Madden 20, 21: Ultimate Team Auctions

[QuikSand]

I am not a console guy. Of late, my son has been getting into console games, including FIFA and Madden.

As a novice entrant late in the year of Madden 20, I have a lot of catching up to do. Fortunately, I am unburdened by any aspirations to become a talented button masher. I will be able to play against my son, that's about all I care about.

Until... wait, there's a fully functioning auction house where you can buy and sell players for your "Ultimate Team?" Hmm, tell me more...


Short version: I'm disappointed that web information about this is a complicated combination of obsolete, ill-informed, and sponsor-driven. It's hard to "learn the ropes" by just going to the vast cloud of pinheads out there who write... or more likely make videos... without being particularly informed or articulate.

So... starting this thread here in familiar friendly territory. I'll gladly take guidance from this group, if you have it. And I'll post some stuff I'm picking up from Madden 20, in advance of the release of Madden 21 where I expect to have my first full immersion process.

[QuikSand]

RESOURCES POST

The best overall resource I have found is this Google Spreadsheet posted by a reddit user.



(note: will add links as they merit it)

[QuikSand]

THE NATURE OF THE AUCTION HOUSE

This took some time for me to sort out on my own, but understanding these ABCs is the first step toward mastering the auction system.

MOST IMPORTANT THING TO KNOW:

When you pull up a set of players, the auction house only has room to show you 100 players. If the set you have pulled is more than 100 players, it will show you the 100 players from your set closest to expiring.

This is a "duh" item for those who get it, but for those who don't get it... it's a completely revelatory thing. Even now, very late in the annual cycle for M20, pulling up "all players" in the auction house means you get 100 guys who are all within a minute or so of expiring... the page just quickly turns into CLOSED everywhere. It can be overwhelming, and if you don't understand what's going on, it seems broken. It's not, it's just designed poorly.

Understand that the poorly designed auction house is itself a "barrier to entry" for free flow of information and participation, and use that to gain an advantage.

[QuikSand]

MORE BASICS OF AUCTION MINDSET

Acquiring players (or other items) in the auction house is to serve any of three purposes:

-To have the card
-To re-sell the card
-To quicksell the card for other resources

Being aware of all three of these is important. I'll have some thoughts on that in more detail later, just born from my own last couple of weeks fiddling around in the auctions.

[QuikSand]

THE TWO MOST PRODUCTIVE WAYS TO "BUY LOW"

Getting good value in auctions, especially a robust offering of auctions like this, requires understanding the market. In Madden terms, I think there are two fundamental ways to get good value:

-Understand the "proper" price for a card, and purchase it when it becomes available with a BUY NOW price substantially below that level

-Take advantage of poorly designed pricing where the BID price is minimal or otherwise too low, and win through bidding or default at an aberrant low price

Nothing shocking here. A few thoughts:


When the MUT auction house is robust (it still is, more or less, now, even in July at the end of a cycle with a basically abandoned game) the ability to grab cards just sitting around at too-low prices should be pretty low. You have to go looking for them.

The key way to do so is to be searching on a set of cards that will generate fewer than 100 results, and sorting by NEWEST. Doing a search like this, combined with an understanding of what prices merit your attention and action, is the best way to do this BUY NOW sniping. Lots...even most... of the value in the auction house is gained by unwise sellers posting players at too-low prices, and wise buyers taking advantage of that and buying them quickly.


As for the latter approach, this is basically the reverse. The two ways to get way-too-low pricing through actual bidding are either that an auction goes largely undetected and the only bidder walks away a super-cheap winner, or there's contested bidding at the close-out and the price essentially gets set by the second-most-interested bidder. Both are potentially high value opportunities, but are inconsistent.

