If somebody is talking about sports games and what trends have changed them in the last five years, it would be easy to argue that virtual team building has been the trendsetter. Whether it's Ultimate Team (EA titles), or Diamond Dynasty (MLB The Show), or MyTeam (NBA 2K), or MyClub (PES) every major sports title has taken a stab at this mode.

And it's easy to see from both a business and consumer level why this has become a trend. There's plenty of money to be had here, and the modes are extremely popular.

At the end of the day, a ton of people like to build their own team, and just as many people like collecting things, or buying/selling things, or just opening packs of virtual cards to see what surprises are within.

In a lot of ways, many of these modes are not unlike Hearthstone or any other collectable card game (CCG for short). You usually want the best cards possible, and the idea of opening that next pack always has an allure.

But the interesting thing about Diamond Dynasty is that it decides to eschew as much of the noise as possible. And that's what I want to talk about after the jump.

If we can agree that FIFA Ultimate Team is the gold standard, based on its popularity and the function of it sort of setting a lot of these baseline rules, I think it's now time to look at the Diamond Dynasty mode as the mode that looks to disrupt a lot of these market trends.
 

Pay To Win?

When looking at these team-building modes, I think you have to look at the currency model first and foremost. All of these modes are "free to play" if you ignore the fact that you paid a price to buy the game in the first place.

It's perfectly fair to say you never have to spend a dime in these modes; however, a lot of the time there comes a point where people either decide they're tired of feeling overmatched, or they just want to use certain players and will pay the price to try and get those guys. And this is where the term "pay to win" comes in with this mode, much like it does with most other traditional free-to-play games.

Most of these modes generally use two currencies so that when you pay money, you're only paying money to get a separate type of "cash" that can be used to buy packs of cards. You can buy more expensive packs that give you a better chance of getting better players, but the point is random chance still exists. You can't just spend money and buy a LeBron James, or Lionel Messi or a Sidney Crosby. You can only buy players with the other form of currency that is earned by playing games or selling players. In other words, you can't just "pay to win" by spending cash to get the best players. (How you use these players still will be the deciding factor, of course, but you've given yourself an A squad to try and make up for any shortcomings you might have on the sticks.)

Diamond Dynasty says to hell with that, of course you can buy any player you want! There's one type of currency, and you can buy it with real cash and do what you want with it. You can buy a bunch of packs of cards, or you can wait for special promo packs, or you can go right to the auction house and buy whatever player you want if you're willing to spend the coin.

Jayson Young talked about this on our site a couple weeks back as a "whiff" and it's a valid concern. I'm still playing this mode a lot, and it's pretty clear a ton of people have spent a lot of money to get certain players. But the question should be, does that matter?

At this point, I have to say it is not a huge deal. If anything, the biggest issue I have with it now is that I see a lot of the same legends in a lot of the games because people have collected all the players there is to collect. I'm more bored with seeing Mike Schmidt or Kenny Lofton than I am frustrated to be going against them all the time. (And it's not just legends either, team after team has Pat Neshek, for example, because of his slow changeup and sidearm delivery.)

Now, I get that not everybody will feel this way, but the thing about FIFA and NBA 2K is that you still went up against most of those amazing players anyway. FIFA has long had a problem with people just buying players through "nefarious" black markets, and the developers continue to try and find ways to curb these markets. Their latest attempt at combating this issue was through "price banding" of sorts where each player can't be sold for less or more than X amount. It's something that got a lot of flak (and applause), but it's hard to really gauge its effectiveness because it was done in the middle of the year when so much of the black market money is already in the virtual economy.

The point being, these economies are actually insanely complex. So much like a real economy, pulling one lever to try and get one result, might also actually lead to four other outcomes as well -- some of which you maybe did not want in the first place. And while maybe I didn't see as many Ronaldos or Michael Jordans as I would have if you could just legally pay to buy them, it's not like they were so rare that I never saw them either.

Looking beyond the consumers, at a business level either the FIFA team is costing itself money by allowing these black markets to do what it won't let consumers do in the first place, or it's still making more money than it would otherwise be making by forcing players to continually buy packs in the hopes of finally getting that Messi or Ronaldo.

I simply do not know the answer to that complicated question as I'm no in-house economist at EA, but the folks at Sony have clearly decided they feel it's either a better business opportunity to make a single currency, or it's pro-consumer to allow people to ensure their money goes to players they actually want, or it's some combination of the two.
 

The Auction House

I have always said the auction house in any of these modes is my favorite part of them. Seeing how money goes through these modes, or searching out "deals" in the auction house to then flip for a profit is just a fun meta-game within the mode. A lot of people do what I do at a much higher level, but the point is this can be fun.

FIFA is the ultimate wild west, with NHL being close behind it in terms of how "alive" the auction house feels with activity. You can just go right into the auction houses in those games and see timers running down and live bids being put in, and bidding wars breaking out. It's chaotic, and fascinating and in a lot of instances there is a ton of money being thrown around.

