Integrity of FIFA Ultimate Team brought into question with recent discoveries

Ultimate Team in FIFA generates hundreds of millions in digital revenue for Electronic Arts every year. The mode is built on digital purchases of in-game currency that is then spent on player and item cards. That can be unsettling as, unlike most physical products, they can’t necessarily be inspected and tested to ensure they function to their described specifications.

This has now become a major issue as a serious flaw has been identified in FIFA’s Ultimate Team that causes the most desired and valuable players to be penalized, failing to play up to their set attributes and take advantage of advertised Chemistry boosts. 

-When you build your team, by playing cards in particular positions, and with particular set-ups, you can increase their chemistry attribute. Having a high chemistry attribute on a player will give them boosted stats, having a low chemistry will nerf their stats. These chemistry stats boosts are huge for how your team plays.

-It turns out that for a large chunk of the most expensive cards in the game, 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 means that users have been spending vast amounts of in-game and real life money, sometimes hundreds even thousands of dollars/pounds, to obtain player cards which are NOT what they seem and are in fact heavily nerfed.

EA Sports has since acknowledged the concern and stated they “continue to thoroughly investigate the information.” Given the circumstances it won’t be surprising if a class action lawsuit is eventually filed. Consumers have not just put their time into earning the Ultimate Team cards, but they’ve put their money into obtaining assets that very well may not have been as advertised. There’s a trust inherent with digital items and in the case of FIFA consumers may not have been receiving what they paid for with their currency earnings or cash.