[QuikSand]

GET THE APP

I am not an expert by any means. But I cannot figure out any way on the console to see the same depth of information about a card for sale that I can see in the companion app. Namely, in the app I can immediately pull up a page for the player and see all the other active auction of the same card, as well as a history of recent actual purchase prices with time stamps. That is a HUGE information advantage, and I use the app far more than I use the console. The app is only for Auction stuff, you can't use it to power up cards or whatnot, but you can buy/sell there and while it's buggy, it's seemingly far more powerful than merely using the console.

Very open to learning that there's some non-intuitive way to see the same data via the console controller...I have tried everything I can think of with no results. For now, I'm sold that app > console for these purposes.

[QuikSand]

By the way, if you're a Madden player and have insight from actually playing the game that might be helpful for an auction-only guy like me, that's totally welcome here. I remain intrigued by the variations in the marketplace... that certain 97-rated guys are clearly in FAR higher demand than others, and I'm piecing all that together, but don't claim any real insight there.

BTW, my son is still playing introduction-level challenges, he's great against beginner level competition but has trouble above that. His stuff earns him the occasional 75-rated players and 2,000 coins and whatnot, which is supposed to be important at his level... but principally because of our efforts in the auction house, we easily have capital of a few million coins worth and a 94-overall roster. So he gets to have 99 Lamar throw bombs to 97 Moss and hand off to 99 Bo and it's all good as a 7yo.

[QuikSand]

HOW TO BUY A GOOD VALUE PLAYER RIGHT NOW

Okay, let's assume for the moment that you want someone right away. How do you maximize value in doing so?

Recall:

Originally Posted by QuikSand

When you pull up a set of players, the auction house only has room to show you 100 players. If the set you have pulled is more than 100 players, it will show you the 100 players from your set closest to expiring.

Okay... the point of this is... don't just rely on the default auction view of "All Players." It is too big. In essence, you're just seeing the players who are just about to expire. If they were posted at attractive prices, they are likely already plucked. So the only real value there is probably going to be the low-BID players, where you can compete at the end of the auction in hopes of getting good value. So, you don't have much control over what you get -- this can be a productive way to land below-market prices on random players or just flip-for-training guys (more on this later) but not great if you need, frex, a more legit starting HB to do a rushing challenge.

NARROW YOUR SEARCH

The main way to find value is to narrow your search of players to the point where it yields fewer than 100 players total. You want to see them all, and then sort by NEWEST.

If you sort by newest, the players you're seeing should start with guys with 59 minutes remaining (in almost all cases). That means you're seeing guys just as they hit the auction. These are the guys who have the best chance of being priced too low, and being a good value for you.

If you need that RB, frex, limit your search to HB. Start with only "Elite" but that likely will give you too many guys, to you might want to search by OVR groups... whatever is your appropriate skill level to target. Search by HB, 92-93 and the complete pull will be <100, and you sort by NEWEST to see what has just been offered.

Note: if you're in the app, when you pull a given player, you can quickly check to see whether the price is "good" relative to recent purchases, or relative to other cards available right now -- super valuable.


If you start to do these targeted searches, you will likely become familiar with the players who come up with them. With HB 92-93 there's a nice band of familiar faces... Kamara, Bell, Josh Jacobs, A Peterson, etc. Over time, you'll likely gather who is in fairly high demand and who isn't. That can serve you well, if you're willing to put in the time. But even if not, the app can help you cut through that clutter and isolate good deals.

Anyway...right now, in game, the James White 93 card is selling for around 20-25K. There are three on the market with BUY prices 20.6, 25.0, and 26.9. That range of prices is what you have to beat... especially if you want to buy low and sell high to make money. You need to oversome a 10% tax on sales... so there's a narrow possible margin here, if you can buy at 20.6, post him at around 26.8, and wait for a sale... you's profit around 4K from that. THAT is what you're buying by isolating the low price BUY prices. It is do-able..these markets are variable enough that there's over 10% give between crests and troughs with nearly every player. Find the low points.

[Fidatelo]

Interesting stuff! I had no idea there was an Auction House in Madden these days. Takes me back to my days of playing the AH in early-WoW.

