There are so many things about FUT Packs that we don’t know. With the help of iamstrgl, we will explain how they are made, which ones are the best and if EA manipulate pack odds and player accounts. Regardless of your FIFA experience, you will start looking to FUT Packs in a different way after you reading this guide.
How do FUT Packs Work?
What we still don’t know about FUT Packs
Let’s talk about FUT Packs, everybody’s favourite part of FIFA Ultimate Team. We are pretty sure that we all love opening packs. We know we sure do. Packs and the potential they offer are what keep you coming back to the game. That’s why by the end of the game there are much more cards that when the game started. We are going to look at what we can discern from packs for the most part.
There are a lot of players in the database and it would be hard to pack a specific one even if it were an equal chance of getting them all. FUT Packs with more players give you a better chance of packing someone good. Packs with only rare items reduce the potential players you can get by 66% roughly making it 3 times more likely to pack someone good (if it were equal chance). EA likely can manipulate pack weights for specific accounts because it’s their game and assuming they built it with the intent to do so it wouldn’t even be difficult. But we are not saying they do only that it would make more sense than scripting, handicapping and momentum.
How are FUT Packs Made?
OK so for this we are going to mostly ignore anything that isn’t a player cause let’s be honest you couldn’t give a crap about packing a tifo or stadium theme.
Let’s assume every player in the database has a percentage chance assigned to it at any given time. And, for ease of discussion, let’s assume it’s the same number for everyone. Whilst we are at it let’s also only look at 75 and above rated players (gold basically). Cool. So we have around 2,000 players in that bracket.
100 / 2,000 = 0.05% chance of packing any one specific player. Assuming the chance was equal.
However, we ALL know that the chance isn’t equal and here’s where things get interesting. First of all, you’d assume that higher rated cards have a lower percentage chance of being selected. But this rule is not set in stone. We will freely admit this could be confirmation bias, but we feel as though the transfer market and price are the best indications of this. Looking at two players with the same rating, we discovered that price and price range are vastly different. Why? Well, chances are with the popularity of certain leagues, some players been made more difficult to pack.
So the rarity of a card, for the most part, is based on rating, but not solely. Here’s likely what EA do: EA likely make an assessment based on football knowledge (insert sarcastic joke here). They assume players in the top leagues will be more desirable and use data from how often players are packed and then put straight on to the market, as opposed to playing a few games with them. The method they use to calculate this doesn’t really matter. The important take away is that there are certain players who do not conform to the ‘higher rating rule = less likely to pack’ rule. Whether this is by league, club or individual is unknown but we are fairly certain it occurs.
Of the players that are available in FUT packs, they probably use a Random Number Generator ((RNG), yes people that is what it actually stands for) to select a player rating. So let’s say we need a number between 0 – 100 and, pulling the odds of the packs in store, we’ll say if it’s between 0 and 80 it will select a 75 – 82 rated player. Between 80 – 96 it’ll select 82 – 84 rated player. And between 96 – 100 it will select an 84 plus rated player. Once it knows what rating group of player you’ll get it will likely generate another number to select which specific player you’ll get. Let’s say for instance you get an 81 on the first RNG, meaning you’ll get a player from the 82 – 84 group, so then on the second, it’ll look for a number between, let’s say 0 – 1000 and that will determine which player you get. Each player likely has a certain amount of values assigned to them which more desirable players having fewer values.
Let us reiterate here, this is a guess. We don’t know how packs are picked but we are inferring this from the pack odds that are given to us from the store. They may just pull a player straight away without assigning players to different pools, but that’s the way they grouped them in the store. If you now factor in how many players are in the game and how even an equal chance would make a specific player difficult to pack, you can see why getting a walkout isn’t as easy as you might think.
Speaking of walkouts, just to reiterate why we think our method is more likely (but again this could be confirmation bias), we’ve noticed that when the walkout animation does trigger, there are certain players that are more likely to come out than others. We have seen certain players pop up fairly regularly as opposed to similarly rated cards, which could be down to them not featuring in a lot of teams/their less desirable nations/low price on Transfer Market. Hence why, in conjunction with the odds on the FUT packs, we believe they first select the pool for each card and then select the player.
