>>>This post has been transfered from the Madden 21 forum section where it has been originally posted.<<<
In a nutshell: In this post, I want to argue, why I would like to make the following suggestions to make MUT more fun for all players. I would be really interested in the honest opinion and motives of players who have already been banned once (justifiably or not) from MUT, why they acted in such a way that they got banned.
- The strategy to reduce the amount of coin distribution, coin buying and associated bans/suspensions should focus on the causes that lead players to these illegal activities, and not on purely combating symptoms (i.e. banning players/account after suspicious transactions)!
- It must be possible to enjoy the positive and fun facets of playing MUT (i.e. collecting rewards as often and as much as you want through playing, just depending on the amount of time you want to invest in this game). In particular, the availability of challenging and repeatable Solo modes is missing. Being allowed to play (or replay) new games over and over again, while still having fun playing challenging games (with increasing difficulty levels the better you get and the higher your team’s OVR is) and still earning rewards, is an absolute must, at least in my view. Players simply have to be allowed to play the way they enjoy playing MUT. Furthermore, it should not be necessary to use a secondary account just to be able to profitably play more Solo games.
- I’d like to see a MUT Solo Season mode and a revision of both Solo Challenges and Solo Battles in order to increase the fun of playing these modes and maintaining the fun of playing in the long run too. I already wrote about my ideas for improving the fun of playing Solo Battles ([INFO/How to:] Madden 22 MUT Solo Battles - Answer HQ (ea.com)) and how to set up a MUT Solo Season (https://forums.ea.com/en/madden-nfl/discussion/comment/2153906) in the Madden forums; and I will try to write about my suggestions how to further improve Solo Challenges soon.
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I’m very intensively following the discussions and reports of players in the Madden forums. In the last weeks and months I have read a lot of reports about bans/suspensions of players who tried to get coins in different ways which are not allowed according to the rules of the game (see [Support] Suspended or Banned? Rules of Madden NFL 22 - Answer HQ (ea.com)). I do not want to judge whether bans or suspensions are justified in those cases, but I've started to think more and more about why so many players take the risk of being banned. The fact that I frequently see silver or gold players offered and bought for horrendous prices in the auction house (on PC) has further strengthened my desire to find answers to why so many players want to “cheat” in MUT (again: I do not want to discuss here whether this is cheating or not?).
So far, I have come to the following possible answers:
- I'm just too naive to think that players are actually just having fun playing the game and in principle don't want to cheat. In reality, everyone just wants to unscrupulously enrich themselves and for that any means is justified. In truth, the cases that are uncovered represent only a minimal proportion and, in fact, every player can be expected to cheat in some way. It's just that not everyone gets caught…. No, I just do not want to believe that!
- Players are not aware of the rules of the game and would not breach the rules if they had known the rules. From my perspective, this is a plausible point. For myself, I don't remember seeing anywhere in the game any hints at what is allowed and what is not. But maybe I just don't think enough about what is allowed and what is not, because I don't even think about how I could get an unfair advantage. Again, am I just too naive?
- The number of bans/suspensions has simply grown proportionally with the number of games sold (due to Covid, lockdowns and a higher share of the population playing computer games). The higher the number of players, the higher the number of rotten apples. This explanation may certainly be justified and explain a reasonable share of bans/suspensions.
- There are just not enough opportunities available to earn coins and packs by playing. And because of lacking opportunities to earn coins in-game, they try finding alternative ways to earn coins even though these ways are against the rules (in other words, necessity is the mother of invention, but interpreted in a quite negative way.
- Both the trading block and the auction house are simply not developed well enough to be useful in a mode that is all about collecting, auctioning and trading items randomly obtained in packs. The limit of 20 items to be sold in parallel in the Auction House is too low compared to the amount of items you potentially receive when buying packs. Just quickselling items from packs for training heavily decreases the value of pack content. In addition, it should be possible to trade multiple items in a single trade to allow fair trades although the main item(s) of interest are not of the same value. Being able to add additional items (of lower value) would increase the likelihood of successful trades and would significantly reduce the need to get coins by other (illegal) means.
