The Unveiling of Rewards
Rewards information is FINALLY out! I think we are all thrilled as we’ve been waiting for this information to properly “plan” or (for someone like me) buy in the FOMO and pray…don’t judge it grows the economy!
There’s a few things I want to touch on as we prepare for this next chapter.
Reward Distributions Through Divisions
I’m not sure about you, but at a quick glance, it definitely felt like there wasn’t quite as much separation in the quality of rewards through the divisions. Don’t get me wrong, rewards get better the higher you go, but just looking at it….I had some questions.
I started thinking about it from a scoring perspective. We all agree that higher division will generally have higher scoring on average. But I believe we are overestimating how much higher Div 1 scoring might be than Div 2…and so on.
Let’s take a recent lineup of mine. It’s a great combination of cards that had some really good matchups. But guess what, I didn’t even get 300, I barely broke 250.
What I’m trying to say is there is enough variance in sorare (thanks to early gameweek locks) that even really good cards can put up garbage scores. We know Div 1 teams will have poor weeks and in the same way Div 5 teams can have amazing weeks. This realization helped me get out of the mindset of expecting rewards to be multiple times better in each division.
This is a theoretical illustration just to show the above point, that scores may not be as far apart as we think they will be. After a couple months and after users are settled into their most “fair” division area, it will be interesting to revisit this and see how it compares.
Based on the calculations we see below, Division 1 is by far the most rewarding, and I believe that will translate to classic competitions (math for that to come at a future date).
In-Season Rewards (and some Math)
I won’t lie, it through me for a bit of a loop when I saw that In-Season tournaments had divisions. Just wasn’t something that I was expecting. It’s interesting, and adds a layer of complexity to the calculations. Players now need to take into account what division they will in when determining how much they should be willing to spend on players, as the upside is definitely more limited (especially if you’re not in Division 1)
I built a simple EV calculator for Limited (Rare, SR, Unique to come in the coming days). Linked here:
Above is a snippet of the calculator, let me walk you through the math. For the Premier League Competition (with Divisions starting March 29th). There will be 8 remaining weekend gameweeks. Based on the illustration from Sorare’s medium post, we know the amounts given out on a weekly basis by division.
We also know the percentage breakout for teams in each of the divisions to give us the Entrant Split by Division:
% of Lineups (D1) = P1% = 11%
% of Lineups (D2) = P2% = 24%
% of Lineups (D3) = P3% = 29%
% of Lineups (D4) = P4% = 26%
% of Lineups (D5) = P5% = 11%
Now the math happens….
Although it would be nice to just divide the amount by the number of participants, it’s not quite that simple. We know that more cards will be minted (through rewards & the primary market). So this theoretically allows for more users/teams to compete on a weekly basis. So we need to take into account this growth rate.
Now with the EV calculated above, this is for a specific division. But remember doing well will move you up, and doing poorly will move you down. So as you consider your budget and do EV calculations, remember to be dynamic in your considerations.
Example time for everyone going out to buy MLS cards:
For the next 8ish gameweeks, MLS Cards will also be competing against European Cards, that by this point are pretty highly minted. So this could be the total participants (a hypothetical number).
Then the European season ends, and I would expect a drop off in the number of entrants for the next 16 Gameweeks (again a hypothetical number).
Now we have all the info, now this is where we can play around with different EV scenarios. So let’s say
With this information we can evaluate EVs based on what if scenarios due to the dynamic promotion/relegation system.
So if over 16 weeks after Europe ends, we think we may largely be in the Div 2 / 3 area, maybe peaking into the other divisions occasionally (as represented by the percentages above). The EV would ~$36. So if you only had to purchase 4 new season cards to compete, it may be worth spending up to ~$36 over Classic MLS Season cards in total.
Of course this is just a simple calculator/model and that the numbers mentioned are hypothetical numbers to more clearly illustrate the math behind the scene. Do you own research and apply your own expectations.
