Debate: More worth it to buy packs or work the auction house?

[bchen96]

I've been seeing a lot of people pull great cards from packs but haven't had the same pack luck yet. My thinking right now is just opening 20 packs to get that one 90+ rated player to sell for big money is probably more worth it than building a team of silver and low golds (low potential team).

What do you all think?

[zrog2000]

I don't know. Since I like gambling too much, I like opening the packs more than working the auction house.

[Galeg]

Probably smarter to use the auctions if you have time, but packs are fun.

[Westheim]

If you know you need, say, a third baseman that doesn't wear clown shoes, the auction house is probably a better bet to get at least a decent high-bronze or silver card. You might open ten packs and not get a player that suits your needs.

[Orcin]

Buy packs with earned points (achievements) and play the auction house with points from card sales and purchased points (if any).

[Thalion]

Like the above poster said, opening packs are fun. I bid occasionally but prefer to populate my team from my packs.

It feels like developing your own prospects through the farm system rather than through free agency (AH).

[Silfir]

It's self-correcting, when it comes down to it. The fewer people open packs, the lower the supply of worthwhile cards in the auction house, which means winning bids become higher, which makes it more attractive to open packs instead. Too many people opening packs makes auctions easier to win, etc.

Now, I suspect the majority of the player base does prefer to get their players through packs, which favors auctioners. On the other hand, I expect that only a portion of unneeded cards will actually make it into the auction house, because some people like to build collections, and others will only bother auctioning off duplicates.

I suspect the true answer is "it depends". If your team is well-rounded overall, you don't lose much buying packs, because any break-out card you pull will likely slot directly into your team, and you won't be auctioning off (and paying 10% on) anything particularly valuable. Auctioning is ideal if you're stacked in some departments, but need to fill a certain position.

[One Post Wonder]

I've never bought a single pack and I doubt I ever will. The math doesn't work out for me.

Opening a pack does give you that sense of playing the lottery, but the math doesn't work out in the lottery either.

I'm surprised there are seemingly so many pack openers. I thought the OOTP community would be more moneyball-like than that. Besides, the market feels more like I'm playing the base game. The packs are pure luck.

The only problem with the auction is that it is very difficult to find certain cards there. Not necessarily high rated ones, but really in-demand ones like catchers and CF who can both play great defense and hit a little bit. Players who get those cards do not seem to be selling them.

[damientheomen3]

Originally Posted by One Post Wonder

The only problem with the auction is that it is very difficult to find certain cards there. Not necessarily high rated ones, but really in-demand ones like catchers and CF who can both play great defense and hit a little bit. Players who get those cards do not seem to be selling them.

Loving my gold Mike Scioscia, I'll say that much.

[zrog2000]

You can scour the AH and get at least 2 golds for under 5000. So if you want certainty, the AH is where to go. If you want the chance to get better cards, I'd buy the 1000 PP packs because the chance to get diamond and perfect cards is the same between the standard and gold pack.

[Silfir]

Originally Posted by One Post Wonder

I've never bought a single pack and I doubt I ever will. The math doesn't work out for me.

Opening a pack does give you that sense of playing the lottery, but the math doesn't work out in the lottery either.

I'm surprised there are seemingly so many pack openers. I thought the OOTP community would be more moneyball-like than that. Besides, the market feels more like I'm playing the base game. The packs are pure luck.

I'm super interested in the math you've done on the subject, since I just spent a bored half-hour working out my own.

Here's what I came up with:


A standard pack has a minimum guaranteed value of a mere 50 PP - the minimum sale price of a bronze and five standard cards. That's obviously rubbish compared to the 1000 PP you paid to get the pack. But that's only the worst case outcome. What's the Expected Value of a pack?

Let's start with the assumption that every card you pull will be resold for the minimum, and use the developer-provided pack odds. For example, there is a 20% chance for any of the standards to be a Bronze card instead, and be worth an additional 20 on top of the minimum 5. 20 times 0.2 is 4 - that means the 20% chance to pull a Bronze increases the Expected Value by 4 above the minimum.


