EA apologises for the FC 24 SBC issue, but players who won Messi "will keep their rewards"
"If you're a dedicated player of the European timezone, you'll be seeing Messi a lot."
EA has apologised to FC 24 fans after a bugged challenge accidentally awarded thousands of players an incredibly expensive and hard-to-get TOTY player.
According to a blog posted on the official website, it seems that for 24 minutes on 30th January, players partaking in the new Squad Builder Challenges (SBC) had a spectacularly high chance of securing the 86+ OVR untradeable Lionel Messi card worth hundreds of pounds.
EA was notified of the issue and pulled the challenge within half an hour, but it was already too late; thousands of players had already snagged it, leading those who had not been so lucky to call for EA to level the playing field – literally and metaphorically – and gift the card to all.
"We understand this has caused frustration within the Ultimate Team Community, and we apologise and appreciate your patience," the team said. "We have explored several scenarios for how to proceed in a way that is both fair and would preserve long term game health."
EA's solution? Players who completed this SBC while it was available "will keep their rewards", and "the SBC will not be returning as originally designed". According to the developer, just "0.7 per cent" of Ultimate team players obtained a TOTY Messi item at the time the erroneous challenge was running (thanks, VGC).
"We know that this is not a perfect solution, and we will continue examining our processes with the aim of minimising such issues in the future," the team said.
"The only people that will defend this are those that got Messi who were panicking their card would be taken away," opined one player in the football game's official Reddit.
Others are disputing EA's "0.7 per cent" claim, saying: "I mean, the odds for getting Messi in that SBC alone was around 20-25 per cent, though."
"It probably is a real number, but that number doesn’t represent their active players nor is representative for the people who had access to their consoles at content release time," agreed another. "The majority of people logging on at content time are Europeans so the majority of players who did the SBC are also European."
"If you're a dedicated player of the European timezone you'll be seeing Messi a lot," lamented another player.
Late last year, EA had to disable an EA Sports FC 24 perk in order to address a glitch that was giving some players an unfair in-game advantage.
The glitch in the soccer sim allowed dribblers with the Trickster Playstyle to attach the ball to their calf and then simply run into the opposition's net to score.