Community Manager
1440666fd7e443ec Here is my Devil’s Advocate take on this:
EA made a change for their own reasons, whether we like it/asked for it or not. We do not have access to their roadmap, and historically, these kinds of changes got rolled forward, not reversed/rolled back. So asking to go back to shards is likely just barking at the moon, better off feeding back and getting EA to properly fine tune the new system so it's fair and usable. Also, if people actually understood the change, they would realise this is not really a Draft system. It is a Phase 2 Token system that replaced Shards. Yet people still call it drafts, so here we are.
Anyway, look at the Drafts (and the Store packs). That is simply a mechanism to convert gems/FP into intermediate currency, being cards that can be exchanged into Phase 2 Tokens (previously exchanged into Shards).
So, compare drafts to old store packs and a few things stand out immediately:
- Drafts have a pity system (store mostly doesn't). You are guaranteed something better than the usual lowest odds within 10 or 100 pulls, which makes it fairer in my opinion.
- Store packs were pure casino simulation, with nothing guaranteed outside extremely overpriced, e.g. 30k gem (or equivalent FP) packs, and even then, nothing was truly guaranteed, just higher odds or a higher card.
- Some packs had no repeat scheme, but the probabilities indicated that the top 2-3 rewards will be given last, so, again no guarantees until limits were reached.
- The 3k gem daily pack used to be limited to one. Drafts are not limited in the same way.
Now compare Shards to Phase 2 Tokens. The real reason you need so many drafts is the conversion ratio of the cards. You get nothing for cards up to 112. Then:
113–115 give 5 P2Ts
116 gives 50
117 gives 150
In the shard system, even the lowest OVR cards gave at least 5 or 10 shards for the lowest event OVRs, and the highest OVR (113/115, depending on event OVR cap) gave up to 250. The key equivalents were :
109/111 = 30 shards
110/112 = 60 shards
111/113 = 120 shards
112/115 = 180 shards
If 113–115 cards only gave 5 shards back then, people would have been screaming just as loudly that shards were rubbish. In fact, they did when Captains landed at 4k shards for an untradeable card. So there was an outrage, and many people could not afford these cards, nor did they bother with trying to get them. Even R9 at 2k later was considered borderline insane, so most highly sought after cards were around 1000-1500 gems mark.
Another key difference is that shards had to be used in-event, or they were wasted. Phase 2 Tokens can carry over to future events, another bonus. Keeping that in mind, the actual issues are:
- Unreasonable conversion rate of draft cards into Phase 2 Tokens
- Removal of the ability to purchase or grind Phase 2 Tokens directly
- Removal of DR cards that could be exchanged for Phase 2 Tokens
- Limitation of tradeable supply to buy desired cards in the market (the 117s I want are 5bn+)
- Unreasonable exchange cost for top OVR (900 tokens, while most event cards only return 5)
Address those five, and the system becomes reasonable again, as Phase 2 Token does give you a choice, albeit a very expensive one (more expensive than the Captains' Icons), but you do have a choice.
A lot of that has already been fed back to EA through the mods channel. EA could also improve the pity system by adding some choice within drafts (for example, Pool A is only 117 max player every 50 drafts, Pool B only 116 player every 30, then the 113-115 every 10 etc.)
For context, I spent around 400k gems during TOTY, plus whatever drafts I grinded and pulled three 117 Icons, all untradeable (Gullit came on around the 95th draft). They came from drafts only. Phase 2 Tokens are currently of poor value, so my 116s came from the market. Very lucky but when I look at the past events with the store with daily 3k packs and other store packs, I never pulled top two OVR because there was no pity system. My high-end Icons came from shards. With the current Phase 2 Token setup, I can barely afford a 116 unless I exchange around 60 high-rated cards, which is not happening unless there is a card I really want. But this isn't a Draft problem its a Phase 2 Token problem....so... yeah...... 11DeadlyKnights hit the nail on the head (without the detail).
