Madden Ultimate Team - The Addiction

[JMD]

I'm posting this here so more people may see it. The MUT thread is fairly dead and I feel this needs to be heard. Fist off about me , I'm a 60 year old gamer , i love football , I have a large football card collection stacked up in boxes and large notebook binders in my closet.

Until last year I really never spent a ton of time with MUT. With Madden 20 I found franchise so boring I decided to give MUT an honest try. I spent hours doing solo challenges and played all the solo battles each week slowly collecting coins and getting rewarded player cards for my efforts. Once my team was in the low 80's I took it online. I quickly found I was often times getting matched up against players with much higher rated teams.

After suffering loss after loss I decided to give myself a budget of $150.00 to spend on card packs. I waited for the limited time deals EA throws up once and a while an got my team up to an 89 over all. I was still playing guys with teams in the 90's but the wins were adding up.

I found that MUT head to head online was a quick way to accumulate coins for use in the auction house. This whole time I was really enjoying building my team up to be what would become a power house team. I eventually ended up with several top legend player cards. This is one of the things I like about MUT , the ability to play with a roster of legend players ,reminded me of my football card collection.

The down side to MUT online are the quitters. Once you have a top tier team guys will quit if you stop them on their first drive while the score is still 0-0.

I played MUT in Madden 20 right up until Madden 21 came out. I'd never stuck with a Madden game for a full year before. So I pre ordered the MVP version of Madden 21 because of all the card packs it came with. A couple days before release I got a $200.00 bonus at work and used it all on card packs. My team was strong on day one. I went online a dominated for the first month and a half. Then EA started releasing the new card packs with higher rated players. Suddenly the competition got tougher. I started spending $50.00 here $50.00 there just to keep my team competitive.

Fast forward to the end of November , I'm at work and I get a text from my wife who was home doing our monthly bills , it read "You spent $575.00 on PlayStation Network for the month of November , WTF? " I was in disbelief , that had to be wrong , no way I bought that many card packs , right?

I got home and checked my account and sure enough I spent that much. It got to easy to just click on a card deal , I usually bought the $50.00 deals that come with several packs and the chance for a high rated player or two. sometimes I'd get squat , others I'd hit the jackpot. I realized at this point I was addicted to this game mode. All I wanted to do was go online and win games and I was willing to spend a ridiculous amount of our money to do so. I play MUT every day. I get up at 4:00 am and get a game or two in before I leave for work. I get home at 3:30 pm and get 3 or 4 games in before dinner. On the weekends I get up at 4:00 am and play until 5:00 pm non stop.

I don't know how or why this happened , how did I get sucked in? I'm still playing the game but I've removed my Debit Card from my PS account so I can't be tempted to buy card packs like that again. This caught up to me fast without me even realizing it. You see my wife wasn't pissed that I spent the money, we have the money, she was just blown away by how much I spent in one month when all months previously were $20.00 to $50.00 tops.

I still see the new packs EA adds and think man I'd like to grab a couple of those , but I don't. My team is a 92 over all and the only way it will get better is by earning coins and using the auction house. I never thought I'd get sucked in like this but I did. That wanting to win took over and to be able to compete with the top teams you really need a top team yourself. At the start you can keep up without spending money but once EA starts releasing the good packs it's buy up or get left behind.

Just wanted to put this out there. This game mode can become an addiction of sorts. I pretty much blew my PS5 money in one month. Don't be like me.

[Hassan Darkside]

Appreciate you sharing that. This is the main reason EA has been tied up in lawsuits recently because their Ultimate Team modes share a lot of commonality with gambling. They raked in $1.5 bil last year on ultimate team because of what you described exactly. The thought that you were on pace to drop almost $7000 on a videogame in a year is mindboggling, had your wife not caught you.

If you do enjoy MUT, I'd recommend employing other strategies to increase your MUT coins and card collection like sniping and playing the auction house. However, the amount of time you were putting into MUT (12+ hour days) should be as big a red flag, if not bigger. Has your wife said anything to you about how much time you play?

[baconbits11]

Thank you for the story and the wake up call to everyone. I have never spent a dime on MUT and never will. I have played some of the solo challenges. This aspect of EA Sports bothers me even more than not improving the game or Franchise Mode. Scary stuff!

