The EA FC 24 Division Rivals Tifo reward is an example of EA pushing pay to win
If you were one of the players to have won 90 Ultimate Team Division Rivals games in Season 1 of EA FC 24, you were probably left angered by the embarrassing reward received in return.
Since its introduction in FIFA 19, Division Rivals has been one of the main ways to play games in Ultimate Team, where players aim to move from Division 10 to the Elite Division and earn rewards along the way. As well as weekly Division Rivals rewards, which improve in higher divisions, players also earn Milestone rewards based on how many wins they earned in an Ultimate Team Season.
Between FIFA 19 and FIFA 23, Milestone rewards offered fantastic packs as a reward for players' accomplishments, but in EA FC 24, Milestone Rewards have been replaced with Tifos instead. Many players assumed this was a visual glitch at first due to how ridiculous it seems to receive a Tifo for winning 90 Division Rivals games, but when the EA FC 24 Season 1 Milestone rewards were sent out, players learned the hard truth.
With FIFA 23 Division Rivals rewards, winning 90 games in one season of the Elite Division got you great Milestone rewards like one Prime Gold Players Pack and two Jumbo Rare Players Packs, with the total value of the packs coming in at 245k coins. Now that EA has removed this content from EA FC 24 Ultimate Team, it's hard to see it as anything other than the company pushing the pay-to-win narrative it's long been criticised for; with this new system, the chances of earning packs and a big player without going through the UT Store is lower than ever before.
Good rewards are hard to grind
It seems that nowadays in Ultimate Team, there are fewer ways to earn rewards just by playing the game. In FIFA 16, players would earn 15k coins by winning Division 1 in Online Seasons, and this was repeatable, so you could continue to make a profit to help improve your squad just by playing and winning games.
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Division Rivals still offers some decent rewards each week, but taking away the packs in Milestone rewards and replacing them with Tifos no one will use is baffling. All signs point to EA hoping that if players aren't earning packs by grinding the game, they'll flock to the UT Store instead and start spending.
This isn't the first time EA has removed rewards from Ultimate Team either. Since FIFA 22, EA has removed tradable packs from Advanced SBCs, as well as removing coin rewards for moving up divisions in Division Rivals. And the one decision that's annoyed the UT Community the most is the removal of TOTW red picks and TOTW packs from EA FC 24 UT Champions rewards.
Removing tradable rewards, coin rewards, and packs and player picks that are guaranteed a special player item lowers the odds of players improving their squads through free rewards or the transfer market. Over the last few years, we've seen more and more packs become untradable – even the ones purchased from the UT Store.
Making everything untradable means players will never make a profit from opening a pack that can be used to buy a player on the transfer market, and their only chance of finding a high-rated player or promo player would be by opening more packs and putting more money into the game.
With new, high-rated promos coming out in EA FC 24 Ultimate Team each week, players will feel like their squads are quickly falling behind the power curve, forcing them to open packs in the hope of finding someone good.
Removing tradable rewards and pack rewards in general just makes the overall Ultimate Team experience worse for players who don't want to sink real cash into the game. We may be in a new era of EA football games, but the same old pay-to-win tactics are still being shoved down the UT community's throats.
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