Which FUT Packs are Best?
So we know this seems obvious, but the FUT packs that contain the most amount of players generally yield the greatest returns. Obvious right? They quick sell for more and for the most part consumables have a price range of up to 5k whereas most players max price range is 10k. Well, we’ve seen a few posts about the validity of opening a greater amount of smaller packs as opposed to a smaller amount of bigger packs so we’ll talk about this in a second (In this scenario smaller and bigger refer to the cost of the pack rather than how many items you receive). Let’s be honest, when we open a pack we want a good player, not a consumable. So straight off the bat, the packs that contain more players are likely to have a better chance of getting you what you want. Packs that have the most amount of rare players are obviously better for you as all the best players are rare.
We mentioned earlier about it being a 0.05% chance of getting a player if it were equal. Well in a pack where you can only pack rare players, icons and the current TOTW (assuming no promo) you have almost a 0.1% chance of packing one of the 1,000 players (rough estimate, again assuming equal chance). That’s around 3 times as likely.
Let’s take an example. The choices are this: open one single 100k pack, Jumbo Rare Players Pack, or open 13 (we are rounding down since after 13 you’d not have enough coins/points to open another pack) premium gold packs. If we look at a Premium Gold Pack then you get 12 items divided up between players and consumables. Usually, you get between 3 to 5 players. You also get a random assortment of consumables, stadium items and even staff which again aren’t really going to get you riled up. You also only have three rares, which could also be consumables. We want players. We are not going to say which is better between the two we are just going to say this:
You have a better chance of packing better players from packs that have more players in it. We have little evidence to back that up besides this: you cannot pack the same player twice in one pack. At least we’ve never seen that from a reliable source.
Let usexplain it like this, say we have a hat with three balls in it. Two white, one red. If you pick the red ball, you win a prize. You, however, can only pick one ball at a time. Assuming no influence or bias, the odds of you picking the red ball and winning the prize is 1 in 3 (33.3*%). Meaning you have a 2 in 3 (66.6*%) chance of picking a white ball. Say you have a go and pick a white ball so you want another go. There’s one very important thing we do before we let you have another go. We put the ball back in the hat. Meaning that you once again have a 33% chance of picking the right ball. Every single time. However, let’s assume we let you pick two balls instead of just one. Well, the first ball you pick is white, which you had a 33.3*% chance of picking. Only now for your second pick, there are only two balls in the hat meaning you now have a 1 in 2 (50%) chance of picking the right ball.
This is why bigger FUT packs SHOULD show that they most likely pack better players inside them. When you open a Jumbo Rare Players Pack and the game starts building it, if the first player it selects isn’t Messi, then the next player it selects has a slightly greater chance of being Messi. And if that one isn’t Messi then the next one has an even greater chance of being Messi. And so on and so forth all the way up to that last player. As opposed to opening lots of smaller value packs where you could theoretically pack the same crappy players over and over again.
The problem with all this is that, like winning the lottery, the chance of packing a good player is still very slim even if 23 other players have been removed from the pool of players possible to pack, it’s an increased chance of packing a player than normal for sure, but it’s still a very low chance. As it should be if we are honest with ourselves.
This is why higher ranks in Squad Battles/Division Rivals/FUT Champions offer packs with more players and more rares. The idea is they are trying to give you a better chance to pack a better player. It sucks when you work hard and don’t pack someone good but that’s how chance works.
Do EA Manipulate FUT Pack Odds?
Do FUT packs from certain SBC’s/Rewards yield better returns? Do EA manipulate pack odds?
Short answer: Nobody knows.
Long Answer: Nobody knows. Let us ask you this. Have you ever seen/heard someone say:
“Hey you need to do the {{insert SBC here}} cause the rewards are through the roof! I packed {{insert_high_rated_player_here}}!!!”
To that, we say thank you for the information about your thorough and well thought out an experiment with a sample size of 1. In other news, we went out of our house yesterday and it was raining so you should all take an umbrella with you tomorrow. We also won the lottery by buying a ticket online whilst we had a cold so if you have a cold we’d buy your lottery ticket online cause it’s practically a cheat code.