I think that this fourth explanation (in combination with point 5) plays a very, very big role in why so many players get banned. Why do I think so?
To improve your team specifically, coins are the only way to get there. If you want a specific item, you can get it cheapest at the auction house, whether by buying them directly, or by buying cheap missing items to complete a set. You might buy packs and hope for receiving your desired item, but the odds of receiving this one desired item via a pack is extremely low (the odds are higher, of course, if you are searching for more than one item at the same time). If you buy some packs (e.g. by using MUT points investing real cash), you can either quicksell them for training or try to sell or trade them (in the auction house or trade block respectively).
That would be a reasonable strategy, if you could offer a sufficiently high number of items for sale at the same time (it shouldn't be necessary to really be online 24/7 just so you can keep putting new items up for sale as soon as you get rid of one!) or if you could use a reasonably working trading system (e.g. deals with several items at the same time, in which you can also renegotiate and not only agree or decline).
However, both conditions are unfortunately not given. The trading block is completely underdeveloped (if I would claim to have had 2-3 successful trades in Madden 21, I am exaggerating excessively. And the 2-3 trade I had I did just because I had the item another player was searching for and the trade did not and the swapped items were worth about the same. but I never used the new Items at all…), and the restriction to a maximum of 20 players for sale/auction at one time is far too little. Buying packs only leads to cluttering up your item binder, and you can't actually do anything meaningful with all the items.
Converting hundreds of low value items into training or to complete one set for a very good player is completely uninteresting in the sense of a cost-benefit calculation either. I’d guess that many players do it anyways just because there is simply no alternative to use all these items at all.
But how do you actually get coins? In principle, the idea of MUT (at least as I perceive it) is to play MUT games to earn rewards. These rewards can be used to improve your lineup, either directly by using granted items in your lineup or indirectly by using it in sets or trade or selling it to get other (desired) items.
There are two different ways / types of MUT modes to earn rewards: H2H (incl. squads, H2H Seasons, Weekend League) on the one hand, or Solos (incl. Solo Challenges and Solo Battles) on the other hand. I’d exclude the various Draft modes here, because in those modes you play with completely different lineups and playbooks (and frankly, I’m not interested in these modes because I play MUT just because this mode allows me to steadily think about how to improve my lineup and I want to play with it!).
H2H modes can be repeated as many times as you want, giving you the opportunity to get very high rewards in a relatively short time. You don't even need to work your way up to the top divisions to do this. The only requirement you have to meet to earn tons of coins (and packs): you have to be able to win against other players! For this you usually need to have a sufficiently strong team and understand the game sufficiently well.
Although I’m in principle able to win at least about 6-7+ out of 10 games in MUT H2H Seasons, I only very rarely enjoy H2H games. Too many players seem to play H2H just to earn coins instead of having fun playing the game. But how can you blame them? The whole point is to get coins and rewards, and the best way is simply to win as many games as possible as quickly as possible. If you are successful with it, you can earn 200k+ coins in a few hours. If not, playing H2H in MUT can be so frustrating.
If you are not competitive in playing H2H (or just do not want to play H2H in MUT), the alternative is to play Solo modes, either Solo Challenges or Solo Battles. While you can play H2H games as often as you want, the amount of Solo games is limited. If you replay already completed Solo Challenges you do not get any additional rewards. And you cannot replay available Solo Battle games at all. The amount of rewards (both in terms of coins and packs) is therefore limited too (in particular when considering that many Solo Challenges are only available for a limited time!).
