The Last Homely House
Undying Lands => Valinor => Topic started by: janjetina on December 21, 2012, 06:31:03 AM
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It came to my attention that the merchant system was changed, limiting the supply of the singles, creating scarcity of the most demanding singles.
There are a few reasons why I think that this is not a move in the right direction.
1. It puts new players at a disadvantage, and gives those who have spent more time on the site and built their constructed decks (multiple decks!) with the help of the 'old' merchant the advantage over the new players who are at a significant disadvantage at building their first competitive deck (see point 2).
2. It is argued that the new players would be encouraged to build their constructed decks by opening the booster packs. What follows is the calculation that estimates the expected value of how many booster packs should be opened by the player to complete a playset of a card from a large edition (such as FOTR), which puts the lower bound on building the deck (lower bound results from the best case scenario when all other necessary cards have been collected in the process of collecting the playset).
Let's say, that a player is building a Moria deck, and wants to buy a playset of Goblin Armory, that is 4 copies of a Goblin Armory.
We observe opening of a booster pack as a binomial event, where success is defined as opening a booster pack and finding Goblin Armory in it.
The probability of getting a non-foil goblin armory in a booster pack is 1/121, as there is one non-foil rare per booster, and there is a total of 121 rares in FOTR.
The probability of getting a foil goblin armory in a booster pack is 1/(121*36), as there is one non-foil rare per booster box, and there is a total of 121 rare foils in FOTR, and there are 36 booster packs per box.
Probability of getting a goblin armory in a booster is the sum of the two probabilities above, i.e. 37/(121*36). I'll call that probability p.
So, p=37/4356. Conversely, q = 1-p = 4319/4356 is the probability of not opening a Goblin Armory in a booster pack.
Since the events are binomial, if we open n packs, we expect to find the following number of Goblin Armories:
m=n*p*q.
So, in order to obtain 4 copies of Goblin Armory (m=4), one expects to have to open n=m/(p*q)=4*(4356)^2/(37*4319) = 475 booster packs.
Let me reiterate: to get a playset of a FOTR rare single, like Goblin Armory, a player would have to open 475 booster packs on the average.
How much time does it take for an average player to get 475 booster packs? He gets 50 credits each week, which is sufficient for maybe 15 booster packs per month and one sealed event entry fee. During that month, a player may play a sealed league event and earn, say another 20 booster packs total (I'm not precise with numbers here, but the ballpark estimate is adequate I think, correct me if you have the exact data available) if he regularly plays in that tournament. So, that's 35 booster packs a month.
With that rate, it would take almost 14 months to obtain a playset of a rare card like Goblin Armory, and at the end of that, if the player is lucky, he would have completed just one constructed deck.
3. It is argued that the change was done to simulate realistic situation. However, the realistic situation differed in the following aspects:
- there was no monopoly; instead of one merchant, there were many available: Cobracards, Sorourke, eBay, etc. and each of them was quite well stocked (almost never missing any rare and frequently being stocked even with playable rare foils). Many people were selling singles locally as well (I used to be one of them).
- trading was available, both locally and over the internet (Mahasamatman). I understand that enabling trading would lead to potential abuse. Associating the accounts with confirmed e-mail addresses could probably alleviate that issue.
So, in a realistic situation, the supply of cards, viewed from a player standpoint, was practically unlimited.
There was also no scarcity of money in the realistic situation, such as there is in the Gemp.
That was the situation that enabled me to collect foils, so I still have my all-foil FOTR set and a few all-foil decks (or I would have if I hadn't lended someone my Servant of the Secret Fire foil playset to someone and in the meantime forgot who borrowed it and the guy hasn't returned the cards on his own).
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I need to correct the distribution of rare foils, as there was one rare foil per 66 packs, making the probability of opening a particular rare foil even lower (to 1/(66*121)), but it doesn't significantly affect the calculations.
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The best strategy for building decks in Gemp is to buy singles. You will often pull cards you don't want, but you can sell them back to the merchant to get some profit out of this. Now, cards like Goblin Armory are pretty expensive, but it still doesn't take over a year to acquire 4 of them if you want to.
