TOTY Therapy

[00:00:00] Hello Footies and thank you for joining us once again for Foot In Review where we've

[00:00:05] been bringing you leading analysis and opinion on all things FIFA and AFC since 2019. Today's

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[00:00:22] our Patreon at patreon.com forward slash foot we're going to get into all of that. We'll also round up all of the content. We'll take your questions in the mailbag. We've got player in review as well, of course. But before we go any further and before I bring Shaq into today's show, I'd just like to announce some exciting changes as this podcast rolls on

[00:01:42] towards episode 600.

[00:01:44] Some of you want us to do for a long time and we finally decided to pull the trigger

[00:01:47] and do it. the exclusive tactics released by the team foot coaching crew right the way from its draft and kind of the overall initial thoughts Right through to the finished product as well plus all of our patrons will get exclusive Additional discounts on foot coaching service. Of course, we've got the merchandise going on and as well as another benefit We're now going to open up the trading show to all patreon members previously

[00:03:02] It was in the support tier above now. It is for everybody

[00:03:04] So look come on in join the discord is wonder and coming to your town. And it's got pictures of these nice wooden shack selling,

[00:04:22] little hand trinkets and things and hot chocolate

[00:04:26] and they'll be Santa there and you pack that lovely blue, you've probably left Winter Wonderland for the best feeling in the world. For the rest of us, we're sat in the rain, queuing sat 30 second carousel, and we're just vainly hoping that it'll be worth the wait, but this is testing me, this promo is testing me.

[00:05:44] I don't think I can find a better analogy than that, Well, it gets content later, let's just, because this is what people want to talk about. We understand that Team of the Year should be very difficult to pack. We aren't, you know, it shouldn't be the case of everybody has their end game team in January. Because if you got, Shaq, if you got five Team of the Year's, your team would basically be done. You would slowly lose the motivation, especially for the next few promos,

[00:07:01] because you'd be like,

[00:07:02] well, no one's gonna improve my team.

[00:07:03] Yeah.

[00:07:04] I've got Messi to draw in a Diaz van Dyke Bellingham.

[00:07:06] Why do I really need to,

[00:07:08] to grind on? It's impossible to pack fodder. Like I can't really open another 83-10 pack to pack 84s as my top rated player. It's sickening. It's just because I've used to the 83-10s and I believe I've completed a hole in an embarp. It's just by doing 83-10s and right now I've probably completed half the segments of best

[00:08:21] and up to the lower ones.

[00:08:22] The higher rated segments haven't even touched them because I don't have a chance to pack

[00:08:27] an 88. was maybe after thunderstruck or before thunderstruck, where we weren't facing many different opponents. It was sweaty grinders after sweaty grinders. And I have a feeling straight off a team of the year. In fact, even from this weekend onwards, you'll see majority of the community just drop off because it's just not worth their time anymore.

[00:09:43] I can't do anything but agree with that. And I in general, if the EAFC, it's been a non-stop deluge of 20-pound pack, 30-pound pack, 40-pound pack, 50-pound pack like, that they are making so much, and it might be that 100 of us leave the game, but then there's that one person that's gone and spent 400, 500, 600 pounds on packs.

[00:11:03] And EA, as far as they're concerned,

[00:11:05] if they are keeping that person engaged,

[00:11:07] that is all they care about. I think in majority of people you work in a corporation, so do I, and majority of the people that work for the corporation have the end customer insight. But at the end of the day, a corporation is a corporation that they're to make money as well. So I understand that. But I guess one of the things that I'm really feeling to understand is at some point those two need to meet to make things healthy.

[00:12:22] But continuing the toxicity within the community, 10 years, I don't deserve a Team with you. That's not even my argument, my argument is because all those packs are untradable, it results in the fodder that's not working. So one of the things that we were so proud of as a Thunderstruck promo was that there was SBCs for us to keep us engaged. There was fodder coming through left, right and

[00:13:40] center. If you didn't pack a top card, I didn't pack a top card through the Thunderstruck, did

[00:13:44] that bother me? Not one bit because I was getting additions it makes sense. The lack of a place for you to put your 83s and 84s. These are all deliberate strategy decisions that someone has taken with presumably the goal being to increase frustration and thereby, as a byproduct of that frustration, drive people to buy store packs,

[00:15:00] like you say, to finish off a sour, to finish off They used to be like ultimate packs or hundred K packs and the argument used to be that you'd watch a Castro You'd watch a Bates and you'll you'll watch Nick and you'll watch those streamers that have the income from the game to spend on the game And you'd sit there and you'd watch them open up 1500 K packs and you're and not get a team of the year and then in your head you'd go

[00:16:23] I'm not gonna do that. I've seen that it's rubbish

[00:16:26] But you sit there and you watch these people packs and the Jumbo Rare player packs, which Castro and Bates, and especially I think Bates needs to spam pack after pack after pack after pack with absolutely nothing. And he just discard everything, just keep moving on. He would churn through millions of points in one sitting. And it never enticed you as a viewer to think, Oh, I need to go to that. Whereas now the packs have changed. I'll give you a really live example and something that I probably spoke to you about this week was I played a game, right? I played a game. I

