Draft system unfairness

Hi,

Not sure whether EA will actually comment on this, but I am getting very, very frustrated with the draft system. I'll try to elaborate my thoughts clearly, hoping for a serious reply. I'll explain

1. on my luck, why this is quite extreme, and how this impacts my in-game experience, and then
2. I'll go into the 26 Phase 2 token system and the ability to grind for players I actually like or want.

I appreciate my post is very lengthy, but I've been thorough - so please bear with me.

My luck:

I have by now spent 250 draft tokens; 100 for attacker, 100 for midfielder, 50 for defender. My total score: the 100th draft token gave me 117 Zico, the 200th draft token gave me 116 Rice. I have some 113-115 players, but that's it. It is extremely frustrating that I only get the pack A on the 100th attempt, while in my league I hear and observe plenty of cases of people getting far more 116-117. It just feels very unfair, and it also means that opponents I face in Division Rivals benefit from having players that I simply cannot obtain. And I have to admit that getting a 116 on the 200th attempt also really did not help.

To spend 250 draft tokens, I have used a large amount of gems I had saved up, plus FP (no hate please - EA must have some income - surely I am not the biggest spender, but most definitely I am not the smallest one either). Previously I could decide to use my gems on a pack that would guarantee shards, such as the festive fixtures 113-115 pack that guarantees 120 shards, and alternatively might even give me the highest OVR player at that time. This pack would cost 22.5k gems. For 30k gems I now get 10 draft tokens, which typically gives me 1 or 2 113-115 players while the max OVR now is 117. This feels quite a bit worse off.

Now to confirm that my luck is in fact horrible, I've ran a simulation using the probabilities of 2% for pack A, 18% for pack B, and 80% for pack C for a normal pull. Then whenever I would reach the 10th pull without getting B or A, I have used 98% probability for B and 2% for A. I would expect this to be 90%-10%, as it is guaranteed pack B or higher which has a split of 18%-2% for a normal pull, so 90%-10% is the same ratio. But let me assume 98%-2% in an attempt to make my luck seem less extreme. Every 100th pull gives me A. 

Just on gut feel: as every pull has a 2% probability of A, I would expect that in 250 pulls you should get about 5 packs A as an expected value, and 2 is the absolute minimum.

I've simulated using 250 draft tokens 500,000 times.

The result I get is that the likelihood of getting exactly 2 packs A is 2.3%. The expected number is (the total number of times I get A over 500,000 * 250 pulls divided by 500,000) 5.56 packs A. The probability of getting exactly 5 packs A is 21.4%, just as comparison.

If I change the probability for getting pack A on a 10th pull without at least pack B to 10% rather than 2%, the numbers become 1.2% probability for exactly 2 times pack A, 6.12 for the expected number of packs A, and getting 5 and getting 6 packs A now both have a probability of over 19%, to give a comparison against the 2 packs at 1.2%.

So yeah, I do feel I am quite extremely unlucky here. And it's just plain unfair that some people joyfully tell me that in 3 pulls they get 2 117s, while I just have to keep spending. It's such a joy killer. The game is far less fun thanks to this.

That also brings me to my next point.

26 Phase 2 token system vs. shards

What you can do with the players that are basically useless for building your team, has been incredibly affected in this 26 Phase 2 token system compared to shards. You need 900 tokens for a 117 (current max OVR). For a player in the 113-115 OVR range, that's 2 to 4 OVR points lower than maximum, I can get 5 tokens. This means I will need 180 113-115 tokens for 1 117. With shards, a player 2 lower than the maximum OVR gave me 120 shards, and a maximum OVR player cost 800-2,000 shards (except the Captains event with its 4,000 shards). Out of me griding the game and using my 250 draft tokens, I can convert 59 113-115 players, including the Star Pass Eto'o. That's 295 tokens, while 900 are required.

With the shard system, my play has always been to only go for maximum OVR players. A max OVR-1 player felt like a waste of rank up tokens, because once the OVRs increase by 2, they are the first you need to kick out to boost the team OVR. Additionally, I could decide which players I would really like to have, and I could typically pick 3 to 5 max OVR players using shards. Getting a 117 is just far too costly in this system. You can still choose them like with the shards (pick the right exchange, and then choose the player you want from the options - so in fact this is the exact same principle as with shards using a more confusing GUI), but it's near impossible to do an exchange within this event without excessive spending of money (which is also very much a theme with those boxes that come every week - but that aside).

Conclusion

I am not saying we have to revert to shards, but I feel that in this new system the element of 'luck' has become even far more important, moderate spending of real money is not sufficiently rewarded, and the option to really enjoy building your team as a consequence is severely hampered.

I'm keen to get some feedback on my thoughts from EA, and sincerely hope to be getting some.

Thanks in advance for sharing your thoughts. In the meantime, I am seriously considering to just stop playing, as the fun is basically over for me and the level of frustration (also because of the gameplay, but maybe more on that another time) is just far too high.

Thanks,

Kannix.