There is a fairly large controversy brewing around EA’s FIFA series. In short, the accusations say that a huge glitch has been present since 2009, which was the year the FIFA Ultimate Team mode was introduced. The glitch makes it so that your players are essentially handicapped, with high performing players not playing as well as they should be.
The entire thing has been broken down on Reddit, with a video from RighteousOnix setting the whole thing off. These are extensive, going into great detail on what the handicapping glitch is, how fans have speculated about it for years, and what the implications are.
In short, your players in FIFA Ultimate Team are supposed to work together to boost each other’s stats. There’s a “chemistry” stat where playing your best players in the right positions will lift certain stats for each player. These can be massive, changing the entire makeup of your team. And the big key here is that you play these players by getting cards, using either in-game or real world currency, so people have invested a lot of time and money into getting the right players, and playing them correctly.
Unfortunately, according to the video and others around the internet, this simply isn’t working as it should. “It turns out that for a large chunk of the most expensive cards in the game,” reads the breakdown. “FIFA has not been attributing the stats boost to the cards afforded by their chemistry. Meaning that they feel sluggish, slow and clumsy in comparison to other, cheaper cards in the game which have been given the chemistry stats boost.”
This whole thing is very complex, with RighteousOnix using “Day 1 cards”, essentially cheap and lower stat cards, to show that chemistry is working for most, but with a higher stat version of the same card it doesn’t. The implication being that players are spending time and money to get these cards, when their original ones would have actually worked even better.
So far EA has not responded to the allegations, but with FIFA 17 coming out in just a few months, on September 27th, they might want to calm their fans soon with either a fix, or an explanation for what is going on.
