How the average FIFA ultimate team player feels.
What FIFA ultimate team consists of?
To set out the foundations lets explain what FIFA ultimate team is. FIFA ultimate team is one of EA’s most successful game modes. It was reported that EA had generated $1.49 Billion from ultimate team alone in 2020. The game mode is only becoming more popular every year and there is no surprise since many football leagues such as the Premier league, Liga Santander, Ligue 1, and the Bundesliga have partnerships with EA sports. The real footballing world does cross over to the virtual world for example, when the voting goes live for the ‘player of the month’ in a major league such as the Ligue 1, FIFA ultimate team fans can contribute to the voting. To put this into context every month EA sports puts up the nominee of the best performers in the Ligue 1, the top footballing division in France, fans and professional players can vote for the best player and the vote is split 50/50. After the voting is complete the player of the month receives an award and a in game FIFA card that players can work towards via a squad building challenge.
Let me take it a step back and explain how the game mode works. When the player first starts up ultimate team, they are met with a starter team and this team is not the best. To improve this team users can trade in the live transfer market, opening packs and obviously playing matches to earn coins and rewards. The transfer market is where users can trade items and consumables for their clubs. Users can learn to trade and there is a whole trading community, which consists of people who enjoy trading cards by predicting market trends with an end goal of making as much profit as possible. There are also apps which are not owned by EA which can be downloaded on your phone such as ‘Futbin’, where users can track the live market with graphs showing the trends of each card. Being a successful trader in FIFA is a difficult skill which does take time to master. In terms of gameplay, users can choose to play ‘division rivals’, ‘FUT friendlies’, ‘FUT draft’ or ultimate teams most competitive game mode ‘FUT champions.
Division rivals is where players are matched up against each other based of skill points where at the end of the week they are faced with the difficult decision of choosing their rewards. This usually consists of choosing between coins, tradable packs or untradable packs. The value of the coins and packs depends upon the players division and ranking for the week. FUT friendlies is where users usually go to complete objectives and play the game casually. FUT draft is a game mode which you enter via coins or FIFA points and the user is drafted random players to choose from as part of their team. After drafting their team, the player is put into a tournament and the further they progress the better rewards they receive. FUT champions is the most competitive game mode with the best rewards available which consist of having to play 30 games over the weekend. FIFA players often label it a stressful game mode as its highly competitive. Now that I have provided a brief overview of the game mode, I will now proceed to highlight the most common concerns of FIFA players and why they believe there is a disconnect between EA and the player base.
The disconnect between EA and FIFA players
The main cause for concern for FIFA ultimate team players is the accessibility of top FIFA cards. Top icons such as Cruyff, Ronaldo or Eusebio are really difficult to get hold off as a casual FIFA player. The recent ‘FIFA black market scandal’ only highlights how difficult it is to access these top prime moments icon cards. It was rumoured that some EA employees were selling high demand and hard to obtain cards for ridiculous prices. Screenshots were circulating all around social media of the prices of these FIFA cards. One of the prices was $1700 for three icon moments players and two ‘team of the year’ players. People were even showing youtubers three icon moments players in their club untradable. It is extremely unlikely to pack one player such as prime moments Cruyff never mind, three top tier icons at the same time. Providing further evidence of there being a ‘FIFA black market’. But the fact that people are willing to pay such absurd prices for a virtual card, that only can be used for one game cycle, which lasts one year, highlights a bigger problem. That it is cheaper to purchase these cards from the black market rather than purchase the in-game currency ‘FIFA points’ and open packs to make coins. People would rather spend a large amount of money on obtaining a high-profile card rather than spend the same amount of money on packs to purchase these players from the market. It was reported by the Guardian that one person spent $600 euros on the game and the best player they packed was an 83 rated ‘Kostas Manolas’. Understandably the player was disappointed with no high-profile player being packed.
This issue of FIFA points has been highlighted by many top content creators on the YouTube platform such as ‘Nepenthez’. People spend money hoping to pack an expensive player with a high value to sell and use the coins to improve their team. It is extremely unlikely a FIFA player would spend money on the game to pack a low rated card that’s extremely obtainable but rather, the player is spending money in an attempt pack the likes of prime moments Ronaldinho. That way the player can make a quick 15 million coins. But if that is your expectation it’s a risk because you never know if you can pack a high rated expensive player and if you don’t you will be left disappointed. Its all down to chance. Even if a player was able to save up $15 million coins to purchase a prime moments Ronaldinho card, they would have to snipe him on the market as the item rarely appears on the market as many users want to purchase it. Therefore, EA need to try make the top-level cards more obtainable.
The aim of this article isn’t to ridicule EA but rather, highlight the disconnect between EA and the player base of FIFA ultimate team. Highlighting how there is an issue of unobtainable cards and the fact that most of the time spending money on FIFA points to open packs doesn’t guarantee packing a high-profile card. It is all down to chance. When I would play FIFA in the past I would save up my dinner money and purchase FIFA points to purchase promotional packs from the FUT store in a attempt to pack a high value player to then have the purchasing power to play with my favourite football players such as Lionel Messi. But often I would spend money and not make a large amount of virtual coins to purchase these players. What I am suggesting is for EA to make these high-profile cards more obtainable to the casual player by increasing pack weight so it’s easier to pack them. Maybe possibly adding a system where you pay a certain amount of FIFA points for a card rather than a player leaving it down to chance. This article is not suggesting ‘FIFA points’ is gambling but, rather highlighting the difficulty in accessing top level cards.