So:

Bronze:  20 * 0.2 = 4
Silver:  95 * 0.1 = 9.5
Gold:    995 * 0.02 = 19.9
Diamond: 4995 * 0.01 = 49.95
Perfect: 19995 * 0.001 = 19.995

The EV per card slot above the minimum is 4 + 9.5 + 19.9 + 49.95 + 19.995 = 103.345 PP. Multiplay that by five (because there are five fully random cards in a pack) and add the minimum value of 50, and you get an Expected Value per pack of 566.75 PP.

But that's assuming that you sell every card that you can't use on its own for its bare minimum price - i.e. the Perfect for 20,000, the Diamond for 5000 etc.

To make up for the deficit of 433.275 PP (pack sale price - expected value) you'd have to, on average, resell your cards for a little more than 184% of their base value.

Aside: It'd would be about 77%, but the auction house takes a 10% cut. You dodge this by pulling cards that can you use directly - so opening packs is better if you do it first, then refine your randomly acquired roster through the auction house. But we know that already, so let's get back to the main topic.


What we would need now is reliable data on how much you can expect to resell cards above their minimum sale price, on average. Only the developers have this, for now, since the Transaction History page that might show this isn't implemented yet.


What I did do just now is make a snap shot of the auction house listings closest to expiry, which I've attached below. Assuming these are the final bids (the most conservative assumption) we've got:

Kyle Hendricks (80) -> 130.1 %
Giancarlo Stanton (75) -> 850 %
Jeff Bagwell (80) -> 100 %
Sandy Amoros (71) -> 100%
Arodys Vizcaino (71) -> 100 %
Mychal Givens (74) -> 150 %
Kenta Maeda (76) -> 351 %
Patrick Corbin (89) -> 300.1 %

The following cards didn't receive any bids despite being offered for the minimum sale price:


Starling Marte (74) -> 100 %
Kyle Crick (70) -> 100 %
Johnny Damon (71) -> 100%



My current estimation is that if your card is at the bottom of possible ratings for your card rarity, it skews close to the minimum, but a card at the upper edge can be worth significantly more. (People have a real hardon for Giancarlo Stanton, apparently. Ask this Mets fan what he thinks of that. )



Funnily enough, I actually put in a 110 PP bid for Starling Marte after I made the screenshot - but I was sniped right back while I was still writing this post. (Kenta Maeda went up to 451 PP in the meantime as well.) People do pay attention.


With that being said, the bulk of the required Auction House profit, relatively speaking, is in Diamond and Perfect cards. To pay for all the packs you open that have only duds in them, you should aim to make about 9250 PP per Diamond card (on average - less for a 90, more for a 99, naturally) and 37,000 PP per Perfect card. Here the simple fact that not a lot of players even have that kind of money sitting around becomes a bit of an issue; most auctions in the Perfect and Diamond space are without bids. The ones that do don't inspire confidence; I just saw Francisco Lindor go for a mere 7000 PP.


However, it also has to be said that most players who do open a Diamond or Perfect cards are probably holding on to them unless they're straight up duplicates. I certainly would!

All in all, my (very, very rough) estimate for the value that a standard pack represents is about 900 Perfect Points in expected resale value - but if you're at a stage where you don't expect to resell any of the valuable cards it comes out to be about the full 1000 PP or even a little more. Plus, card packs have another advantage - you can use the cards in them right away, and skip the bidding process, whereas waiting out good deals in the Auction House can take an in-game week or even month, and Buy Now is significantly pricier.


Since the post that prompted this ramble cited Moneyball, I'll point out that Moneyball is about exploiting inefficiencies in the market, and there's a cyclical element to it. In the movie Moneyball, Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill were all about OBP, because that was the statistic that was being undervalued by everyone else, but obviously now the other franchises have caught up to it - so now Billy Beane has to find other market inefficiencies to exploit.


The beauty of the card pack/auction house system is that players have to open packs in order for cards to be affordable in the auction house. If enough players become convinced that bidding for cards is the correct way to play Perfect Team, it will lead to less packs getting opened - and that will drive up the price of the cards over time, to the point that the EV of a standard pack exceeds 1000 PP - and at that point, the people who are spending all of their PP on packs are the ones who are, in your words, "moneyball-like"!

