My view remains the same as what I had written at the start of the thread
here. If anything, the way the anti-laundering system has been used since it was first reported has reinforced my views:
1) The bidding mechanic overwhelmingly favors players with big card farms, who are best positioned to freely create arbitrary amounts of copies of any card they want, with minimal risk. [EDIT: See also
here for another way the bidding mechanic favors established players.]
2) Price correction
generally does not work. It has happened for some cards (the top few epics), but high-value legendaries that are being spawned in copious amounts remain just as expensive as before. Even when the price of a card does drop, having vast amounts of copies of the, now lower-valued, card still results in deck value increases. What's even worse is that the many lower-valued copies tend to concentrate in the decks of very few players, who are then free to drive the price up to its previous levels. Finally, in certain cases where a pull event is organized to attack the value of a card, players that own multiple copies of the card can "block" the spawning of new copies by simply placing some random common card on the market at the same time.
3) As the numerous transfers of large amounts of bank show, this mechanic is not effective against bank transfers.
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I have two proposals for how to change the system:
a) This is what I had proposed in my
original post: Remove the bid mechanic, and change the system so that cards that are on auction simply have higher odds of being spawned in packs that open during the auction, independently of the number of bids placed on the card. The odds could be set so that about 1 copy would spawn for every 1000 packs opened---this number is certainly not set in stone, it's simply my own crude estimate of the spawn rate we had in regularly-attended pull events before the bid mechanic was discovered. Other factors that currently affect spawn rate (people suspect that the auction price is one of them) can remain in place. [EDIT: See also
here for another advantage of this proposal.] [EDIT2: As I had mentioned in my
original post, the pull rate can be subject to some modifiers (some of which we suspect are already in place), e.g., the odds of pulling a card can increase as a function of the auction price/junk value ratio. But it should not be dependent on new bids, or any other such easily manipulated mechanic.]
b) Change packs so that their contents are determined when the pack is created (i.e., when the nation answered the issue that created the pack), and not when the pack is opened. This would make pull events a lot less effective, as people would no longer be able to stockpile essentially arbitrary numbers of packs, in order to open them while a specific card is on auction. Additionally, participating in a pull event would require answering issues (and potentially creating new nations to get more issues)
on top of opening packs, making the whole process a lot more tedious.
To offer some statistics in support of proposal (b): Currently, I do "private" (i.e., not advertised, so that they only benefit me) pull events, where I open 3000 packs across 1000 puppets, to spawn extra copies of two cards that I constantly bid on. The whole affair takes me about two hours, and I generate about 20-24 copies total (10-12 for each card).
If proposal (b) was implemented, the same event would now take me at least eight hours, given that I'd need to answer five issues for each of my 1000 puppets. During that, I would only be able to open 800 packs new packs, bringing the number of copies I spawn down to 5-6. All in all, I would need to work for 300% extra the time to get only 25% the number of cards.