patrickhuynguyen

@GreenElf for $80??????

EA really needs to lock down their customer support and tell them to stop giving out account information. FIFA has become the ultimate hacking tool.. People, don't use the same email/password on EA that you use anywhere else. You've been warned! Zumba! Dance on! LOL

i guess that light has gone dim... har har...

Here are a few excerpts from another website describing the process in better detail than I did:

I'm very sorry for the long post but I feel that it's about time that gamers and journalists started paying more attention to just what EA is implementing in their sports games. EA is gaining a ridiculous amount of money through exploitative free-to-play game design and encouraging players to gamble with real money.

For those that don't know, FIFA Ultimate Team is a game mode in FIFA where you gain players by buying packs of random cards (cards include players, kits, stadiums, contracts - everything you need to build a team) with either in game points or real money. You gain in-game points by winning online/offline tournaments or trading players in the in game marketplace. This may sound unremarkable, free-to-play models are not unusual. But this is different from other models for a number of reasons.

Firstly this is not free-to-play, EA expects that you pay full retail price (see online pass) to indulge in their 'free-to-play' style of game design. EA has intentionally set up FIFA Ultimate Team so that it is virtually impossible to gain a top team of players without using real currency, you gain a very small amount of in-game 'coins' playing matches and have to pay (in-game coins) for the upkeep of your team through player contracts and injury management. So you pay full price for a game and realise that the game is designed in such a way that you have to pay more real money in order to gain a competitive team.

In FIFA ultimate team cards can be traded in game with coins, the disparity between the value of cards in the marketplace is vast, the difference between about 350-1000 coins for average players and millions of coins for the top players that everybody wants - Messi, Ronaldo, Rooney etc. There is virtually no way of gaining millions of coins in game without spending real money on packs of cards. Even buying packs is no guarantee of making coins, you have to hope that your pack contains a top player that you might be able to sell in game for a reasonable ammount of coins, or there is really no point. This is essentially a gamble, the player is expected to gamble their real money on a chance of getting a top player. Unlike other free-to-play games you can't simply buy items, you are forced to gamble for them.

The way EA has implemented free-to-play models in their full retail price games is also present in NHL. The be-a-pro mode is designed in such a way that if you want a top stats be-a-pro player (Crosy, Overshkin level stats) you have to play literally hundreds of games (several full seasons) to gain the requirements for unlocking upgrades, or of course - unlock the upgrades with real money.

The free-to-play model of design in full retail price games is exploitative to the extreme when you consider that a new FIFA/NHL game comes out every year, requiring the player to have to start from scratch each year with no character/team import options.

The FIFA ultimate team model is much worse than just free-to-play game design in a full retail game. It really is encouraging gambling with real money. The FIFA forums have numerous threads where players have formed an addiction from this gambling, the adrenaline rush from opening a pack is the same as the rush somebody might get scratching a scratch card or pulling the lever on a fruit machine. People have reported feeling out of control and spending litterally hundereds of pounds on packs on a quest to gain an 'ultimate team'. The problems associated with gambling are all present here making ultimate team no more than an in game casino.

I feel that £40 for a retail copy of an EA sports game more than covers their costs for one years development and allows for a good profit, many people would argue that this is overpriced for a glorified roster update. But EA feels that they need to exploit players with free-to-play game design and modes that encourage gambling of real money.

It's really no surprise to me that hackers are buying packs of players on FIFA ultimate team, they are probabIy feeding their gambling addiction. I wish the industry would pay more attention to EA's outrageous behaviour.

Here is another excerpt:
FIFA is 100% to blame if you got hacked and notice FIFA activity on your gamer tag. Specifically Ultimate Team. This has been an ongoing problem since FIFA 10, but it is just now really starting to gain momentum. With FIFA 12 Ultimate team is on the disk, meaning that it is not DLC. In previous years it was DLC. In FIFA 09 it cost 800 MS Point. In FIFA 10 it cost 400 MS Points. In FIFA 11 it was free and now in FIFA 12 it is still free and on the disk.

