Overvalued Cards

[Toerana]

Apologies upfront if this is something for technical not trading cards

Cards has a problem. This problem is in the form of incredibly overvalued transfer cards. In the top 50 most valued cards, 17 are uncommons and 26 are uncommons. All of these cards are valued at over 440 MV.

Now, at risk of sounding like a returning cards player returning to find out he's now poor, I think it's a bit ridiculous. This breeds a game where instead of players seeking to collect actual valuable cards, they seek to collect boosted commons and uncommons because they do more to increase someone's Deck Value than anything else. Now naturally, cards should be allowed to rise to be many, many times their junk value in MV, especially since some lower rarity cards belong to active farmers, notable members of the community or people with unique badges (think Issue Authors and Moderators), but by allowing otherwise worthless cards to top the ranking, it doesn't give an accurate representation of which cards are valuable to the community. I think that this breaks the card game.

There are a few ways to change this, either make it ever increasingly hard to boost Market Value by tweaking its formula, but that could risk preventing lower rarity cards from obtaining an "accurate" MV.

Another solution, which is my favourite, is capping the MV of cards based on rarity. The primary cause of this is to let players continue transferring large sums of money on low value cards (as is a common method with many wealthy cards players) while not covering the most valuable cards list with otherwise worthless commons and uncommons.

The suggestions for caps are just that, suggestions below:
Commons - 50
Uncommons - 100
Rares - 250
Ultra Rare - 350
Epics - No Cap
Legendaries - No Cap

I'm naturally open to other solutions, but I genuinely believe that having stupidly overinflated commons being the backbone of many DVs instead of valuable Legendary/Epic/UR Cards isn't great for the card game or its community. The copies of cards don't seem to be being deflated by people selling them for a more reasonable price at the rate they're being collected.

Other Suggestions from this thread:

- Make Higher MV Cards easier to pull, to allow them to be more easily crashed (in the case of commons/uncommons)

- Make Junking a card impact its MV. If a card is junked, it lowers the MV

[Card Something]

Adding a cap for epics too would be a great idea.

[Toerana]

Adding a cap for epics too would be a great idea.

I'm open to caps on all card rarities, I just left Epic and Legendary open because if any cards are going to be boosted to the sky, it's most likely going to be them (see 9003 S1, Testlandia and Formerly Soops)

[Islands Of Ventro]

You see, I love this idea, but I am one of the poeple who have some pretty overvalue stuff, so I cant agree with you

[Hulldom]

I don't dislike the idea, even my card would never have come close to the cap, think the issue would be that some of the ex-nation cards from S1 would suddenly be pretty worthless and people might be upset.

[Toerana]

I don't dislike the idea, even my card would never have come close to the cap, think the issue would be that some of the ex-nation cards from S1 would suddenly be pretty worthless and people might be upset.

Imho, a card being CTE'd and/or from S1 doesn't necessarily make it valuable. It makes it more valuable than its S2 equivalent, sure, but that doesn't warrant a very high MV imo

[Tinhampton]

Another solution, which is my favourite, is capping the MV of cards based on rarity. The primary cause of this is to let players continue transferring large sums of money on low value cards (as is a common method with many wealthy cards players) while not covering the most valuable cards list with otherwise worthless commons and uncommons.

The Top Cards list can be filtered by rarity, if that matters

[Toerana]

Another solution, which is my favourite, is capping the MV of cards based on rarity. The primary cause of this is to let players continue transferring large sums of money on low value cards (as is a common method with many wealthy cards players) while not covering the most valuable cards list with otherwise worthless commons and uncommons.

The Top Cards list can be filtered by rarity, if that matters :P

Still doesn't solve the other problems associated with stupidly valued commons :P

[Infinitecimal]

I say this shouldn't be a point of discussion. Over time, the market shows the true value of cards, and artificializing market value through methods of inflation will only last so long. Over time, all cards will be found and then it is up to the owners to see how much they value their card by how much they sell for. As people generally see legendaries as worth a lot more, they will sell it for more and therefore the MV will stay. Commons are perceived as less-valuable and will therefore lose MV over time if inflated with due course from the market.

In the end, this doesn't matter anyhow, as NS cards is a game, you choose how you want to play, whether you define success by having high DV, or by your collections, or by just having fun selling and accumulating bank. You should not limit any aspect of inflation as you will take away many players initiative to play. In the end, yes, inflation will bite you back but that is up to the player and how they want to go about playing that ballgame.

Infinitecimal

[Sanghyeok]

If you really think they're overvalued, just short them.

[Toerana]

If you really think they're overvalued, just short them.

pls, I'm trying to be serious

[Riemstagrad]

I am absolutely no fan of the inflated commons and indeed it seems to have become a real hype.
But a hard MV cap is a terrible solution. We must let the market decide. The problem here is that the market mechanism fails to compile a good Estimated Market Value for cards that are not traded much: Cards from nations that ceased to exist.

Maybe it is an option to take the Median of 10 trades instead of the average?
Or let a Junk drag the MV down (as the owner who junks a card clearly expressed an opinion on the value of the card..)

