In recent years, there have been many ways to earn coins on FIFA Ultimate Team. The most popular method of gaining coins was buying them through a third party. This is heavily against EA’s terms of service; however, they didn’t actually take action on this until FIFA 15. After the FIFA 15 Team of the Year promotion, EA added “price ranges.” This was a foolproof way of stopping people from buying coins, and to lure people into buying FIFA points.
FIFA points are the currency that comes from pumping real money into the game. This currency allows you to buy packs. The packs in FIFA Ultimate Team are essentially randomly drawn items that come from purchasing a pack. You can get items from Icon cards to Cristiano Ronaldo to a fitness item for your squad. These are the main way that EA makes its money from the FIFA community after the initial release of the game. FIFA points are also the main reason that other modes are not being developed. It is due to the simple fact that they just don’t make money for EA.
Queries of pack odds
As packs were seen as random, players could not be angry when they packed non-rare players all the time. However, EA recently added “guaranteed in-form packs.” These packs guaranteed an in-form item which leads players to think that EA has full control over these packs. Since this was established, players have been asking for packs to be more rewarding and ultimately asking for transparency when inquiring about the odds of certain packs. EA has finally responded.
EA response
In a recent post on its site, EA revealed early pack odds for gold packs, which you can check out here. It goes on to talk about the different things a player needs to consider when purchasing a pack. EA also mentions that players may use the pack odds to think differently when investing their coins, FIFA points, or time into packs. This is great to hear from EA. It shows the company is aware of the community’s decisions when buying packs. At least they don’t see us all as money-giving robots.
As most content creators have been promoting in recent times, packs are not the way to go when buying FIFA points. Most people say that you should invest your points into the Draft mode. This means that you can add a variable to which pack you buy. This would even allow players to see pack odds for packs that aren’t currently available.
In-game explanations and examples
As mentioned previously, EA knows the struggles of decision making in Ultimate Team. They have given a way to make your decision easier. When in the pack screen, you can press the ‘options’ or ‘start’ buttons to see the pack probability for that specific pack. It is uncertain whether EA will implement a feature that allows players to see odds for getting special items. However, the two spare slots at the bottom would suggest that they have more things to add to this section.
It is obviously unclear whether EA is accurate with these odds; however, it goes on to explain the calculations behind the odds.
Pack probabilities in FIFA 19 are calculated by simulating the opening of a very large number of packs, for each pack in the Store. The number of packs opened in a simulation varies based on rarity, but it will always be enough to be statistically valid. We then re-run this process with every content update.
Mass FIFA points spending
Finally, EA mentions how opening many packs will not help players get better items. When you open 12,000 FIFA points worth of packs, you are not guaranteed to get a good player. EA has a good analogy by saying:
Any probability percentages that you see are on a pack-by-pack basis and are not cumulative. That means that each pack opening is an independent event; opening multiple packs does not change the likelihood of being awarded an item from a specific category. If you flip a coin three times and get heads each time, you still have a 50% chance of getting heads if you flip the coin again.
This is clever from EA and I think that this is a great way of looking at it. Now, when players do not get any good items from a lot of FIFA points, they can see this quote from EA, which does not guarantee good players from larger quantities of FIFA points.
My thoughts
I think that it is great EA is finally being transparent with communities. With the introduction of Pitch Notes and things such as pack odds, it is a step in the right direction for the game as a whole. Adding pack odds will help people with their decision when purchasing FIFA points and also help players decide which packs they will invest in based on certain odds.
As mentioned previously, we do not know if EA is fabricating the new pack odds system. However, it will be nice to see what it does with promotions and the odds associated with getting limited items such as Ones to Watch items on release day. The company briefly addresses this in the article by saying:
Some campaign specific categories, for example, Ones to Watch, feature rare content. In some packs, the rarity of this content category may be less than 1%, and within that, there will be a wide range of probabilities.
So, this means that they are mostly unsure as to what the probabilities will be when it comes to special promotions. Hopefully this will be decided by the launch. I also hope that we see the other special card probabilities with the normal packs such as Icon probabilities.
Other probabilities
Finally, I think that the pack probabilities should be released elsewhere for every single pack in the game. It would be great for EA to have a place that people can view probabilities for packs that aren’t available. A lot of people in the community have been asking for odds on the 125,000-coin packs. It would be great to see the probability of one of those packs compared to the standard gold packs.
What do you think of pack odds? Will they make you question whether you buy FIFA points/buy packs? We’d love to hear from you. Also, you can check out our other FIFA coverage here if you enjoyed this article.