At the same time, there's a lot of items that end up not being sold. People "in the know" understand what cards are worth. There are sites dedicated to telling you what the aggregate cost is of players, and there's timers you have to put on these cards so they don't just indefintely sit in the marketplace.

This leads to a lot of people only searching for deals, and you have people just dedicated to watching these markets for those deals. On top of that, the same type of "black market" issues arise here in that FIFA has constantly had to deal with bots that immediately buy up any cards that were put up with very low "buy now" totals. So if a Messi went up with a "buy now" price of 1,000 coins then that card would immediately be poached by a bot rather than a well-to-do consumer who just luckily found a Messi for an insanely low price.

Once again, the folks working on Diamond Dynasty said screw all that. Everything has a set price, and the market still decides what every item is worth, but let's remove all the noise. People can just go and say what the maximum is they're willing to pay to buy an item, and people can go on and say the minimum amount price they'll accept before selling an item.

In some ways this removes some of the fun of the auction house, but at the same time it removes a lot of the stress and competitive nature of it all. At the end of the day, if the point of the mode is to build a team and play with it, it's very easy to once again say Diamond Dynasty is simply streamlining the market to get people into more games.

From what I've gathered, there is actually a sizable number of people who never actually play games within FIFA Ultimate Team. Instead, they just live in the auction house and buy and sell cards to build an amazing team they will never use. And you know what, more power to them if they're having a good time. Nevertheless, for everybody else, an auction house where you can just go on and instantly buy or sell something rather than jumping through the hoops of getting in a bidding war, or not knowing if you're overpaying seems way more sane.

And maybe you don't know what the average price is of a card over its lifespan, but you still know what you paid for it, and you can generally guess what it's worth by looking at the buy now and selling price within the auction house.
 

Collections And The Slow Drip

Every mode has a different take on "collections" in these games, so Diamond Dynasty does not have a gold standard to try and streamline in the truest sense, but the developers have still pushed for efficiency here as well. There are simply team collections for each MLB team, and if you collect all the players, you get a legend. If you decide you want the legend, then you can never sell any of those cards or the legend himself.

In a lot of ways, the collections are like the old Monopoly game promotion McDonalds would run -- just a bit more fair. You can go and get 35 of the 39 players for a collection easily enough if you really target them in the auction house. But there's still going to be those three or four players that cost a ton.

But at the very least, you generally don't have to "collect" the highest-rated players (see: not every diamond level player) to finish these collections. For example, you don't need a Tulowitzki to finish the Rockies collection, and that's where Diamond Dynasty at least tries to keep things on the level to some extent. The developers certainly could have gone the extra step to try and purge consumers of more money as there are definitely completionists out there that would spend whatever money to make sure they owned every card in this mode, but the developers held back a tiny bit.

The slow drip is the other element that comes into play here. The smartest thing this mode does is give you rewards after every game. You receive tangible items -- on top of your currency -- after every game. And these tangible items can be amazing. It's the one factor that can truly make you decide to never spend a dime.

I have randomly gotten a Yu Darvish and Dustin Pedroia after games. Those two cards have netted me about 55,000 coins, which is enough to pretty much buy whatever you want as long as you're not trying to get those top 25 to 50 players. In other words, as long as I'm not big-game hunting and can be happy filling my roster with Justin Verlanders and Bryce Harpers rather than Mike Trouts, then I'm set for life. Or I could risk that money on some of the better packs of cards and hope to hit on one of those amazing players.

The point is, the game rewards those who keep playing it beyond just earning more money for more packs. It's exciting every time you leave a game, even though you know more times than not you won't end up getting something worth very much.
 

Looking Ahead

The unknown still awaits Diamond Dynasty. It's still hard to say if all this streamlining puts a cap on how much people spend or how much people play the mode. You can right now go and buy anything you want, and build any team you want. Beyond the collections, there are no new cards right now being released week to week. The players you do have will go up and down in price depending on the roster updates. For example, I have a Bryce Harper that went up to a 85 overall, which made it a "gold" card. I paid about 900 coins for it when the card was a lower-rated silver card, but now it goes for 3,000-4,000 coins.

These kind of meta-elements will help give the game some legs for those who like the auction house environment, but at the same time, it remains to be seen if the developers will be introducing lots of new takes on cards like MyTeam or FIFA Ultimate Team. In addition, whether or not that even matters is a question as well as there's no way to tell what version of players you're going up against -- as seen above the lineup screen just shows a player's name rather than the card itself and what type of card it could be.

So will this mode have legs is the question that remains. If people can get whatever they want now, will they keep coming back to open packs? Does streamlining hurt the mode in the long term? Does pay-to-win put a cap on a user's tolerance for seeing a lot of the same teams? All of these are tough questions to answer, and they may not have an answer in the public sphere. The folks at Sony will have their internal numbers, but I highly doubt most of them will ever be shared. What that means is that it will come down to anecdotes and individuals to put more information out there for all of us to digest.

But whatever the answer may be, I can confidently say I am happy with what Diamond Dynasty is trying to accomplish here. There are faults and issues, but the folks at Sony are trying to question the accepted trends and see if there's a better way.