A typical gallows humor response to an anti-EA screed might simply refer to the season's restart: "See you in October. The distress from fans extends across EA's titles. Yet they also keep playing it in droves. Someone who knows this contradiction well is Jonathan Peniket.
Peniket was 12 years old when he first bought a pack. Growing up in Hertfordshire, just outside of London in the U. He needed to purchase the player packs, he said, to keep his team competitive in a game his friends also played. The turning point came when Peniket was in his final year of secondary high school. By this time, he had a debit card.
That meant potential access to impulsive, frictionless spending on his PS4. Previously, he'd have to buy physical PlayStation Store vouchers from UK retailer HMV and furtively hide them from his parents between the pages of books. This was also the year his mother was diagnosed with cancer, only the year after a friend had also passed away.
Peniket wasn't addicted to FIFA. Instead, he said he was addicted to opening packs. The "buzz of chance," as he put it, around potentially unveiling a top player. It was a reliable rush for him, a soothing mechanism when life otherwise seemed miserable. He obsessed over fine-tuning his team on websites like Futhead and Futbin — popular for their databases detailing players' stats — over revising for the exams that would get him into university.
At one point he downloaded a third-party pack-opening simulator onto his phone. The game seemed endless. No matter which players popped out of his packs, the game always released another better one, so his team was never complete.
The high of a lucky draw never lasted long enough to stop him putting down more cash. The guilt built up and the money ran out. His mother told him he'd broken her heart. Peniket didn't tell anyone else about this for a year. To populate a digital dollhouse of sportsmen, you not only open packs to find players but can buy and sell them on a virtual transfer market.
The funds to buy said cards are accumulated by playing games and playing them better than everyone else on Ultimate Team each week. Play well enough for long enough and one can qualify for weekly tournaments which beget bigger rewards and hence stronger teams. At its most enjoyable, Ultimate Team can be about "sniping" a rare deal off the transfer market, finding a fresh way to match the "chemistry" of your players players get bonus stats when lined up adjacent to players of the same nationality or league and setting up a personally sentimental team of past-and-present legends say, Steven Gerrard playing with Mohammed Salah and Kenny Dalglish.
The matches themselves play out like any other FIFA game — the mechanics of which one can quibble over for improvements but is generally the best it gets right now. It's the most noticeable difference in how the game feels to a new player. That feeling is like stepping out of a polished, premium title and into the kind of free-to-play mobile game with which you expect — and adjust your expectations to allow — a more mercenary experience.
The question of how FIFA — a game so popular that real-life football pros play it to scout their upcoming opponents — could improve its basic gameplay is actually far more interesting when you look beyond the series-defining Ultimate Team mode. One might hope that the next generation of consoles — which FIFA 21 will later release on — could provide the impetus for an engine update which hasn't been meaningfully improved for years. Some fundamental questions for a faithful football simulator: How do you make defending, which is more about anticipation and collective action than a single moment of drama, as interesting as attacking?
The legendary Italian defender Paolo Maldini is often quoted as having said: "If I have to make a tackle then I have already made a mistake. For that matter, how do you even make shooting — the most dramatic inflection point in a match — a gameplay event more nuanced than holding a button and a single direction.
One point of controversy in recent game cycles has simply been how to make scoring close-range headers — in real life technically and physically challenging; in FIFA a mere button press — viable but not overpowered. Essentially, the question of how to translate an a-side game that depends both on team-wide coordination and individual brilliance into a simulation played by one puppet master on a couch has yet to be cracked.
FIFA's Pro Clubs mode allows eleven different players to each control their own avatar, but it's long been neglected by developers, plus requires ten available friends for a match.
Ultimate Team feels different because the incentives are different. For the people who suffer with it, they are reported to not be able to control their moods and behaviour when not gaming, and give it more importance than anything else in their life. It has been classed in a similar way to any addiction, and the symptoms from The World Health Organisation say that patients will have:.
Earlier this year, Anthony Joshua admitted that a certain habit almost cost him his boxing career. It emerged that AJ was addicted to FIFA, to the point it affected his sleep and recovery during crucial times in his development as a boxer. I feel for you, JMD.
I had the exact same thing happen. Started the season late, the only way I could compete was to throw down greenbacks. Glad they didn't come up with this on the PS2 gen. My wife would have left my sorry behind. Thankfully the game isn't good enough to get me into this every year.
I'd have to call MUT an impulse rather than addiction, for me at least. But I don't fault EA at all. They're a buisness. They struck gold with this. BB code is On. Smilies are On. Trackbacks are Off. Pingbacks are Off. Refbacks are Off. All times are GMT The time now is PM. Top -. Madden Ultimate Team - The Addiction. User Name. Remember Me? Forza Horizon 5 Review. Poll: What's more important to you, when the time comes to purchase a game?
Click to vote. Page 1 of 4. Thread Tools. How many brothers fell victim to the skeet Like Panini but much more expensive, and much more addictive. It is now the subject of a legal case in France, with the claimant arguing that it has been misclassified as an online video game, when it should in fact be a form of gambling. The game itself might be simple: build a great football squad by winning online matches and gaining coins that you can use to purchase players and further improve your squad.
And a lot of it.
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