After a dodgy SBC accidentally gave out far more Team of the Year Lionel Messi to EA Sports FC 24 players than it should have, EA has announced what it’s doing about the mishap. Unfortunately, the game’s community isn’t convinced that the publisher’s maths properly reflects how many cards were mistakenly dished out.
With Team of the Year cards having been filtering into Ultimate Team for the last little bit, following the reveal of the final men’s and women’s squads, plenty of people have been jumping back into the mode to snag some of them. A lot of them probably didn’t count on being given TOTY Messi by an SBC with a design fault that meant it dished out the Argentine forward way too often, but that’s exactly what’s happened.
EA has now issued an update addressing what happened with the TOTY 86+ Leagues SBC that went live on January 30, and, for 24 minutes prior to its removal when EA realised what was happening, made Messi mania descend on the players that completed it.
Why did it do that, you ask? Well, the SBC was designed to give out one untradeable 86+ rated TOTY player from one of the 13 leagues that’ve gotten one or more TOTY cards. That list included the MLS, which had only one card that fit that bill – you guessed it, it’s 97 rated Messi. So, if the SBC ended up selecting the MLS as the league for its reward, you were guaranteed that very useful and highly-desirable card.
Yup, no weird/game-breaking bugs or glitches involved, just an oversight on EA’s part.
In its update on the issue, EA apologised to UT players and asserted that “an estimated 0.7% of Ultimate team players obtained a TOTY Messi item” via it. Though, in addition to still being unhappy that the mistake happened, and that EA’s current solution is just to take the SBC back to the drawing board and let people keep the Messis it gave out, a lot of EA FC players don’t seem to think the percentage quoted there reflects the full gravity of the situation.
In a community note responding to EA’s tweet about the update, one has alleged: “The figures quoted in this article are unclear/misleading. It states 0.7% of players obtained a TOTY Messi item. It fails to declare what that is a representation of. We don’t know whether that is active players, total players or just players who completed the 86+ leagues SBC.”
Regardless of whether the above is accurate, 0.7% of the game’s player base could represent a noteworthy chunk of the game’s active hardcore players, who’d probably have been most likely to be the ones completing an SBC just after it was released.
So, we’ll have to see how things go from here, but judging by the game’s subreddit, this is something that EA FC players don’t plan on letting go of any time soon.
If you’re planning on jumping back into EA Sports FC 24’s Ultimate Team for Team of the Year once, you know, this whole Messi debacle has subsided, make sure to check out our guide to the best cheap top-notch players to use for non-malfunctioning SBCs and what’s in EA FC’s latest title update.