This its done by the devs, not to make the gameplay better, but rather to put up barriers to playing the ai in ultimate team and earning coins that way.
Also when people start to lose, they might spend to buy packs to improve their team.
Lastly, they change it so they change the Meta, at the start when the game was released you could score with different play styles, but as always around this time of year, they change it so the speed merchants get an advantage. Again so people playing FUT and spending real money, buy the fast players. Then in January they will change it up and strength becomes useful again...
They don't care about how the game plays, their only interest is in getting the few whales to spend as much as possible.
It feels like they nerfed Relentless+ and defending (if that's even possible). Valverde is about as threatening as a newborn kitten. Mapi Leon and Aleixandri soft tackle the player, but refuse to recover the loose ball. He ends up scoring anyways.
It definitely feels like it's designed to get you to spend more money with the hopes of improving your squad. Especially because they create the premium pass (total rip off!). No one asked for stupid Tifos, holiday boots, and cosmetic Evos. The player packs, boosted players, and Evos/Playstyle+ are nice, but too restrictive. I can't use any of that on my starting 11.
It's exactly that. A few years ago a paper written by someone within EA was leaked, where it turned out that bad gameplay and frustrating gameplay loops actually get players to spend more in game. Their reasoning was people want to win and when they get frustrated they want to fix the situation... and some will fix it by spending money on coins. It's not so much about enjoyment, as it is about getting back to the gameplay loop where players win.
If you look at the last 5 iterations of FC or Fifa they all follow a similar trend. The gameplay starts out fine but then they slowly "update" the game. Every update makes the game worse to play, and every update changes the meta of how to score.
I've learned my lesson now, and next time I try the 10 hours demo time and like the gameplay... I will remind myself that it's not going to last. That instead after a few months I will have wasted my money on a frustrating mess of a game.