[Orcin]

Originally Posted by One Post Wonder

I've never bought a single pack and I doubt I ever will. The math doesn't work out for me.

The odds of getting a Diamond card from a regular pack are infinitely better than getting a Diamond card from the AH for 1000 PP.

[One Post Wonder]

Originally Posted by damientheomen3

Loving my gold Mike Scioscia, I'll say that much.

That's the holy grail! Great defense, left handed, and can hit. I've only ever seen one on sale, for 5k, and would fallen all over myself to buy it if I had the money.

I'm not complaining too much. I was lucky enough to land Tony Pena and I wouldn't give that 76 rated card for nearly any gold. Or diamond for that matter.

[Silfir]

Originally Posted by Orcin

The odds of getting a Diamond card from a regular pack are infinitely better than getting a Diamond card from the AH for 1000 PP.

While that is true, it's very much misleading - the odds of getting a Diamond card for 10,000 PP are also substantially higher than the odds of getting one out of ten packs.


The argument in favor of buying the packs instead is that you get a total of sixty cards, of which up to fifty could potentially be anything from Standard to Perfect. Even Standard and Bronze cards can have value for players starting out, so I'd argue that buying packs is a perfectly fine way to start your Perfect Team career.

[Maddox]

Originally Posted by zrog2000

You can scour the AH and get at least 2 golds for under 5000. So if you want certainty, the AH is where to go. If you want the chance to get better cards, I'd buy the 1000 PP packs because the chance to get diamond and perfect cards is the same between the standard and gold pack.

I have not even made 5,000 PP yet.

[Silent_Thunder]

Auction House is pretty much always going to be the better way, the issue however is information. In The Show, card flipping is a very profitible activity ebcause of how easily accessible information on market values, price trends, etc for cards are, which means it's easy to "sit" on a couple cards and farm them over and over for an hour or two before moving on to another card. Here such a strategy would be much more risky due to less accessible market information and a much larger card spread.

Now if Markus ever does a data API for the PT Market, then we are off to the races!

[One Post Wonder]

The biggest argument for the auction way is that cards I purchase are never duds.

When I've bought a card, I'm either going to play them (in which case their value as a sale is irrelevant for the time being) or I know I'm going to resell them for a profit.

Packs have uncertainty, you could easily end up with nothing. Auctioneering, I know I'm going to get something. It's just a matter of how much. I made 2000 once off of one card. With a couple of exceptions where I got too excited about color and not quality, I've either profited from every transaction or gotten good play out of a card.

The auction margins are disappearing now, since the card supply has increased and is continuing to increase. If the game continues long enough, packs will become the best way to get value for your money since you'll always be able to sell a card for the minimum price.

But once things get that far, would you need to buy packs even then? You'd be able to look at your lineup, spot the weakness, and find a player who can fix that weakness for a low cost.

I'm glad people buy packs. Without them we'd have no game. But IMO the 6 original packs are good enough just to set up the team, and after that it's all about buying for a specific team need or flipping something for profit.

I hope there's never any detailed transaction data for the market. I think it's more fun when it is dark and people are weighing the value of a card entirely by themselves.

[Kushiel]

I buy packs from the PP my team earns. I sell every card I do not use eiiither instantly or on AH. This morning I had 7k PP from achievements and bought 8 packs because I had 1k I was holding already.. Today I have made about 10K on the AH selling bronze and silvers. I also sold one gold from a pack for 4400. I then bought a gold upgrade on AH and a bid on another. I have made about another 5k PP on achievements today to do it all over again tomorrow when I see how many PP I have tomorrow morning. I have been able to use both methods so far to good advantage.

[Orcin]

I bought 8 packs today with achievement money from last season. I did pretty poorly until this one, which made the run pretty good.

[Silfir]

I wonder if David Paulino knew exactly that he was going to be complete chaff in OOTP and refused to put on his hat properly out of spite?