Why You Should Play Ultimate Team

[tarek]

I've never delved into Ultimate team because i've only ever played sports games offline, and football games in coach mode.
I would assume that ultimate team is online only, and user vs user. Is this correct? If so then for a sports gamer like myself, who is a little older and not good controller wise, then this mode, whilst intriguing, will probably never get the attention it seems to deserve.

[Moose Factory]

Tarek, I don't know if it's online only actually. If it is I don't recall being notified or being in a waiting lobby for an opponent. Could be wrong. Also you can adjust the difficulty level. My first game was on rookie because you can't adjust sliders in ultimate team (for NHL anyways), but I found it too easy, the score was 7-1 in my favor. If it is online only I'd imagine they pair up users based on what difficulty setting they select.

I say give it a shot. I mostly play offline modes too and do a Season or GM mode, but once I took the ultimate team plunge it's a nice mix up from the other modes. Also auctioning your cards and building up the in game currency to get better players is a fun mini-game in and of itself.

[BCDX97]

I hate how it always says "You have more coins! Buy more coins! Get these cards for coins! Gimme gimme gimme!"

It's like a used car salesman all up in your business. This constant push for more money is gonna push people away from these games - but unfortunately, some rich bastards spend a ton of money on this feature, too.

[bobtrain]

I boycott Ultimate Team because EA Sports neglects gameplay in favor of this mode. What's more important? A great game of "football" or some mode that's a cheese fest?

[opd897]

Don't care for this mode in any game and won't play it.

[rtkiii]

Agree with BCD and bobtrain

[Hollywood88]

Here's my issue. I played it back in Fifa 09 and the first time it was in NHL. Issue I had was getting enough contract cards to keep my stars on the field. Thus an endless cycle of having the sit stars, losing games, not getting enough ingame coins to buy good packs. And so basically i was slowly bled out. Now unless the onlt way to play and be competitive is using real life money to buy packs, then I'm not interested. I refuse to pay real money for packs or even to buy cards in the auction. Can someone tell me if the drop rate for contract cards has increased over the years? Plus, never knowing the best type of packs to buy. Example being should I buy silver packs or keep slogging for a gold. And is gold enough or should I hold out for special gold.

[YoungBuck3]

"For instance in Madden online versus, your opponent picks the 90+ rated Seahawks which leads you able to pick only a handful of comparably ranked teams in order to remain competitive. In Ultimate Team however you and your opponent are each able to hand pick your own roster of talent from the players you have collected through opening packs and buying on the auction house.

This makes the game between you and your opponent a test of skill of player versus player and play style versus plays style; as opposed to a math equation of predetermined overalls and existing mismatches. Madden is used in this example, but this the case in terms of the benefits across every sport which carries the mode."

Except, and I say this as someone who was top div for FIFA UT and logged hundreds upon hundreds of games, you still have games between very imbalanced teams so this point really doesn't hold up at all and furthermore, you enter the game having no idea who the opposition has. At least if somebody picks the Seahawks on you, you know who they have and can pick appropriately, but in UT you have little idea what you are coming up against and when I played Madden UT the hip thing to do was load up a starting lineup of weak players so your rating looked low in the pre-game lobby, then the game would load up, opposition would pause and suddenly in comes all of the superstar players.

When you are coming up in UT you can often run into stacked teams (admittedly these people are usually terrible thus why they have strong teams but are still sitting in 10th division) but still you are playing with a team of bronze guys against a team of gold guys. Once you progress further, you will still regularly come up against teams that are much better than yours given the time it takes to solidify a dream line up.

Of course with FIFA Seasons you don't get to see who your opposition is choosing now anyway, though it is at least balanced.