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The best strategy for building decks in Gemp is to buy singles. You will often pull cards you don't want, but you can sell them back to the merchant to get some profit out of this. Now, cards like Goblin Armory are pretty expensive, but it still doesn't take over a year to acquire 4 of them if you want to.
The merchant system changed today. Most deck necessary singles are unavailable to buy. Artificial scarcity has been created. Hence my post.
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100% agree with you, janjetina.
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The only problem I see with Janjeta's math is that it assumes an even distribution of rares... which in the real world is true, because rare sheets had an even number of rares printed on them. So theoretically, for every weight of a legacy, there is a goblin armory printed.
But gemp does not physically print sheets of rares. I believe that each rare that is generated is simply a random choice from 121 cards. Over time, law of averages says that you should pull as many Goblin Armories as you pull Weight of Legacies, but it needs to be an amazingly large sample set to guarantee that.
So, I argue that your 475 booster packs is actually low.
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Ok, let me address your concerns one by one.
Concern 1: "To get a playset of a FOTR rare single, like Goblin Armory, a player would have to open 475 booster packs on the average."
Correct, incidentally - if a player buys 475 boosters, considering equal distribution of rares in a pack, this number of boosters will give that player a full playset of FotR rares (4*121 = 484 boosters).
Concern 2: "It would take almost 15 months to obtain a playset of a rare card like Goblin Armory (actually whole playset of FotR - see concern 1), and at the end of that, if the player is lucky, he would have completed just one constructed deck."
Correct, lets now try to get back to how this game was working on paper. How much money was an average player spending on LotR each month (not just boosters, but also singles)? Please keep in mind that very few players were buying cards by the boxes. My guess was $20 per week, which is enough to buy 6 boosters (at $3.29 retail price). This is how I came up with the 50 gold/per week scheme (=5 boosters). At this rate, an average LotR player in paper version would acquire a playset of FotR in 80 weeks (484/6) = 18 months.
I assume you are disappointed, because probably you were one of the players that was buying cards by boxes, and spending way more that $20/week on LotR (I know, I was), but I'm not sure if that is the kind of player behaviour I want to mimic in the online system. If I did, there would be almost no difference between Collector's and non-Collector's leagues/tournaments, as your expectation is, that player should be able to get all the cards he/she needs for his deck at a fast pace.
I think the main problem with Collector's league at the moment is, that there was a time, when Gemp-LotR was starting where first few sealed leagues were moving the cards from league collection to permanent one. This has put players that joined after, at a huge disadvantage. Unfortunately, I have no idea how to remedy this problem outside of resetting collections, which might make some people angry.
Concern 3: there was no monopoly; instead of one merchant, there were many available: Cobracards, Sorourke, eBay, etc. and each of them was quite well stocked (almost never missing any rare and frequently being stocked even with playable rare foils). Many people were selling singles locally as well (I used to be one of them)
Guess where these merchants were taking cards from? - They were buying them from other players (and to a much lesser extent - opening boosters, but if they did that, they were always losing value). Guess where were the players taking the cards from to sell to merchants? They were opening packs.
In other words - every card that was available at any of the merchants or on any other singles market, at one point or another came from a booster pack.
Now - tell me how is it different from the merchant system based on stock (as it is done now)? You are looking at the merchant now (3 hours after the change was made) - with several key cards being out of stock, and you assume these cards will never be restocked. What was real world merchant doing in that situation? It was increasing the "buy" price high enough to restock - this is exactly what this merchant will be doing. It will increase the "buy" price, until it will acquire one copy (or specific number - I can configure).
Possible changes
1. I may decide to adjust the weekly allowance, if it is indeed to low, and we want to have all players on average being more of a "power-gamer", compared to what was the situation in paper LotR, or if the average was mis-guessed.
2. I may change the pricing mechanism to fluctuate card price based on number of cards in stock, and for example - aggressively buy cards (increase price) the smaller the stock is.
As always, I accept any suggestions to the merchant mechanism (and game economy), both addressing the 2 possible changes above, or addressing anything in general. The only requirement is - it can't be something, someone came up with in 10 minutes, and provides no reason other than - "I can't get my [insert deck name] completed for the next league". Current system is a result of multiple hours of thinking, tinkering, data-mining and adjusting, so if you wish to challenge it, you better come prepared. :)
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Since there is no finite supply of cards in Gemp, since it's all statistics in a computer, there is no incentive to simulate "running out of stock" for ANY cards. All cards should be available for purchase for every player, not just the ones who got there first. Sure, the prices will be high on some cards, but that's a much better alternative to making them unavailable entirely.