Speaking of which, there is a third way to make money on an AH that you haven't listed. That method is to pick a relatively rare yet in-demand resource (player card in this case, I guess) and corner the market on it, then jack up the price. Buy every listing every time you see it for cheaper than your price and then re-list it for your price. Perhaps the sheer volume in Madden makes this infeasible, I don't know, but it's something to consider.

[QuikSand]

Corner the market is viable, but risky. I have fiddled with it here and there, but can't endorse it as useful - especially while there are more vanilla paths to pursue.

[QuikSand]

MY CURRENT VALUE SEARCH

Right now, here's the main search I am using to glean for value. My team's cash balance at any time is between 100K and 700K in coins, so when I have cash I do this hunt pretty routinely:

All Offense or All Defense
98-99
Newest

Splitting the 98-99 universe into O and D will almost always narrow the universe below 100 players (dinnertime and late night ET the possible exception)... so searching on "newest" gives me the latest additions and a chance to snipe for modest values when they show up.

To make this work, I have run this search enough times that I have become vaguely familiar with all the 98-99 players and their markets. And with the lower-priced players in this tier, I have become very familiar. So, there is a whole tier of players whom I can easily watch and spot a bargain... including several where it's fairly easy to do, since <100K is an easy rule of thumb. So, the 98 DT Mean Joe Greene is a perfect example... the the last week or two, he bobs around between 100K and 140K as actual sale prices. if I have the cash and see him with a BUY below 100K, I just buy him and list him at 130K or so. Sometimes it flips in minutes, other times it takes a day or so, but it always works. Same for CB Byron Jones (120-160), SS Ed Reed (140-200), LT Joe Thomas (90-120), and a handful of others.

It's just a grind. But buy at 92K, post and sell at 130K, you net $25K on the deal. Find that sort of value a few times a day 9and that is indeed possible) and this is low hanging fruit to make money. Other people are doing this, so you have to do the NEWEST sort. And I fairly often am on the fence about a player (Mean Joe at 98K, hmmmmmm) and he gets snagged with 58m remaining on his 1hr post. So, I missed that one, but was on the right track.

I'm not liquid enough to buy unlimited 100K guys, but at any time I am typically trying to sell a half dozen such players toward the high part of their usual range, after buying them at or below the low part of the same range.

If you don't have 500K to work with like this and the 98-99 guys... then the same logic can apply at a lower level. You'll need to sort more finely... maybe 92-93 CBs only (watch the double positions, obv, like WR and CB for more depth than others) or possibly players within one group of cards (Zero Chill or whatnot) but the important thing is to winnow your search below 10 players, and do the same search enough that you get comfortable with the ebb and flow of the market for guys you now "know."

[QuikSand]

VALUE SEARCHES WITHOUT KNOWING THE PLAYERS

Okay, this is my new angle. Not new overall, just one I pieced together and now love.

First... here are the QuickSell values for all trade/sell-able players:



Why mention this? Because at some point, pumping up your Power Up players will be a key for you. And it's a key for lots of players out there. So, know this.

First... here's a great and easy rule of thumb (apparently a lot simpler in M20 than in earlier games):

If you can exchange 1 coin for 1 training point, that's a good deal

Players, by the chart above, can QuickSell for training. You need thousands in training to upgrade your good/top players. So, training points are valuable to you and to others, period.

As nearly as I can tell, the overall best value in simply buying players for their training QuikSell value appears with 97-rated guys-- any 97 player available in the auction house can be swapped for 48,300 purple training points.

As it turns out, this is a viable possibility in the auction house. In general, player pricing seems to collapse a bit within the two point bands we can search by... so the best values are definitely the odd rated players (92 and 93 and lumped together, their prices tend to be similar, so 93s are the better value for this purpose). For most groups, it's quite hard to pay X in coins and come away with X in training points. But for the 97 guys, getting that 48,300 in training for 48,000 coins or less is pretty realistic. And, here's the bottom line... that creates a fairly hard lower bound on the value of these players. Because 97 players are just "worth 48K" to those of us seeking training, you can generally assume that any 97-rated player selling for under 48K is a good deal. You don't need to know anything about the player.


