Community Forum

This is my first year playing this game so I don’t have years of experience like a lot of players - my take is that live series cards are only worth something when players need them to finish live series collection and I think 99% of players trying to do that have finished it long ago. The scouting report vault pack and new conquest with vault pack the last 2 days took the prices down even lower. Only a small handful of cards that have been around for most of the season have retained any value (a few wbc cards, inning boss cards, headliners cards), but if you look at them closely, you’ll see that most only have 1-2 sales some days. (Unless bots are working them ofc)

@TripleH-4481_PSN @TripleH-4481_PSN I haven’t finished ghost conquest map yet but have some unopened vault packs. Last one I opened was 10/11 and was Glasgow or Yamamoto…

5 million cap is for stubs. Not value of your inventory. You can check that with the showzone app. To make this example easy - say you have 10 babe Ruth cards that are a million each. If you sold 6 of them - you’d only have 5 million stubs. If you sold 7 of them - you’d only have 5 million stubs. You can spend your stubs (or put in bids for cards) to make room to sell more things but you can only have 5 million stubs liquid at any given time.

@drbear100_psn it’s def not greedy or stub rich investors. Players can’t have more then 5million Stubs at a time. If you have 5mil you can still sell things but you won’t get stubs for it. I seen the stub transferring happen enough in real time to have no doubt it’s automated and coordinated using 2 or more accounts. When you look at completed transactions of the card in question you see multiple transactions a minute with the highest and lowest prices - it’s not like someone is hoarding the supply of a card and charging a premium. You can’t tell if an entry in the completed sales list is a buy or sale and it would seem obvious, except when they are transfer stubs they create a large margin to have the account they want to move funds to buy the cards for the lowest price then sell then back at the highest. So if the margins are 150k and 20k. And keep in mind this happens so fast you don’t even see most of it on the bid sheet - the stub seller accounts list a card for 20,001 buy now and the new account buys it. Then the new account list it for 149,999 and it is bought back by the stub seller - instantly. Each time that happens, 129,999 stubs get transferred from stub seller to new account. Even when a normal or greedy player sees what’s going on, all they can do is buy up as many of the cards they can, see what the highest prices are when transferring is going on and list their cards for somewhere under that so the bots will buy it up the next time stubs are transferred through that card.

@Manu__SDS_MLBTS tbh, the market is feeling a little boring and predictable. The last app update may have taken out some bots, It’s hard to tell. Lately it seems like there is a fraction of marketplace activity compared to earlier in the season. Most of the value that cards have right now is relative to how that card is used for stub transfers. I mean, it’s like there is tons of supply but the only demand is what bots need (or need out of their way) for stub transferring. Many cards have price points being set by bots. For example, Jared girdlinger draft card. Mid round card been 15-24k since coming out. But now listings are 55k then 98k then over 100k. There’s 4 buy now listings around 44k. If those get bought up and the price moves to 55k, 4 more listings will get made at the 40k price to keep the price point there. Except for when stub transferring is happening, the price goes 6 figures. I guess I’m trying to say the market doesn’t feel like you’re competing against other players. Instead it’s a market that has bot activity going on and you can interact with some of - but it’s not fun.

@rubicante23_PSN totally.

On a different note, not sure why there was no new chase card today…

@Manu__SDS_MLBTS @sds_joek_psn
Did the phase III thing ever go into effect? Stub transferring is happen on lots of cards the past few days. Lots of cards. My guess is stub transferring has been spread out to many different cards for shorter bursts of time to avoid detection and/or showing up on sites like showzone that track market activity. After the bots do its transferring business they populate the bid sheet with 10-15 listings to avoid tipping people off to the cards they are using over and over and over for this. Can’t cover up the completed history tho. Anyways, I’m pretty tired of talking about the bots. It’d be awesome if you guys could tighten up filters before this weeks flash sale.

Hmm. This made me curious since I don’t open packs too often. I just opened 40 ballin packs and zero diamond cards… I was expecting to pull at least 1 but I just got reminded why I don’t bother opening packs.

