Hindsight is always 20/20, but it seems that the biggest missteps this winter Madden promo season were 1) EA allowing everyone to buy as many presents as they wanted and 2) Not fixing the pack odds on presents for lower rates of XL gift pulls.
Would people have whined and complained if EA had limited the number of gifts a player could buy to 10 or 20 per round? Yeah, but that would've died down. Everyone would have been able to live with that and the market would have been able to absorb the 1-2 (on average) 94-96 OVR cards pulled per 100 presents.
Instead lots of people were buying dozens and dozens, even hundreds, of presents per round (if you QS a Ghost of Madden Past, you could buy 43 presents) and pulling multiple XL gifts that ended up being 94-96 OVR cards. So a bunch of people are sitting on 7 Ndamukong Suhs, 12 Gronks and 5 Ed Reeds or whatever. The market is flooded, and these cards' coin values are through the floor.
What I can't figure out is how EA benefits from all these cards being dirt cheap. How much money are they making off bundles with these 95-96 OVR toppers, when people with multiples of the same 95-96 OVRs can just sell them in the auction house (even if it is for 300-400K) to buy training for whatever LTD card, or get coins for whatever other card they want? EA can't be making much off the bundles, because people have really very little need to buy them.
Hindsight is always 20/20, but it seems that the biggest missteps this winter Madden promo season were 1) EA allowing everyone to buy as many presents as they wanted and 2) Not fixing the pack odds on presents for lower rates of XL gift pulls.
Would people have whined and complained if EA had limited the number of gifts a player could buy to 10 or 20 per round? Yeah, but that would've died down. Everyone would have been able to live with that and the market would have been able to absorb the 1-2 (on average) 94-96 OVR cards pulled per 100 presents.
Instead lots of people were buying dozens and dozens, even hundreds, of presents per round (if you QS a Ghost of Madden Past, you could buy 43 presents) and pulling multiple XL gifts that ended up being 94-96 OVR cards. So a bunch of people are sitting on 7 Ndamukong Suhs, 12 Gronks and 5 Ed Reeds or whatever. The market is flooded, and these cards' coin values are through the floor.
What I can't figure out is how EA benefits from all these cards being dirt cheap. How much money are they making off bundles with these 95-96 OVR toppers, when people with multiples of the same 95-96 OVRs can just sell them in the auction house (even if it is for 300-400K) to buy training for whatever LTD card, or get coins for whatever other card they want? EA can't be making much off the bundles, because people have really very little need to buy them.