So... my routine:

Search each individual position
96-97
Price (not BUY price, just Price)

I train my eye to skip past all the 96 guys, and look for the first 97 guys in each group. In the 5m it takes to go through all these groups, I more often than not will find one or more players who are out there selling for 45K or so. I just buy them (via "BUY IT NOW"), I don't care who the player is. Then, if I am urgently in need of training points, I flip him for training... but otherwise, i generally just post the same guy on the auction block at a point (watching the current market for him) that gives me profit... typically 65K or so. It sounds stupid, but again, we are taking advantage of bidders with limited information but perhaps unlimited access to mommy's credit card...hey if that dude is building a Seattle theme team and he really wants my 97 Tyler Lockett for $68K, fresh off my own purchase for $46K, then who am I to say no to that?

* So... understand the market power of the QuickSell values.
* Take my word that 1:1 is a powerful ratio and easy to remember
* Anyone you buy under that 1:1 ratio is valuable either to re-sell or QuickSell

That also means... if you're just splashing around among the cheap players... guys who were put out with no minimum bid... keep the QuickSell values in mind there too. 85 rated guys for under 1,000. 90 rated guys under 5,000. The value roughly doubles every two points. It's not hard to remember that much.

[QuikSand]

Super proud of the boy of late. He came to me, after discovering the way the "Ultimate Legends" cards work, and said he thought we might have a backdoor way to get some of the top tier players from that set.

The UL group was released with a scheme... if you collect the five base UL cards for a given player, you can trade in the set for one card that's better than any of them.

Boy (7) said "if we can't buy the Jonathan Ogden 99 card, maybe we could just buy the other cards and trade them in..." Turns out the market is semi-corrected for this (meaning that the best card from the set of 5 components is artificially highly prices to accommodate this setup) ... but it's not fully corrected. As always, knowing the rules and how to do the work pays off against the ignorant.

So, today we have assembled and flipped Randy Moss once, and have a maxed-out Sean Taylor on the block, all in the pursuit of clearing 100K coins each cycle. Good lad!

[QuikSand]

In the super unlikely case anyone is paying attention to this... the $48K for 97-rated rule of thumb is dissolving in utility as the game is about to be eclipsed by the release of M21.

Even two weeks ago, finding any 97-rated guy for under, say, 46K was an insta-buy and easy money to re-sell him for 60K. Now, there are lots around for sale at 44, 42, 40 or less. The non-super-premium market is just dissolving, I assume.

So it goes.

[QuikSand]

= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =
ALL CONTENT AFTER THIS POINT IS ON MADDEN 21, UNLESS STATED OTHERWISE
= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =

[QuikSand]

My access to M21 started today. Boy has gotten through a bunch of the easy challenges, I have gotten acquainted with the auction houses. Without the app and a comfortable frame of reference, I'm just poaching end-timer guys at low prices, have cleared maybe 100K in a couple hours of fiddling around. Having fun.

[QuikSand]

...haven't bothered updating here. The boy plays a bit, he prefers super-easy mode where he can score a lot, that's fine. I like building the roster, and playing the markets.

Turns out EA is now saying FU to players like me. My account has been semi-banned from the auction house a couple times, apparently because my ratio of games played to other activity is too low for their liking.

Fuck EA, I know, I know. Fool me twice, shame on me...fool me again, all the damned shame on me, I get it.

[albionmoonlight]

Why does EA care one way or the other? They don't make more money if you play the games or not, right?

[QuikSand]

I think the motivation for EA is basically - if clever people can make enough money by being smart, then that keeps them from going to the EA Store and spending US Dollars to scratch their various Madden itches.

Obviously the model here is to make more money on top of what they get from selling the game itself, and selling the online subscriptions to play multiplayer. I don't love it, but that's fully understandable to me.