[oneamongthefence]

What makes the mode even worse is that it's obviously pay to win. The team building aspect of it was the main draw to me and playing online. But it's not fun when you're matched up with ridiculous teams. It would be so much better if you matched with teams that are close to you in ratings. But I guess that's part of the appeal is beating players with much lesser teams. I got into it pretty heavily in Madden 19. It felt awful to pay real money for chances at packs that can marginally improve your team. What I realized is that I was trying to buy my way into having fun playing other users or at least be competitive. The mode has gotten much more grindy the last few years. Training and coins are a lot harder to come by. Levelling up just to give you the opportunity to pay real money for level packs is just ridiculous.

And it's addictive. And it constantly tries to get you into it. You get popups everytime you play Madden to jump into MUT and if you have an addictive personality then it's best not to even play Madden or least keep it disconnected from the internet. I hate the direction gaming is going in general but EA and Madden are definitely on the more egregious side with its monetization and tactics.

Sent from my LM-G820 using Tapatalk

[CM Hooe]

Foremost, I'm sorry you had that experience, and I'm happy that you caught yourself before you got sucked in too deep and caused you and your family extreme financial stress.

I look forward to the day the law in the United States catches up to technology and reclassifies loot boxes as gambling.

I all but refuse to engage in Ultimate Team because of its loot-box-dependent design (notwithstanding that one can "grind solos" to some extent, but like you alluded to, once you want to leave single-player and engage in competitive multiplayer, it's basically pay-to-win). I've heard this story about people getting sucked in to similar modes (mostly around FIFA / NBA 2K / Fortnite / Call Of Duty / Star Wars Battlefront , but Madden has the same basic design) and spending tens of thousands of dollars.

I also left my job in the game industry in part because I do not consider games built around loot boxes to be particularly artistic, and I further have ethical problems with their position as the de-facto business model (albeit they are fading out a bit in favor of season passes recently).

If you are curious to hear more horror stories about loot box culture and why loot boxes are extremely problematic, I recommend this 2019 video from video game critic Jim Sterling.

EDIT: wanted to add that the monetization of cosmetics is exploitative as well; the problem isn't just loot boxes. Dan Olsen of Folding Ideas goes into the problems with this in great detail in his video about how Fortnite "manufactures discontent" in its player base to get them to pay for things. Looking at The Yard here.

[Madden08PCgmr]

Quote: Originally Posted by baconbits11

Thank you for the story and the wake up call to everyone. I have never spent a dime on MUT and never will. I have played some of the solo challenges. This aspect of EA Sports bothers me even more than not improving the game or Franchise Mode. Scary stuff!

I feel for the parents out there that get hit with this nonsense. But I don't fault EA at all. They're a buisness. They struck gold with this.

.. I just wish they'd let the football sim go to someone that gave two d@mns! Let them have their casino. More power to them. Give US football.

[Madden08PCgmr]

I feel for you, JMD. I had the exact same thing happen. Started the season late, the only way I could compete was to throw down greenbacks.

Glad they didn't come up with this on the PS2 gen. My wife would have left my sorry behind.

Thankfully the game isn't good enough to get me into this every year. I'd have to call MUT an impulse rather than addiction, for me at least.

[CM Hooe]

Quote: Originally Posted by Madden08PCgmr

I feel for the parents out there that get hit with this nonsense. But I don't fault EA at all. They're a buisness. They struck gold with this.

I have to imagine pay-to-win existed in Japan first (Pachinko and gacha games have been popular over there for a long time), but EA was the company that popularized the loot box concept in video games in the United States.

FIFA 08 is one of the first loot box console games I can recall existing, maybe the first game. Madden 09 introducing Ultimate Team in a patch was the first I interacted with the loot box idea in a video game I owned. Apple’s iOS App Store did not launch until June 2009; that is, EA’s Ultimate Team idea predates even mobile games, which are universally known for pay to win crap now.

Of all the criticisms leveled at EA here, use and abuse of loot box game design and so deliberately exploiting human psychology for profit with them is something they have absolutely earned.