Need some inspiration

Lots of good points/suggestions. I agree with most. I’d really emphasize the following:

• Game has gotten far less rewarding over the last year. Players are more expensive to acquire in time and/or money and we have a lot less certainty in our ability to claim the players we most want. This is VERY frustrating/demotivating. Everything about the game now seems optimized to milk “whales,” and the result for the average player of modest means has gotten dramatically worse. At this point I would never recommend this game to a friend (only an enemy, lol).
• Some basic changes (and/or reversions to the way the game used to work) would help a lot. For example, LeoEyeNEye​ suggests making the shard exchange rate more favorable. Currently, the shard trade-in value is only 1/10 (or less!) compared to the signing cost of top players. In a word, this stinks! And the fact that inflation has run rampant in the coin-based transfer market only makes matters worse. I’ve saved my coins for over a year, but with 5.6 billion in my account I can’t afford ANY players that would improve my squad. This is deeply frustrating.
• Substitutions need work. First off, we should get 5 instead of 3. Second, there needs to be a more user-friendly way to queue a sub. Currently, it’s nearly impossible to get a sub made in a competitive H2H match without giving your opponent a huge advantage (often resulting a goal).  At the very minimum we should be able to sub after a goal (even if the ball has already been reset in the center circle). Late-game goals often call for tactical subs and the window of time between the goal being scored and the beginning of the celebration montage is simply too short (especially in H2H where, if it was the opponent’s goal they can skip the celebration). Either change the way substitutions work in-game or do as LeoEyeNEye​ suggests and let us program certain substitution patterns pre-game (e.g., using if/then parameters relative to player fatigue and/or time and score line parameters).

The game is currently set up so that only rich people can build squads that they like. The rest of us labor hours a day and can no longer claim compelling rewards. Meanwhile, there is no modest amount of money that the average user can spend (say $20/mo) that provides any certainty of changing our lot. This means that F2P feel less motivated than ever before whether it’s to put in he “grind” or to loosen the purse strings and spend a little. Maybe EA is making so much off the whales that they don’t care, but, in the long-run, F2P (which is the majority of the user community) are just going to lose interest and leave. If EA is indifferent to this, then I guess I’m wasting my breath. But if the company cares one iota about the broader community then some things need to change — SOON.