So, players like me who don't want to stay in our lane are supposed to be really coin-starved, playing every tiny challenge and getting frustrated that our team isn't good enough. So when they drop the new 88 Bo Jackson, we feel like THAT is what we need to progress. But since we don't have the coins to go get him, we instead buy packs advertised as maybe including him. "Buy" being the operative word.

So, that's what they want. Got it. They have cracked down on coin farming, multiple ghost accounts, and stuff like that... which I don't object to, since that's not my lane. They have imposed a 10% tax on every auction, to make it harder for smart market players to succeed... that's annoying but still surmountable.

But it's a new wrinkle, it sounds, that they are now outright issuing temporary bans for accounts that just don't smell right. I have gotten banned twice, with no explanation, but online chatter reveals some people similarly situated are suffering from having "bad ratios" - low number of games played, relative to our coin/asset totals. Whether they think that's a proxy for a cheater (much like people walking into banks with huge amounts of cash is a proxy for illegal activity?) or whether they really despise me and my style (just churn out coins by buying low, selling high, in the auction house)... it really doesn't matter.

I'm un-banned now, still fiddling around, I use my occasional 4 minutes on the Madden app here and there to fill time that once might have gone to timewaster apps like Plants v Zombies or whatnot. I treat it like my not-quite-senior-citizen equivalent of doing daily crosswords to "keep sharp." (I still try to do a daily crossword, natch)

But I am fighting the pull of getting emotionally connected to this. We're not going to pay for the full subscription package to play multiplayer, I don't think, and I won't even pay for whatever the thing is that lets you play the Franchise mode (even though I kinda want to).

Making my peace here. I do not hate the game (like some pissed off long-timers seem to)... I actually like it, for lack of high expectations. But I'm not really welcome at the party, they're making that much clear.

[QuikSand]

Well, despite some off-putting issues, I/we basically have stuck with this as an on-and-off pastime for the full season. The Madden 21 game is basically on its last breath of its annual cycle, at this point.

You have to play a variety of games and challenges to gain resources, so i have improved my button-mashing skills from "awful" to "moderate" I'd say. I remain unwilling to, and not very interested in, becoming a "take on the world" guy, really. But I have had a good deal of fun learning about, and exploiting, the whole market mechanism. I believe the pejorative term for me is "rosterbator."

Overall... we built a maxed-out Ravens theme team (exceptionally good), a nearly maxed-out Dolphins theme team (pretty good) and are a handful of expensive cards short of a Chargers theme team (my boy's pick, for reasons I cannot understand). There is not much strategy to the team-building, exactly, it's not a challenge in that way - rather, it's just difficult to get the resources you need to acquire the top cards, especially all of them.

Anyway, it has been pretty fun. We are almost certain to buy Madden 22, and start anew in August or so.

[QuikSand]

Well, EA is dribbling out announcements about their Madden 22 game. Some changes will affect me, it seems.

-they are making multiple changes to the marketplace setup, steering away from a true free market and putting controls on it (like only allowing prices within a set of boundaries centered on the average recent sales price)... I suspect their main motivation here is to shut down third party coin sales (where some company says pay us $20 and we will buy your stiff player for a million coins, or whatnot)... the net effect will likely be to stifle players like me who like to be smart in the auction house as a means to make money overall

-also news that they have put a lot into the "franchise" mode, and maybe FOF/text players like me should give it a re-look... if there's much of anything at all there, it could be a welcome revival of that element of the game that insiders seem to agree has been dying on the vine for the last several years' offerings (in Madden 20 it was very uninspiring, I didn't even bother in Madden 21)

[albionmoonlight]

Originally Posted by QuikSand

-also news that they have put a lot into the "franchise" mode, and maybe FOF/text players like me should give it a re-look

This reminds me of the great forgotten what-if of EA almost bundling FOF (I forget what version) with the Madden disk.

I wonder where things would be if that had happened.