[00:17:43] was using, sorry for being a rat, but I luckily just saw some things that stopped my mind from thinking like that. If I was a 17 or 18 year old impressionable kid with no, I had this few little bit of disposable income, no requirements for money. What else would I do? I'll just jump in, put the money on and say,

[00:19:03] you know what, you'll owe it and just open the back you know, I've had what, 2,800 points. I did spend a couple of hundred of them on those nano packs to get a couple of loans. So I'm not going to sit here being holier than thou. And also, I'm not suggesting anyone should feel bad if they do buy these packs. If you have that disposable income, you make an educated choice and you realize that,

[00:20:23] okay, at the absolute worst, I'm getting whatever it is store packs, the suppliers dried up combined with the miserable pack weight for anybody opening regular packs like me, you know, the packs I get from League SPCs and things like that, and squad battle rewards, rivals rewards, all that jazz. Look at these prices, Shaq. These prices are absolutely

[00:21:40] out of the realms of anybody that's not either a price point that you could probably find some way to make it there. If it's 8 million on the market, no one's even going to try to get a Theo. No one's even going to try. And on the PC market, it's not a single one of the team of the years that is available for them to even buy if someone happens to have 15 million coins. They can't buy a single team of the year. Also, another thing as well, if you look

[00:23:02] at last year, I saw a team of the year, messy price of last year around this time as opposed you can go out and you know, also you just have to get these players in packs. So I want to know you can buy them and he's like, well, how'd you get your coins then? I'm like, well, you get certain rewards and you get coins per match. But when you actually sit here and think about it, you get even at best, maybe a thousand coins per game you play. Just do the basic math of how many games you would need to play to get a three

[00:24:22] million player. A thousand coins, borderline. So look, I don't want this to come off as though I It was it had everything for everyone and had something for everyone as well And I assume that the year will be something similar, but it's so far apart It's just it's just it's big is believe how different it is to thunderstruck and then not even a million miles away I think if you looked at the way the content was structured when just the individual positions were I impacts I think people were pretty happy because you had those we're disappointed that the cards are this price on the market, hands up, we got it wrong. We were trying something different with our upgrade policies in this week. Again, we're always experimenting, even if it's the most generic PR nonsense, but we don't get it. We don't get it. We do not get it. And therefore, it's us shouting into the void.

[00:28:24] And I try and be as balanced and rational as I can. It sends the signal to everybody in that company that they just need to keep going. Exactly. Even if users are going down, even if activity is going down, which we don't even know for sure because all we have to go on are very loose metrics. It's not going to change at this rate, is it? Well, one of the metrics that we can see is, for example, Week in League has been extended

[00:29:42] to have an extra day on Week in League, which is probably good.

[00:29:44] But the reason is because I think a lot of the midfielder. Whatever it could be. I don't know. And I'm sorry, it's gone.

[00:31:00] One of the things that even Nick mentioned in the video, which really blew my mind that

[00:31:03] I didn't really consider up until he said it, was the fact that what if he had just done come across as just us sitting here for 30 minutes bashing EA, accusing them of being the root of all evil. There will be plenty of people that will have enjoyed this promo. There'll be plenty of people that have got lots of enjoyment out of it. They've enjoyed the content. They've got things done they've wanted to. And I hope actually the 99% of you listening to this show have that experience

[00:32:21] and you like it and it's great and it's gone well for you.

[00:32:24] However, is our, I think it's our memes of just keep going, keep going, it's just not worth it. It's not worth it. And I'm doing it and I'm going to keep going. I will keep going on the grind. I will keep going through my league S because I will keep trying because I know from previous, I've been really lucky I've got a team with here every single year and I know how much that can change. The next pack open could have a team with the

[00:33:42] year and back pain and my opinion then of this, including ad-free access to the show, exclusive merchandise and access to our meetups,

[00:35:01] which this year is happening once again over in Crete.

[00:35:04] Simply sign up at patreon.com forward slash foot in review. We had the Hero SPC, the player picks, and they were decent. I think I got decent fodder out of it. Nothing great. We also had the 85 plus two, which was, I think, repeatable twice. We had the 82 into 20, which is, I think it's a daily thing that's coming on, which is probably a good thing for the use of our fodder. Along with that, we had a DeBina SPC,

[00:36:21] which looked interesting to begin with,

[00:36:23] but we'll talk into that a little bit later.

[00:36:25] And yeah, that's pretty started a new RTG. But Shaka, I mean, are you going in for the cup? No, I usually try to get the XP done at least just to play the five games if I have the time, but I'm feeling a bit, um, I don't think I'm as adventurous as I usually am.

[00:37:40] So I probably will skip the cup this time around, but yeah, we'll see.

