Extra Time Has Become a Complete Disappointment- What happened here?

I was just about to post about this myself, but you beat me to it, lol! Well said all the way around!

Alas, in the course of just these last couple of months Extra Time has gone from a useful tool to a pointless waste of time. Why would I play literally weeks of trivia to claim a card whose shard value is virtually worthless?!

It’s worse than insulting. This change to Extra Time is truly an embodiment of everything about this game at the moment. It’s EA clawing back value (i.e., stuff we used to be able to enjoy without paying through the nose for it). Here are a few others we’ll all recognize:

• They clawed back value from us when they switched to the draft system. You used to have certainty of being able to claim a good card that improved your team at the end of every event, but they wrecked that and made it random to try and induce more spending.
• People got up in arms about the draft, so they brought back “shards,” only it was a FAR worse version of them with outrageously poor exchanges. EA was trying to mask it intentions to screw us by nominally “bringing back shards,” but it was still a raw deal.
• The transfer market used to be a viable way to trade players you no longer needed and get ones you did, but EA broke it with extreme card scarcity and rampant price inflation. Despite numerous posts, they've not lifted a finger to fix the broken market. Again, their strategy seems to be to make the game as miserable as possible and pressure users to spend in order to alleviate the “pain.”

And now Extra Time has been severely downgraded… just cuz they can.

There’s a name for the pattern described above and it’s: en-💩-ification. It’s the tactic of companies who face too little competition and, in their GREED, decide the easiest way to increase profits is not to innovate or increase market share, but to downgrade quality of service and cannibalize their customer base. It’s patently obvious that none of the above-listed changes improve the user experience. Each one is a calculated tactic on EA’s part aimed at clawing back value in order to create more pressure on users to spend, and the questions we need to ask ourselves are:  

Where will it end?

Why should I invest money in my account if EA has shown it’s more than willing to change the terms of “the deal” (i.e., their value proposition to customers) and make the game worse with no regard for what the community wants?

And finally… Where is EA ADDING value to the game? We see it clawing back value at every turn, but where, in the last year, has EA made any substantial improvements to the game? (I can’t name none!)

This latest change to Extra Time may be small in isolation, but it’s a “tell.” It’s EA showing how petty and ruthless it’s willing to be and how little respect it has for this community.