How has your collecting/trading habits changed since NeonMob's system overhaul?

In general, how do you think your trading and collecting has changed since the big ‘update’? I know /for sure/ that trading barely exists now in comparison to what it was before - what are the specifics, though? Maybe we can give NeonMob a better idea of how much this update has changed their site as a whole.

  • Collecting: I prefer collecting a few older series. After attempting to collect a series from post-update, I’ve learned it’s almost impossible to finish as a free user. Obviously trading is a part of collecting the series as a whole, but trading doesn’t hold the same weight when it isn’t happening.

  • Trading: I’m holding onto rare cards and no longer accepts commons and uncommons for a rare considering they are so far and few in between. A lot of users, including me, refuse to trade cards from finite series for infinite series thanks to the difference in value. My trades went from 5 trades at the least and 15 at the most in one day to 1 offered trade every day on average.

  • Buying: Prior to the update I was willing to spend the money on packs (especially when I was close to finishing a series). Right now I don’t see the value in buying cards when I may never finished the series I’m buying the packs from.

I’ve read similar experiences from others here, and it’s obvious that site activity is already starting to dwindle. NeonMob’s future seems a lot more uncertain as a site. It makes you wonder: if they had continued with the system as it was, would they be making more money in the long run? Are they making even less now? We can only hope changes are made, and the concerns aren’t ignored.

6 Likes

I really dislike the changes. I have been trading since the beginiing. I am bored now. I looked forward to trading. Now, I find it difficult to know the quality of items or to know th ‘value’ of items.In a sense I am no longer engaged with collection and seem to stay with the same collection forever - i.e., I never complete a collection. This was a challenge in the past; no longer.
Using free cards seems to have no merit. Most, almost all cards selected are common, uncommon or rare. For days (weeks?) nothing changes. It is common to get two or three of the same common selections when choosing using free cards.
I don’t think I can hold out much longer.

5 Likes

The changes hang over the site like a bitter cloud a little… I like how they have requirements now for creating a new series (2 Chases minimum, no more variants) but the trading no longer seems fun.

Please, Neonmob! Improvements are due! :confounded:

I’ve been attempting to complete the same 5 sets ever since the new system was implemented, with little success.

One set in particular I’ve opened somewhere around 55-60 packs for a total of 126 cards. It’s a 20 card set - 5 common 5 uncommon 4 rare 3 very rare 3 extremely rare plus 3 chase. I have pulled ZERO (yes, zero) VR ER or chase. The idea that this set will take “just a little more time” to complete than before the changes is laughable.

Before the changes I was making/accepting/declining 5-10 or more trades per day. Now I might accept 1 trade PER WEEK.

I’m initiating no trades now. It’s frustrating enough without a “return to seekers” button, nevermind trying to trade multiple rares, that no one needs or wants, for a duplicate VR that no one has.

3 Likes

I’m in autopilot.

My pre-upgrade cards are off limits, even dupes. I don’t like to take new card for older cards, even if the trade great. I got 10-15 trades a week, mostly for sets I’m purging. Most of my friends are in the same position as me, nothing to trade.

It’s not fun anymore. I’m still here because I have friends and I care enough for some artist to spend a month trying to complete their 16-card sets.

4 Likes

I used to come, pre-update, for the art collecting, then stay for the trading. (5 min. to open packs, but hours sunk into trading.)

I recently joined again, so I didn’t realize how big the change really was until a couple days in. Haven’t bought recently because no series that I’m currently collecting is close to completion.

For collecting, I started collecting some new series; but I soon made peace with the low odds of completing a set (which is what I care about in the long run). I’ve decided to collect cards from older series for now, because they seem more valuable for trading (plus it feels like a better gamble somehow).

For trading, I’m still trading (maybe once or twice a day). I’m trading pre-update cards for pre-update cards (which probably has little to do with the update and more to do with my absence). Then for post-update series, I’m now trading between common, uncommon, and rares. And then not really anything above that :confused:

Very-rares seem to be about 8 times more rare than rares in the Avatars series, which kind of explains the lack of trading between rares and very-rares since one can only trade 5 cards at a time. @__@

The percentages of rarities seem to be pretty similar with other series that I’ve looked at. But each series has different numbers of cards within rarity classes, which makes value a little trickier to gauge than the pre-update series with numbered editions. For Avatars, the average rarity of each card is about:

Avatars
C   13  4.218%
UC  12  2.084%
R   12  1.391%
VR   8  0.261%
ER   8  0.123%
CH  67  0.006%

Compare that to the numbers from the Oriental Era Women’s Beauty series.

So it would seem that without print count, a better way to judge card value between two post-update series is the average chance of pulling a card within its own series.

2 Likes

I agree with @peopleschampion’s way of describing it: Autopilot. I come on, check new series and votes real quick, collect my cards, see I have nothing to trade 9/10 days and then pop into the forums. I spend WAY more time reading in the forums now than I do on the site proper. And I’m not a sociable person, so that’s a bad sign.

8 Likes

Now, the first thing Im pay attention on a new collection before collect it is the number of chase.
Some new collection have 9, 10 chases… so forget. I simply don’t start to collect.
Also, I’m not seeing any more the number of prints. I have looked much more the rarity.

1 Like

I come online, I open packs for the 4 series I collect, I attempt one or two trades and I leave.
I’m not interested in voting for new packs anymore, like before. I’m not sure I’ll be able to collect most of them.

I kind of want to do that at least until I can’t open the newer packs anymore, when they’re out of circulation.
Which gives me about 6 months, and yeah, then I’ll see.

