FAQ
What impact will Price Ranges have on coin selling?
The addition of Price Ranges in FUT will likely have a huge impact on coin selling, as it targets the principle in-game vehicle for the selling itself; cheap players. Put a Bronze LB on the market for 2 million coins, pass the details to the supplier and boom, instant access to coins. With the lowest FUT Price Range to be set (as we understand it) between 150 and 5000 coins, that simply won’t be possible anymore. Now if you wish to set a Buy Now price of for example 2 million, you’ll need to actually own a player that’s worth that amount. By which point (as you may have worked already out) if you own someone that valuable, you may as well just sell that player on the open market to generate funds.
In my last piece on coin selling I described turning off trading within the web and mobile apps as the eventual “silver bullet” to coin selling. Price Ranges are an atomic bomb powered, sledge hammer of doom, to face of coin selling because 99.9% of the players listed to instigate coin selling, are the least valuable players in the game. Price Ranges control the upper limit those players can sell for, effectively closing the door on their exploitation potential for would be coin sellers.
Why is Messi’s Price Range still so high? I thought EA wanted to lower market pricing for FUT players?
The short answer is, EA do. However doing so for FUT 15 isn’t really an option for a number of reasons. The first being that slamming the stable door after the horse has bolted, burnt down the farm and won The Grand National, is pretty pointless. In other words, the FUT 15 market is simply beyond manageable repair in terms of its pricing; the damage is done. The only thing EA can do right now is to bring about some more predictable price stability; which the price ranges intend to offer.
Plus, if you actually own Messi, worth in the current market around 5 million. You’d be pretty pissed off if EA slashed his value in half overnight. That’s even more so the case had you managed to earn Messi through legitimate play, or by packing him. So right now EA are merely maintaining the FUT 15 price status quo, nothing more. What it does ensure though is that Messi’s price won’t rise or fall beyond a reasonable margin based on his sales trends so far this season.
Will player pricing be more predictable?
Which brings me neatly on to pricing. What fixed Price Ranges will hopefully do for all of us, is provide predictable targets to aim for when buying players. Because if you know for a fact that Eden Hazard goes for between 310k and 470k you can through matches, trading, selling, etc put together a reasonable plan to save up the coins to buy him. The way the current market fluctuates that’s just not possible. What mostly happens is you end up buying Hazard for a peak price (because a 3rd party is price fixing him) and then he crashes in value the next week, leaving you out of pocket. Whether the Price Ranges EA have set are “fair” themselves is certainly open for debate, but their intention at least is to level the playing field when it comes to buying players in Ultimate Team.
What about transfer market trading?
If there’s one thing Price Ranges make me worry about most, it’s market trading. Because with the predictability of price ranges, undoubtedly comes a reduction in the required skill of a successful “trader”. The buy low, sell high mantra is glaringly obvious, but in FUT because there are so many players a natural knowledge gap exists around what more obscure players are worth. Price Ranges effectively hang a visual price tag around the neck of every player, which I worry will kill off some the mystique that makes trading fun and interesting.
The key to that not happening is the Price Ranges themselves. Which EA need to leave enough variance in for you to feel like you can grab a bargain compared to the minimum/maximum prices. If you buy someone for 150 coins and then sell them on for 5k you’d be pretty pleased, so that lower bracket itself seems “ok” on paper, but whether that will ring true in the wild is yet to be proven.
The other thing Price Ranges will prevent is you losing a player you listed at a low price to generate some early interest, only for the servers to then go down resulting in you losing them for a fraction of their value. Price Ranges ensure you’ll always get the bottom price no matter what. Which in situations like i’ve described is a welcome safety net. And again it allows more predictable planning for your next purchase too.
And the Future of Ultimate Team?
As i’ve already stated, my personal opinion is that this years FUT 15 market is beyond repair. There have been too many coins extracted by hacks, coin selling and auto-buying, it’s just a mess. So you could argue that putting in Price Ranges now is sort of pointless. But with the next, as yet unannounced football simulation from EA, an as yet unannounced period of time away, this is the ideal time for a test and learn. Get Price Ranges in, find out what works, find out what doesn’t, and find out bloody quickly.
That way when the next FIFA rolls around, EA (and us) will have some fairly reasoned expectations around what Price Ranges do to the market, where they should be set, and what the pitfalls are. A brand new, completely clean market would also give EA the chance to drop the Price Ranges for the highest rated players compared to FUT 15. If EA don’t manage to do that, after all this upheaval, i’ll be very disappointed.
Who knows, Price Ranges may even bring about the return of actual player trading between friends too. Providing the players offered for trade are within the same range as one another, it could work. That’s not a guarantee by any means, but it’s something EA may consider should this prove to be a success.
Closing Thoughts
To be honest, this announcement came as a bit of a shock but having had 48 hours or so to digest it, as you can see from the text above there are probably more positives to Price Ranges than there are negatives. But in between those points, there are a whole bunch of unknowns too, which won’t fully come to the surface until the biggest mid-season change FUT has ever seen, has bedded itself in. We'll of course follow up in a few weeks.
But whilst the addition of fixed Price Ranges is undoubtedly huge, they have sort of existed forever within the FUT community as unwritten rules anyway. When a player’s price is getting too rich, you normally know it, and communities like ourselves, certainly help to direct people towards better value choices in the market too. It’s the formalising of these unwritten value barriers which we don’t really understand the full impact of yet, although we’re all about to in what will likely be a baptism of fire.
When I wrote my last coin selling piece I summarised it with a few sentences which now seem more poignant than ever. “Now that the web and mobile apps have closed, normal FIFA gamers are as always left waiting and wondering what will happen next. Will it be more draconian measures, or finally the promise of a better tomorrow?” Perhaps Price Ranges are the light at the end of the tunnel, one way or another for all of us.
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