@PLY24MKR_XBL said:

Marruci breece knit batting gloves diamond being bottet reset server make it to sign in again!

I’ve been down this road all season, and honestly, it’s infuriating. You can report it, call it out, and be rightfully pissed about how unfair and corrupt it is. That’s what you should do. I’ve practically begged SDS to address it. It ruins the marketplace, hurts legitimate players, and steals revenue from the very people making the game. It’s cancer to the game, and the lack of meaningful action has honestly taken a lot of the fun out of it for me. Just don’t expect reporting it to make you feel any better.
The unofficial advice? Pay attention to which cards are being used and how their prices move. If you happen to have 20x of them from when they were cheap, listing yours well below the bots’ inflated prices can be a pretty easy way to cash in while their activity is happening. When bots make it impossible to compete in a normal market, sometimes your best bet is to piggyback on their activity. If you can’t beat em, join em? Pretty lame and ridiculous that this is where we are at, but hey, here we are.

@SiberiaTigerCub_PSN apologies. I don’t mean to sound like blocking an entire country would be helpful… It would not. I meant to emphasize that I think the most effective thing to do would be blocking unwanted traffic at the source - more aggressively.

@Dolenz_PSN I left a pretty lengthy comment in the main marketplace thread how recent bans have actually been fueling the marketplace problems. The silence behind it has driven players to search for answers where they are met with many webpages explaining how the marketplace has been corrupted by bots and humans are not able to compete fairly. Those who try may be banned. Therefore the solution is to buy stubs and individual cards directly from them. These pirates are using the problems they created and the failed response as bait to lure customers.

Tl;dr gotta be way more aggressive with the tools you have to keep bots out of the marketplace. 3rd party stub sellers have created web pages explaining how severe the bot infestation has become as SEO to reach frustrated players looking for answers and present a solution to the problem in the form of buying cards and stubs directly from 3rd party sellers.

@SDS_JoeK_PSN Thanks for the update. Unfortunately, it hasn’t changed anything. I checked bids I placed yesterday to see what went through overnight. Most are still sitting as the 1st or 2nd bid, despite numerous sales of the same cards above my bid.
Since you’ve asked me to keep you updated, there’s another behavior I’ve been watching. MLB Draft Drew Buress is trading at inexplicably high prices compared to other mid-round draft cards. Its completed transaction history suggests it’s being used for stub transferring. I experimented by buying up a bunch and listing seven of my own between 70K and 180K. In the past, the bot buys my listings; other times it undercuts me by one stub so quickly that the activity only shows up in completed transactions, not the bid sheet. Today I realized something different going on. about 30 minutes ago, stub transferring was happening and I put my high bids to interfere with it and the activity stopped and suddenly a dozen normally priced sale listings appeared. I’ve seen this before and originally thought it was some automated, largely pointless SDS response to detected stub transferring, perhaps an attempt to make it look like something was being done rather than letting the activity happen out in the open. But it’s becoming much easier to believe SDS does nothing in that situation and the bots themselves are simply covering their tracks. Historically, the lack of normal sale listings and an absurdly high Buy Now price made these cards easy to identify. Now, normal listings suddenly appear, making the market look perfectly fine even though suspicious activity was happening seconds earlier.
As for actually addressing this, source filtering has made the biggest difference in the past, particularly blocking emulators from accessing the app. Banning accounts is fine, but not stopping the problem at all. All the accounts used are temporary and are from players buying 3rd party stubs. So actually, you’re banning accounts that may have used bots for 5 minutes while being accessed by the 3rd party stub sellers. Instead of banning accounts you need to focus on preventing access to the app by configurations used by bots, I.e, android emulators, vpn, ip addresses from Russia and China. I’m not an expert in these things but right now, I would not be surprised if validation tokens from 24 hour verification are getting recycled and spoofed over and over by multiple bots accessing the api. When reCAPTCHA v3 was introduced, the marketplace briefly felt completely free of bots. Even after switching to v2, after the first week of bots running wild, tighter restrictions and verification every six hours seemed to make a noticeable difference. Over the last week, however, the problem has become rampant again, coinciding with verification being extended back to 24 hours. It makes me wonder what other filters have been relaxed.
I think the approach of starting with loose restrictions and gradually tightening them to avoid inconveniencing legitimate users has failed. Spectacularly. Start by restricting bots aggressively, then gradually loosen restrictions if legitimate players are being caught. The reason these bots exist is to steal from legitimate players and SDS by selling the stolen proceeds through third-party stub sites for a fraction of the price.
One last thing, it’s a fact, not just my opinion. SDS’s silence has left players searching elsewhere for answers. I Googled the issue last night and as my first result found what appeared to be a gaming news article describing marketplace protection as essentially nonexistent, with players unable to compete against bots. The article even linked directly to a site selling cards and stubs that players were struggling to obtain legitimately as the only solution to marketplace corruption. Think about that for a second: third-party sellers are using the marketplace bot problem, and SDS’s apparent inability or unwillingness to address it, as SEO to reach frustrated players and sell them the very cards and stubs being obtained through this activity. They’re essentially marketing the solution to a problem they have created that’s hurting your own game. Not to mention frustrating me.