Decaying MV over time is another idea that comes up every now and then, but this is also flawed for cards that are not traded often and especially for cards from other seasons. Somehow they have to decay not towards junk value but towards something close to their intrinsic value... but that sounds almost impossible to calculate.

[Land Without Shrimp]

Or let a Junk drag the MV down (as the owner who junks a card clearly expressed an opinion on the value of the card..)

Yes to this. This suggestion wouldn't be hard to implement mechanically, and it "makes sense", from a economic point of view. The "median trade value" idea isn't bad, either.

Caps are a bad idea. Agree with letting the market set the value, but let's make that actual MV formula make a little more sense, yeah?

Because I'm lazy, when I get a random 4.60 MV uncommon with 0 bids on it, I junk right away without even trying to put it up. I'd love for that to actually impact the MV.

[Yulemark]

MV is just what people are willing to pay (on average no less) for a card.

This payment is made from leftover value from sold or discarded cards.

As such it's an expression of cards' relative value to one another. If someone wishes to introduce an element of speculation (and thereby a bubble) in the card value system, then I say let them have fun with it. If anything, it demonstrates the shortcomings of the stock market. Nothing worng with people learning about that.

[Varanius]

I believe this is extremely overdramatic. There’s really nothing harmful about inflating cards, at all. And this argument really comes off as “I don’t like it so it shouldn’t be legal”. I don’t see how it’s harmful to the community to play the game differently. And if someone wants to collect the thousands of bank to properly inflate that many common cards to a Giovanniland-esque level of bank, why shouldn’t they?

[Riemstagrad]

--snip--There’s really nothing harmful about inflating cards, at all. --snip--

There is:

[*]For collectors (of any kind of collection) it becomes much harder to complete their collection if there are highly inflated commons that belong in the collection. Because of the high Market Value and because inflating owners tend to hoard those cards.
[*]They block many community-driven pull-events when they enter the market and lure Market Value sharks into a bidding war.
[*]They create some distortion in the Deck Value rankings.

The pattern in this is that the benefits of inflated commons go to the people who inflate them, while the negative effects affect all others.
It's not so bad that it breaks the card-game, but the effects are there.

[Varanius]

--snip--There’s really nothing harmful about inflating cards, at all. --snip--

There is:

[*]For collectors (of any kind of collection) it becomes much harder to complete their collection if there are highly inflated commons that belong in the collection. Because of the high Market Value and because inflating owners tend to hoard those cards.
[*]They block many community-driven pull-events when they enter the market and lure Market Value sharks into a bidding war.
[*]They create some distortion in the Deck Value rankings.

The pattern in this is that the benefits of inflated commons go to the people who inflate them, while the negative effects affect all others.
It's not so bad that it breaks the card-game, but the effects are there.

It might make it harder to collect certain cards, sure. That’s not really something I can agree or disagree with just from lack of experience, so I’ll take your word for it. However, I’d also like to point out that Giovanniland has collected almost every TWP card and it’s not unfair to make the assumption a few of them were inflated before he collected them. S1 Farrakhan is one of the most inflated cards I can imagine, and both you and Wop own it in your S1 epic collections. The insane amount of cards 9003 has collected, I’m absolutely positive that many of them were inflated before he had them. While I’m not saying I think that that should be the standard everyone else should live by to complete any collection, I don’t believe that the effects from that first point are serious enough to suggest technically action (though I get that’s not what you were trying to say).
As to pull events, probably, but so do things like bank transfers. It’s also usually pretty easy to avoid doing that for anyone in the card server (which I get, isn’t all card farmers). And finally, I don’t believe distortion of deck value is really a major issue. Personally I think inflation makes things a little bit more fun, but that’s just me. I appreciate you correcting my earlier post, and will be sure to try and make my statements more factually accurate next time. ^-^

[Praeceps]

Regardless of the merits of this, would the idea not fit better in Technical?

[Toerana]

Regardless of the merits of this, would the idea not fit better in Technical?

Probably, but I wasn't sure where to put it and wanted primarily thoughts from the cards community.

Re the Idea about Junk: I definitely like this idea, it would help to deal with the issue, but the bulk of over inflated commons are CTE'd and thus incredibly hard to pull.

[Giovanniland]

The trading cards market is supposed to be a free market, with little to no restrictions. It's up to everyone how they want to play the card game: whether to collect cards pertaining to a certain theme, earning DV by storing legendaries, inflating cards, etc. I personally inflate cards for fun more than for the DV boost.

Placing a cap on the value of cards doesn't make sense and will not only kill a perfectly fine market strategy, but also end the rivalry between inflators and deflators with a clearly lopsided solution. It's like if raiding was suddenly declared illegal. I also disagree with the idea of junking affecting MV because it's an action impossible for those who want the MV of a card up to prevent, as opposed to an open auction where both sides must fight for their goals of increasing/decreasing the MV.
Furthermore, there is a way to deflate cards already. Simply place them up at auction for low values, and remove the inflated trades from the last 10 so they don't count for MV anymore. Of course, inflators will fight to keep the value up but that's expected since they don't want to see their DV crash. If they don't, well, it decreases pretty soon and there are many examples of these cards, such as former transfers in which the nation transferring bank doesn't care for the value.

