So received this email today from FUT thought id share it with all of you. Signs that the foundation has been rocking for a while now Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock these last few months, you’ve certainly noticed that it has become extremely frustrating trying to use the UT “search functions,” as the simplest of tasks have become far more difficult than anyone could have imagined, even with EA’s so-so (and that’s being nice) track record. Trying to find the lowest priced Hunter consumable? Well, you know something’s amiss when you have the max value at 100,000 coins and none come up. Have you tried to search for a player, and then after you find him, you turn to the second page and just 1 or 2 show up? I bet you have; especially if you’re on the Xbox 360 like many of us are. Trying to figure out “EA Logic” over the years has been an exercise in futility: Accusations of scripting and handicapping, frequent server outages, accounts being frozen (for good) for no reason, insane customer service wait times, and the criminal nature of annual changes in player weights making it near impossible to get great players in packs anymore, are just a few reasons why Electronic Arts (or EA for short) was named “Worst Company in America” two years straight by the respected online “watchdog,” The Consumerist. To the non-gamer, these problems may seem trivial, but to those of us who live and breathe FIFA and FUT (and there’s a load of us) these problems are unnerving at times. The hardest part of it all is that the game itself (highlighted by groundbreaking gameplay unsurpassed in any title in any genre) has been nothing short of brilliant and spectacular for many years now, yet just about anything and everything having to do with “off the pitch” interfaces have been an unmitigated disaster. Not so “ultimate” conditions For those of us who favor Ultimate Team, the time, money, and energy we spend building and financing our squads, which puts a ton of money in EA’s “DLC” coffer, is starting to feel more like a job and a liability, and far less like a passionate hobby. In years past, problems searching for players and consumables were pretty much non-existent. In fact, in the early weeks after FIFA ’14 launched, these problems were fairly rare and unnoticeable. The troubling thing is, is that it’s getting worse by the day. Last week, when a friend of mine turned 30, I decided to give him 100,000 coins for his milestone birthday present. He listed a player, messaged me all the relative info about the listing, and after searching on the Xbox 360 console for well over an hour (toggling different search parameters to try and trigger a successful search), I still could not find the player. Having never used the Web App (give me a break, I’m an old man!), I figured this was a better time than any to fire it up, which is exactly what I did. It took another 10 minutes (and countless unsuccessful search attempts) to finally find the player. This isn’t an isolated incident. It has become increasingly more difficult to use the search functions for the FUT Transfer Market as time has passed. And this isn’t just my opinion; I have talked to countless FUT gamers having similar difficulties. And then this week, in a repeat of a similar software glitch earlier in the ’14 season, items bought at “open bid” have been impossible to retrieve from the “Transfer List,” thus tying up probably billions of coins worth of items, and this problem hasn’t been sorted as of the time that I’m writing this. I’ve touched on the “searching errors” before in my “Market Update” columns here on UTUK, and comments came in from readers saying that the market itself was starting to noticeably suffer because of this. Just an Xbox thang? In my never ending FUT journalistic pursuit (not really) I have sought out my PS3 and PS4 compadres and asked them if they were having such troubles. The consensus was that they weren’t having difficulties as bad as the Microsoft crowd, but that they were having issues just as frustrating such as mid-match disconnects, instances where players were bought and then got “stuck” in cyberspace abyss (aka- FUT purgatory), and in some cases it took weeks to either get that player back randomly, or contact EA and let them sort the problem out, which never happens quickly. And these are just specific examples- I won’t even bore you with the omnipresent details of scammers, “scripting,” web app glitches, non-inform players being packed out during the given TOTW window, account “wiping” and many more. All it takes is a glance at EA’s FUT Twitter channel, to see overwhelmingly harsh comments, most of them deserved in my opinion. And they’re deserved because the FUT community loves this game. We love football, we love playing our mates to have a laugh after work, and we love the intricacies that the game developers are constantly perfecting year after year (let’s not mention “Heading the Ball” right now). But as customers, or “clientele” if you wish, Ultimate Team is a DLC (downloadable content) part of the FIFA title, and for the amount of extra money some of us have paid, it seems unthinkable that problems such as the ones I’ve outlined here today continue to not only go un-fixed, but EA doesn’t even acknowledge they exist. Good News on the Horizon? Just 5 days ago, The Consumerist announced that Electronic Arts would not “three-peat” as “Worst Company in America,” but it wasn’t by an overwhelming margin, as Time Warner edged EA 51% to 49% in an “opening round”