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100% agree with you, bibfortuna25
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I think the main problem with Collector's league at the moment is, that there was a time, when Gemp-LotR was starting where first few sealed leagues were moving the cards from league collection to permanent one. This has put players that joined after, at a huge disadvantage. Unfortunately, I have no idea how to remedy this problem outside of resetting collections, which might make some people angry.
I think with current player base this no longer is such a big problem. Leagues get big enough for prizes to overshadow what people got then.
Last Sealed league I finished second. Total prizes I got were way better than what I got for winning the first Sealed that was played a year ago.
An average player at that time got something like 20 packs out of such league (18 to build the deck, but prizes were low for middle of the table then IIRC). Currently and average player easily gets more out of a league. And I think the league size can increase even more.
Of course a player that plays just a few games or has really low win percentage currently won't take 18 booster packs out of a league. But there were only 3 leagues giving 18 boosters to everyone. That's 54 packs, even if you buy 5 a week you make up for it in 3 months.
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What if new players who joined after that first few sealed leagues will automatically get that product added to their collection? That would put a lot of folks on more even ground.
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What if new players who joined after that first few sealed leagues will automatically get that product added to their collection? That would put a lot of folks on more even ground.
That is a possibility. Though, I'd rather just increase the sign-up bonus from 200g it is at now, if it is indeed needed. Much simpler to do, and gives new players more choice of what they want to do with it.
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Concern 1: "To get a playset of a FOTR rare single, like Goblin Armory, a player would have to open 475 booster packs on the average."
Correct, incidentally - if a player buys 475 boosters, considering equal distribution of rares in a pack, this number of boosters will give that player a full playset of FotR rares (4*121 = 484 boosters).
Actually, the use of uniform distribution assumes a huge sample size. Nitsuj has mentioned this.
In my example the sample size is the total number of booster packs / rares. That is a huge number and for the practical purposes, I consider it infinite.
In your statement the sample size is only 484 booster packs / rares, and you are assuming uniform distribution over particular rares.
The assumption about the uniform distribution is not guaranteed to hold in that case.
The distribution in the sample can be arbitrarily skewed (see below) and no simple statement can be made about it (though you could make the statement that buying 484000 rares would give you about 1000 playset collections with high probability).
Clarification:
If there were only two types of rares, Hoeffding's inequality would apply, but this case is more complicated, still the way of thinking is the same.
Hoeffding inequality deals with the case when there is a huge number of red and green marbles in a bin.
If we assume uniform distribution inside the bin (i.e. number of green and red marbles being equal, analogous to the uniform distribution of rares over all the booster packs), and we take a finite sample with size N (e.g. N=484), we have a probabilistic guarantee that probability of picking a green marble in a sample will be close to the probability of picking a green marble from the bin, which is 0.5 (i.e. that the sample follows the same - uniform - distribution as the bin).
The guarantee in this, simple case, is given quantitatively by Hoeffding's inequality.
Let's say that we want the mean of the sample distribution to be within 0.05 of the mean of the uniform distribution. If we plug in N=484 and epsilon=0.05 into Hoeffding inequality, we get the probability of the sample distribution differing from the bin distribution to be no more than 17.8%. If we want our mean sample distribution to be within 0.01, we get absolutely no guarantees (probability larger than 1).
However, our bin doesn't have 2, but 121 different colors, so the sample size has to be much larger in order for us to be able to have our guarantees about the sample distribution.
I'll try to address the rest of the response after my workout or tomorrow.
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I was thinking about to suggest a resetting all collections when I red Marcin's post. I would like to point out that even if system is slower then the current logic, that would bring great value to building up own collection. Players who started before and builded their collections to certain point might get furious but I'm curious what they would say about this option?
Having fresh start and much more competition might be healthy and fun. With new solid system that would slowly allow players to build up and improve decks over time and bring almost real feel of joy when adding cards to collection as they would be hard earned.