The gentleman a few posts up form me explained Ultimate Team and how it works very well. So, I will not explain it, but I will explain why this is such a lucrative scam for those involved in hacking accounts.

Think of the goods in Ultimate Team.....namely the cards and coins as the currency. The "consumer" is the person who wants these goods without having to work for them in game. The scammer/hacker is the one who will provide these goods at a real world cost. The only way the scammer can profit from this is by having lots of the goods at his disposal. The only way to get that is either by scamming individual players or by hacking XBOX Live accounts. That is the short of it....

Turns out hacking an EA account is extremely easy. I have seen numerous posts on the official EA forums about people getting hacked by people who's only mode of hacking was a simple call to EA customer support. Once they contacted EA support they would then advise the support person that they had lost their EA account details for their gamer tag. Then EA would simply hand over those account details and you can figure out what happens from here. Since most people with EA accounts probably use the same email address and password for both Live and EA it was an easy social engineering hack. EA has since the release of 12 upped their account security a bit, but it is still lax.

The bigger issue is the Chinese websites that are actively selling "preloaded" MS Point accounts (gamer tags). These are hacked accounts that are beefed up with MS points and then sold on to people for a price. I only know of such sites as they have been mentioned numerous times on the official EA Ultimate Team forums. People then use these accounts to log on to FIFA and blow all the points on Ultimate Team packs then ship those items over to their main account most likely through EAs web app for Ultimate Team. This is not unlike World of Warcraft account hacks. Where your account would get hacked...typically by some Chinese gold farming operation...emptied and all items sold and then traded onto a feeder account.

This is only going to become more prevalent in the coming years as free to play and micro transactions become more the norm. There will always be the people that don't want to work their asses off to gain their virtual goods and their will always be someone whose has hacked and scammed and stolen to provide them those goods. The game companies are to blame if they do not start to step up their security protocols within these games and make them more like financial institutions than a silly video game. The security needs to be as robust as your bank....not Hello Kitty Island.

I am a very active member in the FIFA Ultimate Team community...it truly is an excellent game mode in an already excellent game. Sadly there are people trying to exploit others to make a buck.

On a side note....FIFA is the worst online gaming community on the planet and stuff like this along with non stop cheating and exploiting the game online are the norm. It is the worlds biggest game and as far as sports video game franchises is the king of the hill worldwide. It is one of the top selling games in the world every year....not top selling sports game....but top selling game.

@Cletus VanDamme It's not a high horse thing. Just because you can get away with something doesn't mean you should. Sure, you can run out of a restaurant without paying for the meal. Or steal some socks that don't have the security tags. You can kill someone and never get caught by the police. You may think that it's silly to have society rules. But we have them so that life is simpler, faster, and easier. Seems to me that it's not a high moral ground that's the problem. It's that you have a below normal moral ground.

As for the device, it let's you make your own ROMs (which is perfectly legal). It let's you use your own game controllers and your own cartridges. And (fingers crossed), since it has Atari controller ports (which Sega used for the SMS and the Genesis), you can use the thing for Atari and Commodore emulators (hopefully!).

Emulators are completely legit. It was getting illegal ROMs that was the problem. Also, many people have obscure games that were never ripped to ROM form and thus now, maybe we can have ROMs for everything now. Before, you could search for a ROM and then find out it's bad. And you had to depend on whether the people that actually had the tools to rip cartridges had access to the obscure titles.

I wanted the hammerburst to be on sale! :( your avatar actually aims the hammerburst like a gun. but the lancer is just the guy rev ving up the chainsaw...

I actually had more long-term fun with the Fruit Ninja pack-in than the full-blown The Gunstringer...

@Fizmarble someone making a comment on something they actually played. how original.

I drive a 06 Toyota Highlander more often than I should.

please let me win that speed wheel (and all the rest)!!!! merry christmas!!!