@SDS_JoeK @Manu__SDS @ manus favorite people at SDS Update?

@SDS_JoeK @Manu__SDS @ manus favorite people at SDS
Do you guys even know how rigged the marketplace is right now? If I was a 3rd party stub seller I’d be laughing popping champagne. Prices are getting driven up. Players keep bidding until they reach their ceiling but still won’t be able to obtain cards they are chasing and the price sits right above their limit. Until the next person comes along and keeps bidding until they won’t anymore and the prices are just going up to manipulated highs. It’s exactly what they want because they sell the stubs at a fraction of the price. I just can’t wrap my head around why this is has been allowed to happen all season, with the exception of a couple weeks and a few days here and there. If you guys can’t get a handle on this maybe you should put a disclaimer that the market can’t be trusted or maybe just take it offline for maintenance until you have this under control.
*I feel like a total Karen about this and I’m just about done caring. Having enough stubs has never been the problem for me. I enjoy going through the market, buying and selling cards and following the prices. The bots are so severe right now that I’m not able to get any enjoyment from the marketplace and I WANT to enjoy that part of the game. I don’t think it’s too much to ask!

According to showzone his meta overall is 3rd highest starting pitcher but I couldn’t tell you why. I tried him vs cpu a few times and was underwhelmed. Those ratings are meant for online playing so I gotta think he has some value that I haven’t found yet.

@SDS_JoeK @Manu__SDS @ manus favorite people at SDS this is ridiculous… whenever you guys get around to looking at your internal numbers you’ll probably notice there’s 8x more market activity then just a few days ago. I think we’re at that place again where it’s pointless to use the marketplace until you guys do something.

@SDS_JoeK @Manu__SDS @ manus favorite people at SDS
I know it’s the weekend and maybe the people running the bots are taking advantage of that… i haven’t seen the level of aggression the bots are displaying today for a couple weeks. Price fixing, undercutting, hoarding. Many items being used for stub transfers right now. You guys have the tools to deal with this… use them.

@SDS_JoeK_PSN actually, I may have spoke a little too soon. I haven’t paid much attention the last day but wanted to reply that your prompt attention to the matter is appreciated and meaningful. Without getting into it (look at cards won in diamond quest, for starters), A little more tweaking might be helpful. Specifically tightening source/origin based filters. You guys are definitely making a huge difference. I’d even go as far as saying that currently what I’m seeing is tolerable. But thought I’d mention in case you guys are really trying to annihilate all unwanted connections. Thanks

@SDS_JoeK_PSN I have not seen any obvious signs of bots or automated activity this morning and overnight. Thanks for getting on top of it.