A while ago I calculated the amount of coins you might earn as a “normal” player (with average Madden skills and an average team) within a week. Including all daily and weekly objectives, incl. the highest rewards tier in Solo Battles (“Legend”, but not every player is able to reach this tier!), the amount of coins is lower than 100k (and if I subtract the rewards that you also get as a H2H player, i.e. the weekly and daily objectives’ rewards, it is even much lower!). Of course, if you are good enough to rank top 100 in the weekly Solo Battles leaderboard, your rewards are much higher. But per week, only 100 players per platform can enjoy these rewards.
Summarizing, if you only (want to) play Solo games, you have to play every day to earn up to 100k coins. How much is that worth? When comparing this amount with available packs, you need to play about 2 weeks to afford one Ultimate Legends pack (which does not even guarantee to get an Ultimate Legends master item). Regarding other packs, you might be able to buy 2-3 packs per week (maybe some more when considering the lower value packs).
When comparing the 100k of coins that could be earned by playing Solos with the amount of coins to afford the most recently released top value items, you would have to play several weeks! As an extreme example, the current Team Master program should be mentioned here. If you want to buy one of these 99 OVR items in the auction house, you would have to pay about 2 million coins. If you would like to buy the items needed for completing the respective set, the price is even higher (if I neglect that I’m trying already for days again and again to buy the individual parts for the set, but they are not even offered. Most likely, because the items you need to complete it were available through playing Solo Challenges in previous promos, but almost all of these items have been NAT!).
That means that you would have to play 20 weeks of Solo games to be able to afford such an item. 20 Weeks!! And I do not expect that the price of these items will fall below 1 million coins soon. I guess, the price for these items might be lower on xbox or PS, just due to the larger player base, but even when considering that these items’ price is 500k, it would still take 5 weeks to get it.
I know that this example is an extreme case, in particular when considering that last week there have been released just 5 Rivalz games (in total 2k coins to earn) and 3 Ultimate Legends Solo Challenges. In total something about 10k of coins for playing 8 full games. This would mean: 200 weeks of playing Solo Challenges for one recently released item…
Yes, there exist Madden nerds who play every single available MUT Solo game, who are able to gain a lot of coins just by playing and who easily could afford these items. But frankly, should it really be necessary that you only live for the game, so that you can enjoy newly introduced player items? I’d guess (and hope!) that many players are not quite as crazy as I am, and devote so much of their lives to this game. It's just a game!
From my point of view, it is completely understandable why so many players use coin buying, coin distribution or other unwanted methods just so they can get a reasonable amount of coins. I absolutely do not want to defend these methods, but from my point of view the MUT team should think carefully whether the current course is really a good one. Making it harder and harder for players to get coins through playing or to get the latest items (some examples: an increasing number of LTD items offered in packs; player items to be gained through Solo Challenges in various promos are NAT; the coins for completing a Solo Battle game was reduced from 1k (in Madden 20) to 25 coins in M21; the quicksell price for Touch Down packs has been reduced from 65k in M20 to 50k in M21, …), just to force them to invest even more real money in packs, but at the same time punishing any other trials to receive coins with bans/suspensions is a shot in the arm in the medium term.
This business strategy / policy can only lead to ever greater dissatisfaction among players; even more as players get banned without any warnings (that they might get banned) and any in-game information about what is now allowed and what is not. Many players even claim that they never got the information what they did wrong to get banned; neither during the time their ban had been active, nor afterwards … Again: I do not want to judge whether these bans are justified or not! And I will never try to use any of these methods myself!
Why did I take my time to write down my thoughts? My main intention is to create awareness of what the current conditions in MUT mean for an "average" player. Playing MUT has to be worthwhile in terms of the rewards that can be earned, not only for those players who earn tons of coins furiously in H2H modes, but also for those players who just don't play that often, are perhaps less good at the game, or just want to have fun playing against the AI.
I guess I know why more and more items granted as rewards for playing Solos are NAT. I assume this policy has been implemented to increase the fairness for players who are using only one account. If players with 2 or more accounts would be allowed to trade these items to their primary account, they would have a great advantage, in particular if these items can be used in sets. While I do not like it (not at all!) that some players might use secondary accounts to exploit them to more easily complete sets or get better items, if you forbid all players to trade or auction their earned items, the fun of this type of mode is enormously reduced for everyone!
