Pele Box Icon

The whole box thing is a bad joke. Would be nice for a meta Pele card to actually be available to us commoners. EA endears themself to no one when they take an icon like that and put him behind a +$150 paywall. 😒

It's actually a tragedy. I'm just gonna have to keep on with my nerfed 122 Pele. 

So for me... This event has become my worst nightmare for the game. I feel almost like EA has to be trolling me. A week or two ago, I mentioned how I'm stuck with Pele at 122 and Baggio at 121. And EA rolls out a pre-obsoleted 123 Baggio card for $5 (can't even sign or buy the obsolete card with saved in-game currencies for my nostalgia team)... and Pele is available for about $150-$200 in the box. I was ready to spend some money to secure Pele, but the price is too much. Some of my other favorite players are too hard to get... Ronaldinho, Maradona, Maldini... Haaland is a stiff in the game. It's too disinteresting to play with meta players, can't get my target players at a reasonable price and/or level. EA is tough. Or cruel. Or I dunno... just doing anything they can to run me off again I guess.

Same boat here. The cost to compete is eye-watering (and simply beyond my means), and the alternative is just super unrewarding — as you rightly point out. It’s a K-shaped economy. The rich are up here:  /. The rest of us are down here:  \.  Meanwhile, the “middle-class” (which is what F2P used to be) has been wiped out! Another name for this is a caste system. We, the members of the lower caste, are expected to accept misery as our lot in life and duly perform our role as cannon fodder for “the whales” of the community because (as so many commenters are willing to rationalize) “EA has to make a profit.” Personally, I find this insulting — to my humanity as well as my intelligence. We all know it’s possible for video games to be highly profitable and highly rewarding for users. EA is making a choice here to forego the latter, and far too many users seem to be knuckling under and accepting a raw deal instead of raising hell.

On a finer point, your observation about Haaland is spot on. This guy is one of the best, most physically dominant, players in world football. He crushed it last season, and in the WC, and is off to a flying start in the new season. So, it’s insane that EA has not created a Haaland card that plays like the real-life guy — fast, physical, amazing finisher. My theory is that there are very few folks on the technical side who really know the game, and since the “suits” are clearly calling the shots overall there is a real vacuum of true football aficionados working on the franchise. (How else could the game mechanics have remained so bad for so long otherwise?!). And so we end up with the same warmed-over icons and fading stars month after month. EA’s idea of shaking things up is either totally self-serving — like the draft system — or totally lame — like asking for us to vote on the freaking soundtrack (as if I care what music is playing when I have my one-thousandth lousy H2H!). All a long way of saying I’m not going to start holding my breath for the release of a meta Haaland. (Because, if they create one, it’ll probably be stuck behind a paywall anyway. 😔😒😡🤬).