The Reason FIFA 22 Banned 30,000 Players
On paper, "FIFA" Ultimate Team is supposed to be a place where gamers can emulate what they see in real-life football — a mode in which a player can build the team of their dreams and compete against other players' squads online in pursuit of online footballing supremacy. Unfortunately, that's not the experience fans of EA Sports' long-running franchise often get. Instead, players are constantly faced with going up against repetitive squads that play into whatever meta is prevalent that year, or god-tier teams built from using copious amounts of microtransactions as opposed to being earned from quality play. Even if players overcome these obstacles, it's likely their opponent has a plan-B in the way of an exploit.
One example of such a workaround is "FIFA 22's" no-loss glitch, which has become so problematic and prevalent, EA Sports has cracked down on it and temporarily suspended over 30,000 players for using it. Apparently, while competing in FUT Champions — the highest level of competition in "FIFA" Ultimate Team — some players would hit the "home" button on their controller when losing, and remain at the console's home screen until the session timed out. By using this method, players wouldn't be hit with a loss (per EuroGamer). While EA's actions against players exploiting the system show the company is dedicated to fair play, the workaround had other implications for gamers.
EA claims to have fixed the issue, but players still have their rewards
"FIFA" is no stranger to players that attempt to cheat the system in order to maintain favorable win-loss records, or to get more wins in FUT Champions. Such practices violate EA's Positive Play charter, a list of guidelines players must adhere to when using EA's online services. One of the aforementioned guidelines put forth by EA is for players to "Keep Things Fair", urging them to not "use exploits, cheats, undocumented features, design errors, bugs or problems to get a leg up on others." Purposefully timing out a game to avoid a loss, or a game in which a player is severely outmatched, is in obvious violation of such guidelines.
EA claimed to have fixed this and divvied out week-long bans, but as of right now, the company has not specified if players caught cheating will lose the rewards they obtained while doing so. Naturally, this has created a stir on "FIFA" Ultimate Team's subreddit, with some users claiming that this punishment is a slap on the wrist. Reddit user u/StatCat2017 said "A load of trash players got the best rewards they'll ever get. Seven days is peanuts, most of them miss a WL they wouldn't even qualify for."
Other users, such as u/GrizzlyAdam12, claimed that because of this exploit, many players lost value in the online transfer market due to crashes in value. They explained, "These cheaters also crashed the entire market....except for icons and top tier cards, because they bought them with all their rewards. This ban is a slap on the wrist and doesn't do nearly enough to compensate everyone else who've lost coins due to the crash."