having no interest anymore. Mainly because if I can see a game get skewed this much so quickly, I've lost confidence in the direction and decisions the development team is making.

Just my two cents. I hope others are still enjoying.

[joker7702]

The gist of the problem is supply and demand. Historical cards make up about 75% of the card population, but 30% of the drops, and these ratios only get worse as you climb rarities. Two possible solutions are increasing historical drop rates, which I do not see happening, or making more different historical packs. An idea I had would make it so there are different kinds of historical packs, from standard historical packs that only guarantee a bronze through to diamond historical packs. There could be a rotation in the shop, where there is always the standard pack, a version of the historical pack, and a non standard live pack.


Also, as a side note, I preferred the eras version, with cards at the end. It felt more personalized by team.

[ronhatch]

Originally Posted by joker7702

The gist of the problem is supply and demand. Historical cards make up about 75% of the card population, but 30% of the drops, and these ratios only get worse as you climb rarities. Two possible solutions are increasing historical drop rates, which I do not see happening, or making more different historical packs. An idea I had would make it so there are different kinds of historical packs, from standard historical packs that only guarantee a bronze through to diamond historical packs. There could be a rotation in the shop, where there is always the standard pack, a version of the historical pack, and a non standard live pack.

Also, as a side note, I preferred the eras version, with cards at the end. It felt more personalized by team.

Reducing the cost of a historical pack below the point where statistically you're likely to get more historical cards from the equivalent cost of standard packs would be an important step in the right direction also.

[Marleigh]

Originally Posted by The Otter

This might be true if, for some reason, the cards you were selling (or were considering selling) were not subject to the same scarcity, and the same market forces, as the ones you were buying/considering buying. Everything true of your "similarly priced card" is also true of the one you're giving up -- if the former is up to 50,000 PP or whatever because it's a crucial part of a major mission, then the latter is too. (Either that or you're trying to sell a card that doesn't have a mission attached, which means it's not comparable, is it?)

there is huge variance among historical cards depending on what missions they are in, and especially how good the FOTF is. the diamonds have a floor depending on the FOTF.

Also on my Free to play teams I have tended to have a theme. But on all of them I have completed all of the live missions and sold those to fund the theme, this is no longer possible. Previously a Maddux would buy you several low diamonds now you can barely afford 1 or 2. Even with the prices of SEs pushing up somewhat due to price fixing efforts their sell price falls way short of making a reasonably good team in the current environment

[Westheim]

Originally Posted by joker7702

The gist of the problem is supply and demand. Historical cards make up about 75% of the card population, but 30% of the drops, and these ratios only get worse as you climb rarities. Two possible solutions are increasing historical drop rates, which I do not see happening, or making more different historical packs. An idea I had would make it so there are different kinds of historical packs, from standard historical packs that only guarantee a bronze through to diamond historical packs. There could be a rotation in the shop, where there is always the standard pack, a version of the historical pack, and a non standard live pack.


Also, as a side note, I preferred the eras version, with cards at the end. It felt more personalized by team.

There has got to be some version of pack that gives historical cards that is not ridiculously hard to get in a tournament you'll never win or costs five digits during sales.

The specifics of such packs however are hard to formulate for me, and if you lot were ever in my dynasty thread you'd know that I don't lack for creativity...

I thought of randomly dropping historical packs on a player through various means, none of which sound great, like:

- 10% of all standard packs you buy randomly are a historical pack of some variant instead (akin to the quoted post, either a historical pack as is in the game now, or one that f.e. gives all historical silvers)

- packs from challenge mode might randomly be a historical pack like above (but the game's purpose can't be to sim the 1927 Yankees twice a week)

- flash sales of special packs, say, there's 1k historical silver packs dropped onto the game, for 3k PP each, but you can only buy three per team (this invariably will disadvantage one part of the player population or the other, depending on time zones and a hundred other things)

I got nothing.

[neugey]

The more I think about it, I think it would help to have 2 PT universes, one FTP and the second for anyone who has bought PP. By default every team gets placed in the FTP universe - and if you spend money then next Monday your team gets moved to the paid universe stone level. There should probably be certain missions/tournaments/cards that are in the paid universe only, to give some incentive for spending and playing over there.

IMO the spectrum between the whales and the FTP is so massive it's causing a lot of people to lose interest in the seasons mode. The upside of this idea is it should really renew that interest ... the downside is that people would be less likely a minor amount of money on PP because they know it's impossible to hang with the whales. But since many people run multiple teams it might not be as bad as you think.