Honestly, we don’t mean to poke fun we are just trying to point out the ridiculousness of the situation. You can’t with any certainty say what is or isn’t true for everyone. If you wanted to determine whether a coin was fairly balanced and you had a 50% chance of getting either heads or tails you’d need to flip it at least 10,000 times and even then you could only say it’s true with a 99.9% level of confidence. And that’s an experiment with only two outcomes! If we as a community came together and documented our results we could definitely get a peek behind EA’s curtain, but the coordination it would take is unprecedented.
Do EA manipulate pack odds? Most likely. Probably only FUT packs that you don’t buy, so stuff from SBC’s etc. Why do we say that? Well, let’s look at the facts only. Firstly, EA started offering untradeable packs, which are perfect for them as the cards have little value outside of personal value if you pack someone good. These cards can’t be sold and at best can be used to get another untradeable player/pack or a tradeable pack. They take money out of the market, sometimes forever. And the easiest way to get money back into the market is to buy FIFA Points. Now that pack odds are required to be disclosed in certain markets, packs that aren’t bought have no odds on them. Unless you see the odds change on paid for packs, and they do when a promotion is run (e.g. TOTY items are in packs), then they likely don’t change the odds for paid packs.
Do EA Manipulate Players Accounts?
Do EA Manipulate certain players accounts to make them pack better players?
Let us start by saying we know no more than you do. If EA wanted to make more money, and they do trust us on that one, rather than make a complicated intelligent system that makes you less likely to win games at certain times by “adjusting sliders” or what have you, wouldn’t it be far easier to incentivise players by letting their favourite internet personality pack better players more often? Regardless of whether that person was on really good terms with EA or not, if you have loads of followers then surely it’s a lot easier to make 20 – 50 accounts have better luck than to manipulate an engine on a global scale for everyone, even those who have never bought a pack in their entire FIFA cycle. Why manipulate millions of people when they can manipulate 20 – 50 without their knowledge and then let them manipulate millions of people without even realising it?
From our point of view, it’s entirely possible to manipulate packs for one account against everyone else’s. And not even just possible but frankly not even difficult. Let’s look at things that everyone can understand. When EA takes an SBC down, they usually give back the cards players have submitted. There are many examples like this one, and none of them specifically says EA can give anyone better pack luck, but what they do tell us is that EA has records of player submissions and player ownership. It also tells us that EA has the ability to reissue cards or gift players cards if needed. It tells us that EA has the ability, without needing to rewrite any code, to manipulate a specific account. Now that to us sounds like the start of a compelling argument.
Let’s get a little more technical now. If EA have that level of control, and again we know they have from those examples, and if you have also read the rest of this post about how FUT packs are built, would it be beyond the realm of reason to suggest that EA could bump up the weightings for higher rated players by, lets say 10x, for certain accounts? Or even to suggest that EA could reserve a slot in every 45th pack, with a random variance of 20, for an 86+ player? We don’t think it does. The fact is this situation isn’t only possible, it’s highly probable. Look at the event EA throws each year before the release of the game. In that, you can see certain accounts packing icons and high rated players etc. Now yes these accounts are obviously set up and staged specifically for this event, but our point is only that the technology for them to do that is there.
Now ‘probable’ isn’t the same as saying EA very clearly do this. That doesn’t mean that they are more likely to pack better cards but that they have more chances to. From EA’s own website:
Any probability percentages that you see are on a pack-by-pack basis and are not cumulative. That means that each pack opening is an independent event; opening multiple packs does not change the likelihood of being awarded an item from a specific category. If you flip a coin three times and get heads each time, you still have a 50% chance of getting heads if you flip the coin again.
You have to be in it to win it and YouTubers likely open more packs than anyone. We are just pointing out that everything in this game is supposed to make you feel good about buying more FUT packs. That’s why they made walkouts with all their flares and sparkle. They don’t want you to feel bad about the game. They want you to feel good. Because the better you feel the more likely they think you are to opening packs. It’s the same reason why gambling machines make lots of cool noises and sounds. When people are winning around you, it makes you feel like you can win too. Giving a few accounts increased odds of packing better players is a far more likely method for getting people to play and open packs than making them lose games every now and then.