Question to Toerana: if the MV cap is somehow implemented, what would happen with existing cards? I would certainly not like existing inflated cards to decrease in value after all time and effort I've spent on inflating cards, nor do I think anyone that also inflates cards would agree with that solution.

Answers to other concerns:

[*]For collectors (of any kind of collection) it becomes much harder to complete their collection if there are highly inflated commons that belong in the collection. Because of the high Market Value and because inflating owners tend to hoard those cards.
[*]They block many community-driven pull-events when they enter the market and lure Market Value sharks into a bidding war.
[*]They create some distortion in the Deck Value rankings.

The pattern in this is that the benefits of inflated commons go to the people who inflate them, while the negative effects affect all others.
It's not so bad that it breaks the card-game, but the effects are there.

1. Collections aren't supposed to be easy to complete. There are a number of other reasons a card may be hard to get: someone hoards the card; the nation is well-known in the NS community; the nation has ceased-to-exist leaving a card with very few owners... an inflated card is just as fine as other challenges I listed before. That said, I do not inflate cards with the sole purpose of preventing someone from collecting them, because that's rude for the collector, and I will help a collector get a card if said type of inflation has been done.
2. It's indeed sad when pull events are blocked by other cards, whether they are transfers, inflated cards, etc. But the market shouldn't be easy for pull events at all times. Remember these events aren't even the main purpose of TCALS, which is to make transfers riskier (coincidentally, since inflations are often done like transfers, TCALS is also a way for inflations to fail).
3. Inflation is a legitimate strategy in the trading cards market. Saying it 'distorts' the rankings sounds like saying it's a bad thing, and it isn't. One often overlooked factor is that inflation helps small collectors increase their DV when they find an inflated card and choose to keep it, so in a sense it does benefit people other than the inflators. Furthermore, inflated cards don't appear out of the blue - there is time and effort spent into inflating them, and a high risk of being heisted too. It requires time and effort as any other card trading strategy.

[Pluvie]

Actually, and this ain't no expert opinion, but I'd much rather see an accelerated rate of pulling inflated cards than a MV cap. A cap would detract from cards that actually deserve their MV and meh, not my thing. I do think something could be done about over-inflation and I'd much rather see that in a form of accelerated pull rates on inflated cards so they could be much easier crashed.

I've also heard some people talk about MV decay (sorta like how influence decays in GCRs) and I wouldn't be at all opposed to that either

[Fhaengshia]

There's a few ideas here which is good to hear, it's good to hear from all sides.
If changes are made to estimating MV, there needs to be more changes: I think the fact that commons that are traded at .01 or .02 have their MV reduced to 0 is an oversight of the current rounding system.
My understanding is MV < 5.00 is rounded to the nearest .05, and MV < 50.00 is rounded to the nearest .50, with MV above rounded to nearest 1.00.
It seems a ceiling to MV is unpopular, but a floor maybe needed for these commons, 9003 has a collection highlighting this: May Day: Another worthless collection

[9003]

There's a few ideas here which is good to hear, it's good to hear from all sides.
If changes are made to estimating MV, there needs to be more changes: I think the fact that commons that are traded at .01 or .02 have their MV reduced to 0 is an oversight of the current rounding system.
My understanding is MV < 5.00 is rounded to the nearest .05, and MV < 50.00 is rounded to the nearest .50, with MV above rounded to nearest 1.00.
It seems a ceiling to MV is unpopular, but a floor maybe needed for these commons, 9003 has a collection highlighting this: May Day: Another worthless collection

This has been patched and when those cards hit the market they get a MV of 0.01. The server is also slowly updating them (very slowly). This was a funny glitch and made a great collection lol.

[Fhaengshia]

There's a few ideas here which is good to hear, it's good to hear from all sides.
If changes are made to estimating MV, there needs to be more changes: I think the fact that commons that are traded at .01 or .02 have their MV reduced to 0 is an oversight of the current rounding system.
My understanding is MV < 5.00 is rounded to the nearest .05, and MV < 50.00 is rounded to the nearest .50, with MV above rounded to nearest 1.00.
It seems a ceiling to MV is unpopular, but a floor maybe needed for these commons, 9003 has a collection highlighting this: May Day: Another worthless collection

This has been patched and when those cards hit the market they get a MV of 0.01. The server is also slowly updating them (very slowly). This was a funny glitch and made a great collection lol.

Oh cool!
Things are able to change after all

[Toerana]

Question to Toerana: if the MV cap is somehow implemented, what would happen with existing cards? I would certainly not like existing inflated cards to decrease in value after all time and effort I've spent on inflating cards, nor do I think anyone that also inflates cards would agree with that solution.

Ideally, they'd be reverted to the cap. However, naturally, lots of people would be mad about that, so I wouldn't be against just having the cap affect cards that aren't already above the cap. If they fall back below the cap, they can't go back above it, but people don't loose thousands of DV overnight from their cards having a cap forcibly applied