This is from a highly active grinding F2P perspective as well. I went back to F2P once Gacha kicked in, but if there will be value in the game to pay for it, i wont mind chipping in again, but the value for time and monetary efforts needs to be there.
We will see what happens next, as WC is coming up very soon.
2 lengthy cents.
I think I just come at this from a different perspective, a perspective of never (and, I mean not once) having found EA truly responsive to any issue I’ve raised. Even on glitches/bugs where it was clearly an error on their part and where I was nothing but diplomatic in my communication, they’ve NEVER done right by me (even though it would have cost them basically nothing to make me feel heard and fairly compensated). And what I witness day in and day out in here is that they mostly ignore my fellow users. So, this feels to me like a fundamentally adversarial relationship in which you get nothing by trying to accommodate or be diplomatic with EA. Instead, it appears to me that you have to publicly embarrass them (like the comment section in their last YouTube livestream) to the point that it threatens their bottom line in order to get their attention and force change to a system that increasingly revolves around their wants and needs (not the customers’) Otherwise, they just plow ahead trying to take advantage of us whenever and however they can (see the “draft system” as Exhibit A).
All that said, I appreciate your two cents and I generally agree with your analysis (though I don’t know what those of us who can’t scrape together anywhere near 400k gems are supposed to do). I wholeheartedly agree with your five bulleted points, but my concern is that I can’t imagine EA doing all five. And if they don’t then I have a hard time seeing how we ever get back to a place where F2Pers can remain competitive — which is where we were when the shard system was in place! In the seven weeks since this disaster began my squad went from a place where I had Top 10 players at every position (and at least 5-6 truly meta players) to maybe five Top 10 players and only one truly meta player (I still love my Cech in between the sticks!). I’m daily asking myself why I don’t just quit, and the only real reason at the moment is that I’ve got a league I manage and I don’t want to let those guys down.
But that isn’t going to be enough much longer. Every week that passes without EA doing (or saying!) anything makes me more bitter because it lands as disrespect. Disrespect for the hours and hours we F2Pers have spent building our accounts. I’ve logged in for more than 400 days straight, but thanks to the change from “shard system” to “draft system” (sorry, there’s just no other shorthand for it) all of my effort is being wiped out and I’m falling farther and farther behind the competition with every passing day. I don’t think it’s lost on most F2Pers that, at this rate, we are threatened with permanent second-class citizenhood. And that’s why, if there are going to be changes, they had better be comprehensive (per your five bullets) and they had better come soon. Because EA can rob me of the competitive team I labored to build, but I’ll be damned if I let them rob me of my dignity to boot.
Let me help you get the drafts out of your head, and I will correct your sentence, " I’ve logged in for more than 400 days straight, but thanks to the change from 'shard system' to 'PHASE 2 TOKEN system”....
Now that things are corrected. The 400k gems on one hand is a lot for many players, but on the other, it's not really, because I had ~200k saved for TOTY by not chasing cards I did not need/want, and I grinded a lot of DR since.
The P2W vs F2P, I don't want to get into the politics of it, because every player needs to decide on their own and be realistic wit the expectations as at the end of the day, the game development does cost and it needs to be funded somehow and make money, but the game needs both player types, and it needs to be a symbiotic relationship, which is why the Phase 2 Token needs overhauling as per the 5 key points I made.
The feedback from all of us, including yours, is slowly listened to, and some of it has gone into the game (e.g. highlighted ball that took about a year before we saw that option live), other ideas are discarded. We are unlikely to see commentary back, which breaks the feedback loop at this point in time. The main issue IMO is the current setting with a typical corporate/government slow pace progress/regress (depending on one's point of view). Either way, the time is running out for them because the World Cup is soon, which will be a big deciding point for many players as to which game they'll play.
you have heart and soul brother, you care about the game, and like you, I want to keep fighting for the game we once loved. Keep up the fight.
