The EA Sports FIFA community is in turmoil over a massive scandal in which fans claim an Electronic Arts employee sold coveted FIFA Ultimate Team cards direct to players for exorbitant sums of money.
EA said on Wednesday that it is Examination of the reports.
Earlier that day, Twitter exploded as fans with the hashtag #EAGate shared screenshots of messages from someone who claims to work for EA. In the news, a seller is offering high-performance FIFA Ultimate Team units called Icons and Prime Icon Moments and charging up to $ 1,700 for groups of certain cards. If the buyer agrees, the seller promises to add the special forces to the player’s account the following Monday.
The FIFA Ultimate Team typically works with a lottery-based system where loot boxes offer virtual cards that players can put together to build the ultimate FIFA team. The more powerful the player card, the rarer it is. Dedicated fans may spend hundreds of dollars on these loot boxes to get a good card for running their team.
But the cards this mysterious seller is offering are far better than what most players can find by chance – EA does not indicate the probability of drawing a particular card type if it is below 1% and the cards on sale are extremely rare. Players taking advantage of this offer could theoretically win against almost any other team, even if their opponent had previously won some great cards from their loot boxes.
Fans are understandably upset at the idea that other FIFA Ultimate Team players may have cheated by paying an EA representative to add units to their account. EA announced on Wednesday that it is investigating the allegations and said it would “act quickly” if it detects “inappropriate behavior”. The company is also aware that this situation raises player balance concerns and will update the community at a later date.
An EA representative asked for comment told Polygon that he had nothing to add other than Wednesday’s tweet from the EA Sports FIFA account.
