Mission Madness
 

The following comments about Missions are only my opinion... whether you agree or not is fine. I'm still having fun playing the game.

Complete Team Missions:
Having these 26 player Missions (where you need 26 of 35 players) has kind of thrown everything out of whack. I went through a number of the Missions and have determined that the rewards are no longer worth the inflated prices of the players. There need to be a lot more players put in play (more packs awarded for tournaments) to kind of put things in the proper perspective. Take the AL Central for example. Yes, you could try to keep winning packs, but eventually you need to get to the auctions if yoiu want to cvomplete the missions in a timely manner. At the current inflated rates, even if you have gotten your 5 teams to the point where you have 20 or 21 of the 26 cards you need for each team, the remaining 5 or 6 cards will cost you so much that that the Verlander reward means nothing. In one case I figured that you would need to spend close to 10,000 points to get a card that now goes at auction for about 12,000 points (and thats before you remove the 10% auction fee). Yes missions should be challenging, but the reward should make sense for the trouble you go through.

Point Missions:
Here is where the value of some cards is really distorted. Because of the 26 card complete team missions, 2 point cards (players rated in the 40's and 50's) have assumed values so high that you basically can ignore them. I've found that when I have reached 5 points of the 7 points required to complete the mission, that its more economical to buy one 5 point bronze card than two 2 point iron cards. In one instance I recollect buying one bronze card for around 125 points as opposed to two iron cards that were at minimum 150 points each.

I'm curious as to how many of you are seeing things. I know one thing for sure, it must be pretty difficult for newbies to improve their teams at these current price levels.

Well that's it.
Have a great day and have fun playing the game!

They did bump up the tournament rewards for packs which will hopefully have an impact over time. Where a 32 team tournament was awarding 14 total packs (6 for 1st, 4 for 2nd, and 2 for 3rd and 4th), they now award 21 cards (10 for 1st, 5 for 2nd, and 3 for 3rd and 4th). That 50% increase is significant.

I think that a big issue is the limited supply of Silver cards. With the number of gold packs out there as mission rewards along with the ability to directly purchase them, Silver cards are relatively scarce compared to their value. With rare exception I have only been selling my duplicate cards. I have gotten my packs through tournaments and mission rewards. Right now, I have 47 non-live Gold cards and 79 non-live Silver cards. Based on pack odds, I should be pulling two and a half times the number of Silver cards as Gold but currently have less than a 1.7:1 ratio. This is even more out of whack when you consider the 10:1 ratio between the QuickSell values of Gold versus Silver cards.
My feeling is that they should sell Silver packs for no more than 1500 points. I think there would be a good demand for those packs which would help alleviate the lack of supply of Silver cards.

Yeah, you're not supposed to buy all the live cards. It's much, much more effective to open a lot of packs from tournies/twitch streams and just slow-play the collections. Packs are mostly full of live cards, after all. I finished them on Monday after a couple weeks of opening many packs, without spending barely anything. And now I have some of the best cards in the game!

I absolutely agree with your point about the AH being very tough for new players to upgrade their teams though. The historical card market being blown up every week by new collections has got to be a big turnoff for newer/casual players.

My assumption is that the scarcity of Mission cards does encourage those who buy point to do so in higher volumes which drives up revenue. With all of the work that Markus and team have put into the game over the years, I will never fault them for maximizing revenue. Part of that is the faith that Markus puts a great deal of that money back into improving the game. If the whales fund the hiring of more developers, then kudos to them.

However, I do worry about the long term sustainability of the model. I like having missions be difficult to complete but there needs to be a better balance where players who don’t shell out money to buy points have a path to being reasonably competitive and participate in missions. I go back to it being a supply issue. Give away more packs as rewards versus handing out points which further drives up prices. Opening packs and collecting cards is fun. Scrounging for points to hoard isn’t.

yeah, I share concerns around those lines. The game definitely needs casual players to sustain it. It can't just be F2P sharks selling stuff to whales.

Some really good points. I have noticed the pack rewards are up, but I'm still amazed at how many duplicates I get in a single pack.

Some really good comments. I have used a combinatioin of packs and some purchases... some cards are difficult to come by. And as I remarked to someone else, the number of duplicates I have gotten in packs is pretty high.

You have more great comments. I guess for nlow we have to play it as it is and hope for the luck of the draw. I pulled some great cards out of packs in OOTP21, but my luck this year, despite winning more packs, has been mixed. You need a really good draw every once in a while to help your team improve.

Whoa hold the phone. What's this about getting packs from twitch streams?

Basically when you watch the official OOTP channel on Twitch and link your OOTP account, you can get a free pack every 15 minutes, up to 5 max per day.

Further info: https://forums.ootpdevelopments.com/...d.php?t=323654

Time for my stupid question. How do you link and OOTP account to Twitch?

here is the original thread from last year, which I believe has the instructions for linking:

https://forums.ootpdevelopments.com/...d.php?t=319681