I’d really prefer a trading and auction system that evaluates the trades and auctions based on their estimated values. If the evaluation of the trade indicates that it is just a transfer of coins or items from one account to another, the evaluation result might be used to ban accounts or players. For instance, if items are traded between two players (or accounts), you could e.g. use the sum of quicksell values in terms of training points (of all traded items) as an indicator if this is really a fair trade or just a one-sided transfer. As a second indicator (assessing a trade by the sum of quicksell values only does not take into account the fact that 2 items with the same quicksell value can be valued quite differently by players!) I would additionally take the average sales value of the traded items (the trade data are available. Otherwise, the MUThead database would not be able to show them). If the sum of the sales values of the items deviates more than 2 standard deviations from the respective mean value (of the other deals) (a common method in statistics to identify suspicious outliers!), I would classify the trade as suspicious. As a third indicator, I would use the sum of the values that have been traded between two accounts so far. If this balance is very unequal, one could also mark these accounts as suspicious (one could also set a maximum how unequal the balance of all deals between 2 accounts in a Madden year may be in total; maybe increasing over the year as items get higher quicksell values. but once the limit is reached, only deals that balance the books again can take place). However, before players make a trade that could be marked as suspicious, they should also receive a notice ("Attention: this deal may be considered grounds for disqualification due to its one-sidedness! Do you still want to proceed?"). On the basis of identified suspicious deals, random manual checks could be performed.
I’d really prefer that easy trading (of multiple items) would be possible at all. When I started to play MUT it was fun collecting items and use them in sets to upgrade my lineup. But it became more and more difficult as soon as the number of NAT items strongly increased. From my perspective, that the exchange of player items and also of collectibles is increasingly radically restricted, takes away a lot of fun of the MUT mode!
Therefore, I would like to make the following suggestions to make MUT more fun for all players:
- in order to reduce the amount of coin distribution, coin buying and associated bans/suspensions, the focus should lie on the causes that lead players to these activities, and not on purely combating symptoms!
- From my point of view, it should be much more important to ban players/accounts that use just bots to gain rewards, and less about players who make use of illegal practices via the auction house. I am not saying that these practices should be tolerated, but I think it would be better if a few rotten apples are not caught, but in return no player is wrongfully punished.
- It must be possible to collect rewards as often and as much as you want through a selection of different Solo modes, depending on how much time you are willing to invest in the game. Being allowed to play (or replay) new games over and over again, while still having fun and still earning rewards, is an absolute must, at least in my view. Players simply have to be allowed to play the way they enjoy playing MUT. Furthermore, it should not be necessary to exploit a secondary account just to be able to profitably play more games.
- It must be possible to trade items (both players and collectibles) but these trades have to be fair. Of course, one-sided transfers of coins or items should be rated and suspicious ones identified by an algorithm. But it should be possible to trade them! and much more trades with multiple items should be possible, so that you can really achieve fair trades as well!
- I’d like to see a MUT Solo Season mode and a revision of both Solo Challenges and Solo Battles. I already wrote about my ideas for improving the fun of playing Solo Battles (Re: [INFO/How to:] Madden 22 MUT Solo Battles - Answer HQ (ea.com)) and how to set up a MUT Solo Season (https://forums.ea.com/en/madden-nfl/discussion/comment/2153906) in the Madden forums; and I will try to write about my suggestions how to further improve Solo Challenges soon.
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Positive Play - Feel the emotions, but be aware what they are telling you!
Joy: you like it! Anger: you don't like it! Frustration: you don't like it but cannot do
anything against it! Aggression: you don't like it and want to break something.
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Tell everybody (@joy), give constructive feedback (@anger),
ask for help (frustration), and have a break (@aggression)!
I try to help out other players, but I'm not an EA employee