200g per league seems less choice from what we have now. Why would anyone want to have boosters chosen for him instead of buying them by him self. For example one might play ttt sealed league but needs king block cards for his collection deck and doesn't care about ents of fangorn boosters as those don't bring any cards that are wanted.
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If there were only two types of rares, Hoeffding's inequality would apply, but this case is more complicated, still the way of thinking is the same.
Hoeffding inequality deals with the case when there is a huge number of red and green marbles in a bin.
Is he an Elf?
Or maybe a Sword!
Hoeffding, The Equality Slayer!
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I have to agree with Bib. This is a virtual community, you aren't spending real money and you don't even have to win games to win said money (via the virtual allowance) I don't see the problem.
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Response to the point 2:
An average player, who wanted to participate in tournaments, got the needed cards using additional resources (i.e. trading), so the situation doesn't quite relate and this is a guess anyway.
Considering Decipher's release schedule is more useful to make this estimate. Decipher released a new expansion every 3 months (or was it four)? In that period, an average player was expected to build (at least) one deck to participate in tournaments (more competitive players had more alternative decks). By the time a year passed, another base set and another format appeared.
We are in a bit different situation: all the sets are already out and the people want to build a few decks in parallel, for different formats, so the "demand" for cards is even higher.
What I think should be done:
I think that each player should be able to construct his first deck quickly and the rest of the system should be left as it was.
With the old merchant system, this could have been accomplished by giving new players a sizeable starting amount of gold, that should be adequate for building a deck that has reasonable chence of winning in a competitive environment. With the new merchant system, that wouldn't help much, since a player would be unable to acquire any decent cards.
Response to the point 3:
Merchants, who probsably sold not only singles, but packs as well, used to buy cases wholesale (either directly or through a distributer) and were opening booster packs to replenish their stock along with buying collections and singles from their players.
If you decide to go along with limited stock, please consider raising the limits and adjusting them according to the number of players. Limited stock is not necessarily a horrible idea, but transition needs to be gradual (i.e. limits / merchant stock should have been set much higher) and announced. This abrupt shift when one second all the cards were available in unlimited quantities and another second no playable cards are in stock is not a good thing.
My first suggestion is increasing the merchant stock. My second suggestion is giving a one time "first deck" sizeable grant to each new player (which means that the same thing should be given to all the players, to keep the level ground). My third suggestion is that the players be allowed to keep their sealed league product (and that should be applied retroactively).
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With the new merchant system, that wouldn't help much, since a player would be unable to acquire any decent cards.
Why? He can't do it today, yes. You probably don't play long enough to remember first weeks of the old merchant. All cards were available of course, but it sold cards at very high price and bought very low. It all evened out slowly during next weeks. That's why I made a 3 weeks break with collector's leagues (and may make it a week or two longer if need arises - I monitor the market closely to see how it reacts).
I think when the new merchant stabilizes most cards will be available all the time and others most of the time. In fact, most are available even now (out of 121 FotR set rares only 14 are out of stock).
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I sorry but you are wrong Hsiale. Out of 621 rares in movie block, 227 are out of stock at this moment.
Of course rares that are in stock are 90% bad and not that playable.
There is no chance to build any viable deck in my collection at this point.
I honestly think that estimation of few weeks to get merchant stabilized is far to optimistic. I don't think it will settle for months if at all. Nobody is selling anything and I doubt that anyone has like 8 hates on stock or even 5 easterling captains waiting for weeks to make profit. Merchant should be more aggressive to get his stock filled.
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I don't want to be all negative about this change. Definitely it would be great to have more stable market then it was.
For example: captured by the ring and easterling polearm at about 20g while elendil was around 13 or so. I would rather eat my own hat then be right about this :)
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I have no idea how do you know that I am wrong and not you - neither of us knows the formulae behind merchant. The only way we can learn is by observing the system.
