“…various factors play a part when it comes to reward tiers. This isn’t something people like to hear but rewards are based on level of difficulty, length of solo and solo conditions.”

-Kraelo (https://twitter.com/KRAELO/status/935228798576013312)

EA tells us they factor in a lot of things when they calculate rewards, so why is the community so upset with rewards?

Everyone from solo grinders, to pack pullers, H2H players, Weekend Leaguers, draft champions and squads have issues with their rewards. I heard Salary cap rewards were fine from a couple folks so we’ll leave them alone.

But why is it most all of us don’t think the rewards for our time put in are good enough? Why is it across the spectrum there is so much hate? To say I have an answer would be foolhardy. Because let’s say you bump everyone’s rewards a bit, does this affect the market? So if you give a bunch more coins, it inflates, if you give cards, they go down in price and therefore the rewards level out to their old spot.

But say they want to increase rewards, how would we do it? Give pack rewards for grinding? Those end up disappointing far more than they please. Look at top end finishers in weekend league with their supposed great packs. They end up causing a lot of heartburn and anger at seeing guys who finished behind them pull better cards. This isn’t something that’s going to change. Pack luck is just that, luck. I’ve seen people win raffles with 1 ticket where the guy with dozens of them loses.

Does EA need to figure out a $ per projected number of hours grinding or do they have that already? Should H2H grinders be rewarded the same as the solo grinders on a coins per hour basis? Because one weekend league is around 16 hours of grinding. Grinding team leader solos for OBJ was around 16 hours too. But that’s a tough comparison because team leader OBJ/Mack took coins to complete by buying and selling players on the auction house plus the gold badges and so on.

But let’s skip past that digression and estimate say you get a max of 20k an hour grinding solos. And you can do solos normally just watching netflix or twitch or whatever. Let’s project 16 hours of solo grinding gets you around 320k. 16 hours of weekend league, if you have average skill level, you will win between 11 and 14 games. That gets you to gold 2 for weekly and monthly rewards. So on a weekly basis you’re earning 30,000 coins, 1 80+ overall player, 12 75+ Players and 5 70+ players. The monthly rewards at 5 gold players and 1 85 auctionable/88 NAT player is almost not worth mentioning.

So that’s around 115k if you count the 80+ overall at 10k average, 75 overalls at 5k average and the 70 overalls at 3k average. 16 hours of grinding to average around 7k an hour of returns. Less than half of what you’d get grinding solos.

This gets to the bigger question is if H2H is the reason you grind solos so rewards don’t need to be equal? That’s a whole other blog. Moving on.

Of course if you’re a better player you’ll get better rewards. But the biggest complainers of rewards this year are the guys finishing top 100 so take that for what you will. Again the problem becomes how does EA reward us for our time spent in game with in-game loot? If you buff the loot for all the complaints, it doesn’t solve anything as people still complain their rewards not being good enough because the market changed.

I really don’t know the best way to increase the feeling of reward in game for MUT. Is there a way to reward us through psychological tricks or some feel good longshot story or do we just want cold hard coin?

It feels to me that Madden rewards solo grinders more per hour spent in game than H2H grinders. And maybe that’s me being biased since I grind more H2H than solos. The math above seemed to point that way. But to continue it, one H2H game can take from 30-40 minutes and you get 1,000 coins for winning and the potential to move on to the playoffs if you win 7 games. The big rewards don’t step in until you win the Super Bowl and that’s rare.

Solo grinding has a similar payout structure, first solo, a couple hundred coins then it builds from there. But gauntlets can be done in a couple hours where a season of MUT would take you near 6-8 hours for the 12 games or so to win a super bowl. And that’s only if you can beat equal competition 4 times in a row in the playoffs.

What they could do is determine how many coins they want to reward us per hour and find the average amount of time it takes us to complete the tasks and reward us comparably. I believe right now in H2H they base all reward structures off people winning the Super Bowl every season. They need to understand we’re not all Superman.

So potential solutions, solo grinders need a good journey type solo sequence that takes a bunch of hours to complete and rewards both auctionable packs and coins. So 10 hours for the next solo journey = 200,000 coins.

H2H players should get a pack after every win they have in seasons all-pro 2nd string and higher. There needs to be a John Madden type reward for H2H like Squads has. Some huge end goal for season badges. The 93 overall player isn’t good enough. How about a Vince Lombardi item?

Weekend league players need to have their rewards close to doubled.

Squads I heard still needs to up the tokens but it’s payouts are similar to H2H now so a similar pack reward would be fine.

Draft Champions needs to mirror Salary Cap structure.

The biggest issue, and I’m not doing service to you guys burying it so far in the blog, is that the more rewards they give us to grind the game the less likely in their minds we will spend money on the game. I don’t agree with this thinking but I don’t have the space or time to flesh it out today. Maybe we’ll circle back to this statement in the future.

Talking about what else needs their own blog, pack odds. But for today here’s my quick solution for packs, they need guaranteed value for the silvers and other low cards. We need a trade in set for quicksells or a silver master card. They’ve actually done a decent job with this at times with flashbacks and football outsiders. More of that please.

Unfortunately this blog doesn’t offer a very good solution outside of just “increase the rewards please” or really ties home the grand idea that everyone complains about rewards no matter what you play in this game. I don’t know if there is a final point to be made on it and if there is truly a grand theory here. Someone smarter than me could probably figure it out. So sorry about that, I guess not all blogs will be winners, so no rewards for me today.