Similarly on autopilot but even that’s starting to get tiresome (guess some tiny, stupid part of me is still hoping things improve). I would sometimes spend almost my entire day off on trading now I’ve just turned trades off altogether.
There are some wonderful new series coming out but I just can’t bring myself to open anything new, especially since the post update cards I have collected are still sitting mostly unfinished.
Used to be a paying player as well but now there’s really no motivation to pay anything at all to this site, particularly with the dismal 30% take for the artists. I refuse to support that.
I had a series I was working on, almost finished and mostly submitted too, until the updates hit and I just lost all motivation. Now it’s likely to sit in limbo forever…

3 Likes

From a collecting standpoint, I am rapidly losing interest in the whole gig.

Having created the concept of “digital scarcity,” and gotten a bunch of people interested in that concept, NeonMob has now abandoned it??? Yeah, I know, there’s still “scarcity” but the open ended part just makes it all pretty boring. Maybe it works from an “art” perspective, but it shows (just my opinion) a lacking understanding of the psychology behind collecting and collectibility.

So I check in, open my free packs and check out. Trading has become just about non-existent. It’s almost more interesting to go back and collect “unpopular” old series that were not fully subscribed than to pick up new ones… and that should speak for itself.

3 Likes

Trading is pretty much non-existent except in cases where people are leaving and trading their cards away, and that is pretty sad. Nobody wants to trade because the value of new vs. old cards is really unclear, and the value of Rare and above in the new sets is ridiculous to the point that people are not willing to trade up/down. You can’t trade 2-3 uncommons for a rare anymore. The only successful trades for VR/ER I’ve had were where I felt I overpaid using both new and old cards, giving 5 of my cards for their 1. Otherwise, people are not willing to accept the trade because they’d rather hang onto those dupes to try and get the others from that set.

I have stopped purchasing packs, which is something I used to do almost weekly. I can’t support the site if the main “fun” aspect (trading) is out the window. Sadly, buying packs might be the ONLY way to get valuable trade fodder, but even after I spent $50 last time, I was only able to get to about 80% completion on 2 of the sets and the other ER/chase cards will likely never find their way to me.

My own set has had similar frustration, where casual collectors are unable to collect my set and that makes me sad. I want people to be able to get the cards they want. Sure, as a creator it’s nice to get paid, but honestly I didn’t make a set hoping for a payday. I made a set to share my art, and unfortunately it’s just not accessible to as many people now.

I still try to trade at times, but I spend way less time on the site now. I will probably be here til the bitter end because I have loved the site and the people I’ve met here, but the changes and the lack of communication and empathy from the NM team has made it hard to get excited, even when sets I love come out.

Also SUPER bummed the poster option was nixed, especially for those sets which are exclusive to NeonMob… because we can’t actually GET that art outside of NM since they have a contract with the site. I was able to still order one that was on my amazon wishlist because it was a direct link, but I wish they hadn’t removed the option, or at least looked for other avenues to still offer merch if their current vendor wasn’t working out.

Anyway… I’m still here. I’m still opening my free packs. I’m still attempting to trade, and even pulling packs of my own series even though I completed it, just to try and help folks who haven’t had luck getting the full set.

4 Likes

I’ve finally begun putting time intro trading again, boy is it awkward! I find myself swinging from thinking a potential trade is highly unfair to me to thinking its highly unfair to them, and sending it off anyway cause trading is all that’s keeping me here. The complexity of collections is diminished because uncommmons are basically commons, it is rare for people to accept 5 uncommons for 1 rare, but trading for anything rarer than that is even harder (no one has dupes!). Trying to trade across series is far too unclear. Avatars cards do not have the same value as The Bestiarium Vol.1 just because they have the same time window, their rate of being pulled does but we have no way to determine that outside of manually checking how many have been pulled in each series. I have been quick to judge rarity of a series based on the count of the card I’m trading for (#123/infinite) even if that person might have just picked up that card early, and I worry other people judge based of this same value (especially people who traded prior to The Fall).

3 Likes

If there is an infinite number of cards, does it even really matter what the number of the print is? There’s an infinite number, and regardless of it going out of print at some point, you still don’t know how many prints have gone out, so who knows how to gauge rarity?

At first I collected only amateur series because of the shorter time limit. When I after a month didn’t finnish even one of those series I had pulled three packs a day from I gave up on those completely. Now half of what I opened are packs from old series, just to get that feeling of opening a good pack every now and then.
Trading is almost completely gone. Whenever I get a duplicate VR or ER I check to see if anyone has a duplicate of one of the cards I’m missing, but neither happens often at all so trades are one a week, maximum, and only within the same series.
I never spent money here before, but now I almost wish I had just so I could stop…

2 Likes

It matters because people aren’t going to trade a rare with 200 copies for a rare from a different series with 2,000 copies. They are only…temporarily infinite. This wouldn’t matter so much if trading within a series was more plausible.

Edit: I misread what you said. I do not think the actual card number matters, its just the only way to even remotely gage how many cards have been pulled so far. And you technically can check how many prints have gone out, its just not very efficient.

Yeah, no, I get that. I won’t trade finite number cards for infinite.

I used to collect cards everyday, but now it’s only every few days if I have a moment of time. Trades are one every few days and I’ve slowed down on my trading. All to the fact I barely get anything above a rare worth trading.

Now most of my trading activity goes to Cian’s Trading Emporium.
This is where to sink all the commons multiplicates I always get.

I’m not even opening packs on some days. It’s not fun to open free packs anymore, what’s the point?