23.12.2012, 13:00 CET
Updated 24.12.2012 CET with price changes
Fellowship of the Ring rare cards out of stock and sell price
Bow of the Galadhrim 2,85 4,39
Double Shot 10,27 15,80
Servant of the Secret Fire 21,60 23,38
Aragorn, Ranger of the North 19,82 25,07
Aragorn's Bow 45,51 80,02
The Saga of Elendil 6,84 15,41
Uruk Lieutenant 19,46 43,61
Cave Troll of Moria, Scourge of the Black Pit 23,87 36,73
Goblin Armory 71,00 89,21
Goblin Swarms 18,17 37,98
Moria Axe 0,76 1,18
Black Steed 0,48 0,81
Thin and Stretched 0,10 0,15
Power According to His Stature 26,24 40,48
I've looked through other sets and the situation seems worse there. I can't research it thoroughly because I don't see sell prices for all the cards (I don't own even one copy of them). I will note down price for some cards out of stock that I have from set 7.
Preparations 15,72 42,16
Arwen, Fair Elf Maiden 3,93 9,81
Shadow Between 6,85 25,27
Terrible and Evil 12,23 25,55
Fat One Wants It 10,84 33,63
Smeagol, Always Helps 9,57 105,01
Anduril, Flame of the West 17,91 42,75
Noble Leaders 12,76 24,50
Fierce in Despair 6,35 82,75
Southron Leader 2,23 3,12
Southron Marksmen 9,28 247,47
Morgul Brute 24,34 59,16
Leowyn 3,40 10,58
Ulaire Lemenya, Assailing Minion 10,42 41,46
Encirclement 5,56 67,03
Troop Tower 16,25 89,56
Now let's wait two days and see how did the prices change. Once they go up enough, you won't need to have cards to sell, you'll simply go, buy boosters and on average cards you sell will give you your gold back with some extra on top of that.
What we need is traders. People who, whenever the market needs, step in, buy boosters and sell them as singles to merchant. And make a little profit on it. Such traders give the market liquidity it needs. But they need information to work. So, I would not change anything with merchant (now). We need time to see how it works. The changes I would do instantly are:
- display sell price of each card all the time for every player, even if this player does not own the card (a quick fix),
- make a daily economy report - each day, at midnight server time, a text file is generated (or, perfectly, each time a player requests it to be generated, but I don't know how heavy this will be on the server) containing market info. Such file should be easily importable into any spreadsheet software for analysis purposes. For example each line could be something like this:
#1#R#1#The One Ring, Isildur's Bane#4#18,52#availability#
Where entries mean: set number, rarity, card number, card name, number of copies you have, current sell price, estimate of copies the merchant has, for example:
- out of stock (0 copies, not selling),
- very low (1 to 3 copies, i.e. less than a playset)
- low (4 to 11 copies, i.e. less than 3 playsets)
- average (12 to 50 copies)
- good (51 to 90 copies)
- very good (91 to 99 copies)
- overstocked (100 or more copies, not buying).
Having such reports we could start making market decisions that help both us and market liquidity. Currently I have no idea at what price it will be a good decision to sell any of the out of stock cards I have so I'm cautious. If I had access to information on prices, it will be much easier to sell for me.
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I didn't say you are wrong about card prices, only about availability of cards. I counted all rares out of stock from sets 1-10 and got number that I wrote in previous post.
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That's true, I looked at RotK and see the situation is different there.
But many rares out of stock means that many rares will increase in price. And once average price rises over 10G, people will buy packs, sell singles and make profit while stocking the merchant. That's why I noted down card prices, in a few days we'll see how they change.
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To be honest I'm not a fan of the Merchant at all. Having the ability to buy cards means that Collectors leagues will eventually turn into Constructed leagues with identical decks. With no difference between the two there will be no point in even running the Collectors leagues at all. I'd much rather see Collectors leagues be made entirely from cards opened in boosters. If site become a problem then perhaps they could be made available in the Collectors format.
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Collectors leagues will eventually turn into Constructed leagues with identical decks.
Eventually, yes. But it will take enough time to not care too much about it.
I play Gemp since it started. I played every single sealed league, placing in top 8 in each and in top 3 in more or less half of them. I also played some constructed leagues, but have no time for this since summer. I also increased my collection significantly due to not going for a strong deck during first Collector's league, but selling off all FotR block rares I had then, when their prizes went through the roof, and picking up lots of strong cards from other blocks. I believe no other player has more cards than I and very few, if any, are close.