[00:37:43] We'll see what happens.

[00:37:44] Yeah, absolutely.

[00:37:45] We send a lot of new gold cards introduced as well. She's got the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, as you all dribbling one. I can't remember the technical plus. That's the one it is. She's got the technical plus, uh, play style plus, whereas this one, she's got the Trevella shot play style plus, which I guess it's not too bad to have, but what I spent another 120k on it, not really. DeBini is a car that I used at the start of the game.

[00:39:01] She was my marquee back pull at the start of the game.

[00:39:04] I really enjoyed her, but as time went because I loved having that ability. Instead of having to go in and start an SBC, I don't really wanna do. I've liked being able to just go, okay, this G-86,

[00:40:20] I'll just chuck it in and it gets me another pack

[00:40:23] towards grinding League SBCs.

[00:40:25] So that's been one of my favorite things,

[00:40:26] I think of this entire promo. you get through that weekend of all team there, they start to, you know, it's the whole feast and famine that we talked about over and over again on this show. They, you know, they want to get people, give people that mental break to be able to come back fresh, whatever promo they've got to throw us next. But let's move on then and talk about, we'll quickly do player review, then we'll just finish that with our own thoughts and our own progress

[00:41:41] over the last couple of weeks through weekend league. She's, she's got everything. She's literally probably going to be one of my favorite cards I've used this year in midfield. And to partner hull it, I couldn't think of a better player. Yeah, it's, it's what, and you've advocated me completing this SBC.

[00:43:03] And I think the only reason is because I, I love having that medium high.

[00:44:03] backs. Like he would win the ball cleanly a lot. But if he was getting involved in a tussle with somebody, there were times when the person would just bully him off the ball.

[00:44:08] And that was proving a problem for me. Now I, he played the whole weekend. I started

[00:44:14] six and two. I then went two and five. And I was at breaking point, literally close

[00:44:22] to control of breaking point. Thankfully, for So it gets, I think you can't say six and a half out of 10. Wow, that's, yeah. Yeah, that's a tight review. That's a very open six, a harsh one, but yeah, that's average, just about average. Yeah, and we come at this from the point of view

[00:45:40] of probably mid to high tier teams,

[00:45:44] as opposed to, you know, again, if you're just coming up

[00:45:46] and you're starting a new team,

[00:45:47] you can't be able to be fantastic. I just was just rushing through just wanted to get the ninth win and because I didn't know if I could play any further I thought I'll just get the nine and then I'll just forget about it I'll see what I can do Went to nine five eight five and then things to go horrible horrible horrible turn I went to nine five and then nine nine six and I had three disconnections back to back

[00:47:01] Back to back. I just winning each game first game

[00:47:04] I was really surprised why the guy didn't quit because I was three zero up in the 15th minute

[00:48:04] on ourselves, you know, we have certain expectations of how we expect to finish in a week and week and week. But when you're in your position, Shaq, you're like that, just, you just got

[00:48:08] to move on. It's literally not your fault. There's nothing you can do. And the rewards

[00:48:11] difference between nine and 11 is between nine and 14 is just, there's nothing in it.

[00:48:17] I said, I've got 11 in the end. I finished 11. I've actually finished 12 and eight. So

[00:48:21] I was doing some Evo's. And I think I got 188, 186 I don't even get 83 out of that fact. The weight has been the weight has been that I can't I wasn't tracking anything. So you memory can play tricks on you. But I spoke about this last week. I was going through and doing league SBCs ever since Team Lea came into packs. I did have a saves cash of about 50 really good ones. I was opening

[00:49:41] up everything and the nightly upgrades we were getting I was

[00:49:44] opening. So I was opening 84 by's finish up with the mailbag. Of course, again, the Discord is open for everyone folks and we have a questions section in there that you can submit questions. Is there any point for the upcoming shows? We've had one from someone called John Footcoaching. Don't know who he is. Troy's not very important.

[00:51:00] He says, the boss says,

[00:51:03] I love this way of asking questions now

[00:51:05] that we have an open Discord.

[00:51:06] And his question is, it's not just me. And you just feel like a lot better, a lot lighter. And it's a really fun place to actually hang out. So come on in, don't be shy. People are really friendly as well. Just come on in. Yeah. And look, it's moderated as well, we should say as well. So if you've had bad experience in another Discord, we are going to be keeping, the doors are open, but behave yourselves, people,

[00:52:23] behave yourselves. Don't want to be able to throw you blue. And I absolutely love the fact he was rewarded for his patients with a blue. You know, did you have what? Over 500 packs in the end? Yes, over 500 packs. Yeah, over 500 packs, but he didn't get a move. So he didn't. But he has got a blue. He got. I saw he got really bright. So yes, he's just bright.

[00:53:42] For those of you, I would have to remember the orange advertisements in the UK.

[00:53:46] He asks, where does this team of the year on call Around like whatever they you know because of course we don't know the promo is it gonna be coming up

[00:55:03]