Community Manager
I think I just come at this from a different perspective, a perspective of never (and, I mean not once) having found EA truly responsive to any issue I’ve raised. Even on glitches/bugs where it was clearly an error on their part and where I was nothing but diplomatic in my communication, they’ve NEVER done right by me (even though it would have cost them basically nothing to make me feel heard and fairly compensated). And what I witness day in and day out in here is that they mostly ignore my fellow users. So, this feels to me like a fundamentally adversarial relationship in which you get nothing by trying to accommodate or be diplomatic with EA. Instead, it appears to me that you have to publicly embarrass them (like the comment section in their last YouTube livestream) to the point that it threatens their bottom line in order to get their attention and force change to a system that increasingly revolves around their wants and needs (not the customers’) Otherwise, they just plow ahead trying to take advantage of us whenever and however they can (see the “draft system” as Exhibit A).
All that said, I appreciate your two cents and I generally agree with your analysis (though I don’t know what those of us who can’t scrape together anywhere near 400k gems are supposed to do). I wholeheartedly agree with your five bulleted points, but my concern is that I can’t imagine EA doing all five. And if they don’t then I have a hard time seeing how we ever get back to a place where F2Pers can remain competitive — which is where we were when the shard system was in place! In the seven weeks since this disaster began my squad went from a place where I had Top 10 players at every position (and at least 5-6 truly meta players) to maybe five Top 10 players and only one truly meta player (I still love my Cech in between the sticks!). I’m daily asking myself why I don’t just quit, and the only real reason at the moment is that I’ve got a league I manage and I don’t want to let those guys down.
But that isn’t going to be enough much longer. Every week that passes without EA doing (or saying!) anything makes me more bitter because it lands as disrespect. Disrespect for the hours and hours we F2Pers have spent building our accounts. I’ve logged in for more than 400 days straight, but thanks to the change from “shard system” to “draft system” (sorry, there’s just no other shorthand for it) all of my effort is being wiped out and I’m falling farther and farther behind the competition with every passing day. I don’t think it’s lost on most F2Pers that, at this rate, we are threatened with permanent second-class citizenhood. And that’s why, if there are going to be changes, they had better be comprehensive (per your five bullets) and they had better come soon. Because EA can rob me of the competitive team I labored to build, but I’ll be damned if I let them rob me of my dignity to boot.
Let me help you get the drafts out of your head, and I will correct your sentence, " I’ve logged in for more than 400 days straight, but thanks to the change from 'shard system' to 'PHASE 2 TOKEN system”....
Now that things are corrected. The 400k gems on one hand is a lot for many players, but on the other, it's not really, because I had ~200k saved for TOTY by not chasing cards I did not need/want, and I grinded a lot of DR since.
The P2W vs F2P, I don't want to get into the politics of it, because every player needs to decide on their own and be realistic wit the expectations as at the end of the day, the game development does cost and it needs to be funded somehow and make money, but the game needs both player types, and it needs to be a symbiotic relationship, which is why the Phase 2 Token needs overhauling as per the 5 key points I made.
The feedback from all of us, including yours, is slowly listened to, and some of it has gone into the game (e.g. highlighted ball that took about a year before we saw that option live), other ideas are discarded. We are unlikely to see commentary back, which breaks the feedback loop at this point in time. The main issue IMO is the current setting with a typical corporate/government slow pace progress/regress (depending on one's point of view). Either way, the time is running out for them because the World Cup is soon, which will be a big deciding point for many players as to which game they'll play.