Still I'm even not half way done with Movie Block playset. And I expect it will take me 2,5-3 more years (if I play similar number of games and manage to stay top level sealed league player) to finish the playset of whole LotR. This is a lot of time. I have no idea if I will play this game for so long. And for sure there never will be a significant number of players with such big collections active in Collector's leagues.
If there was no merchant, it would be no problem for people with big collections. What's the difference between having all cards and 70% of them (due to some repeated in packs there are some you don't have). I can build enough strong decks anyway. No merchant is worse for people with smaller collections, who have 20 strong rares, sell them and buy 14 strong rares which go into one deck. The big difference is between having no deck and one deck. Further progress is way smaller.
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I think that each player should be able to construct his first deck quickly and the rest of the system should be left as it was.
With the old merchant system, this could have been accomplished by giving new players a sizeable starting amount of gold, that should be adequate for building a deck that has reasonable chence of winning in a competitive environment.
I think this sounds like a great idea. A bigger initial payout, enough to build one decent constructed deck.
What if you simply got your first 60 singles for free?
What we need is traders. People who, whenever the market needs, step in, buy boosters and sell them as singles to merchant. And make a little profit on it. Such traders give the market liquidity it needs.
The problem is that Gemp gold just isn't that useful. In real life, people deal in singles in order to make a profit, because real life money can be spent on all kinds of things. But in Gemp, there's basically only two things gold can be used for: Joining leagues, and buying more cards. Maybe we need more ways to use gold?
And if you ever arrive at a situation where people can buy boosters from the merchant and reliably make a profit selling the cards back, then you've effectively gamed the system. I'm pretty sure MarcinS doesn't want that, because people will be able to just grind their gold up infinitely.
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Well I loved to collect cards and play collector.. But after this day I think that collectors leagues are gone:( The new merchant should be limitedly supplied to the start, then when some cool cards would be gone the new system should work. But now from 10 golds you can make thousands of golds and plenty of cards... I now see that i cant be interested in collection as I used to be, cause I can have everything within a few hours... That is very sad... I think that the best sollution is to return a server week ago on the start of new merchant or just restart all collections and make some normal prices.... I would be pissed off but I dont see any others sollution but deleting or collections or reload some backup with the state before new merchant (and fix up all bugs)
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A backup from two days ago would be nice indeed. And then reintroducing new merchant, but before he goes online he gets confronted with a (computer) trader who will restock the merchant (because all problems we have now are caused by merchant being dramatically understocked). Trader should work the following way:
- for each pack available in the game, it calculates the average (expected) resell value of singles in the pack,
- if the value is 110% of cost of the pack or more, it buys the pack and sells singles to merchant,
- this is repeated till the trader does not want to buy any packs.
110% to leave a small margin so that it still is good to buy packs from the start, but not ridiculously profitable. I haven't calculated too much, but the current return rate on RotK packs is around 300% (I started the day with 50 Gold, went through well over 1000 RotK packs and my current wealth is around 30 thousand Gold + a RotK playset). And card prices still didn't go down to a reasonable level despite me feeding merchant with all I could.
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Well please think about a restoring cause now the collectors is ruined.. Also I dont see a point in the leagues cause the main reason are prizes which are now very devalved..
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Well I don't know if it is so much ruined. For example cards I have have completely no influence on Collector's because I haven't played in such league for half a year and don't think this is going to change - I have no time for two leagues and sealed is way more fun for me.
Also are the prizes really the main reason for playing leagues? For me playing in a competitive environment is a far bigger reason.
But doing something to card prices is definitely needed. Because the old system was in place for too long to players to fix it on their own. I fed the merchant with 3-4 copies of all RotK rares and haven't seen a big difference for him.
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This has been an excellent case study in the problems with free markets. I'm sorry I missed it! No matter what the solution, it would be great to track what had happened (lack of cash depressing prices), into the boom day of Christmas Eve, and now what to do.
I had written a long post last night, but decided to wait to post. I'm glad I did!
Here are suggestions I see for a long term solution.
1) If booster pack retail prices are 10 gold, that means that booster pack wholesale prices are about 5 gold. In real life, I used to buy boxes from a wholesaler for just under $2 per pack, which would equate to roughly 5.8 to 6.0 gold. The wholesaler made a small profit, so his prices was just about 5.0. Therefore, if the average rare price goes above 6 or 7 gold, the wholesaler should just open packs and stock the store.
2) I would also assign a cap of 99.99 gold for any rare, equivalent to about US$30 in real life. This is a little artificial, but it prevents massive trickery. Also, to the best of my memory a non-promo never got above $30 in real life. In Magic, everyone worried when Jace got above $50 - I'd like to avoid that.
3) On the low side, I would implement a minimum sell price of 1 gold for any rare and a minimum buy price of 2. In real life, there are always transaction costs. I will note that big Magic retailers like Star City games will buy any mythic rare for 25 cents, about 0.6 gold in our system. A mythic rare appears once on a Magic rare sheet, making the probability roughly the same as a rare from a large set like FotR. Therefore, I think 1 gold is a reasonable floor. It makes things less worthless.
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I think what we have now is a good long term solution. The problem is not in the system, but in the starting point. The new merchant started extremally understocked and had no way to buy packs by himself and get the singles (which he should do as long as it is extremally profitable).
Of course even if nothing is done, users will finally drive the prices to a good level. But it should not be left for them. The reasons are:
- it will take too long. The merchant is so heavily understocked that he will demand a lot of new cards before he calms down. And the amount of money users who restock him make is ridiculous. I made 30.000 Gold today, just out of curiosity how the merchant will react.
- there is no good interface for users to do this. If there was a button "Choose an expansion, buy a box of boosters, open them all and sell all the cards" and all this took 15 seconds, I would probably already have stabilized merchant on my own (and asked Marcin to remove excess cash from my account afterwards). But with current interface I think it would take one man, using all the ways to speed up things that are available, a few days of work day and night to restock the merchant. I have neither time nor will to do it.
I think that once the merchant gets restocked by computer, opening packs until expected resale value of cards drops below let's say 11G for standard boosters and 22G for Reflections, the system will work. One problem is what to do with collections that heavily changed today. A backup from Saturday is a perfect solution, if it's unavailable, the good thing is that due to card prices being high people store what they earned in cash or packs, so I think removing everything above some value would work. Something like erasing all cash above 500G and all packs above 100 (leaving booster choices no matter how many one has, as they can't be bought from merchant so people who have lots of them could not gain them today). The only problem is if someone bought packs and already has opened them - for example if such fix is applied my RotK playset should probably be reduced to a set of one copy of each card (I did not have 120 RotK rares yesterday, but I had 3-4 copies of all the most expensive ones).
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ok, so the reason that i am on GEMP is because i enjoy playing the game. i could care less about imaginary cards.
i very much enjoy playing in sealed tournaments, and want to make sure that i have the coinage to continue doing so. i figure that selling back the cards i get from my winnings is a good way to offset the cost of joining.
so my question is: does this new merchant system make this a good time to sell, or should i wait and get a better price later?
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i very much enjoy playing in sealed tournaments, and want to make sure that i have the coinage to continue doing so. i figure that selling back the cards i get from my winnings is a good way to offset the cost of joining.
If you use cash only to join leagues, you will never be short of it. You are given 50 gold each week (provided you log in at least once during this week). A sealed league signup fee is 50 gold and will not increase*, such league starts once every 36 days, so you have 5 times more cash than you need. Even if you join all leagues, both sealed and constructed, this will not take even half of the cash you are given just for logging in.
That said, this is probably good time to sell cards if you feel you need cash for something else. Especially if you don't sell in extreme amounts. If you sell in extreme, this is risk. I very much expect most of the 30k gold I sit on now to be taken from me somehow. Such cash is not healthy for the game and I earned it only to check the merchant's reaction to being given lots of cards.
*Rules I use for league signup fees: the cost is more than amount of days a league lasts but less than 1,5 of this number. A league allows you to play on average one game a day and a bit extra (sealed leagues are 40 games over 36 days and cost 50 gold, format I'll be trying in next constructed leagues is 13 games over 11 days costing 15 gold. So playing in a league costs you approx 1,3 gold daily, and you earn 7 each day, so you'd need to earn money on prizes only when you'd want to participate in at least 6 leagues simultaneously, and there never were more than three.
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word.