Last week, as the sports world shut down, many FIFA 20 fans wondered what EA was planning to do with their weekly Team of the Week promo. EA came out last Friday to say they were replacing it and would have further information this week. After much speculation within the FIFA community, the replacement team is finally here, and it is probably worse than you were expecting. Going forward, TOTW is now Team of the Week Moments. A team that takes TOTWs from past FIFAs and puts them in the game. Check out the first of its kind below.
Due to the suspension of play in leagues around the world, Team of the Week Moments will temporarily replace Team of the Week.
Read the latest Pitch Notes to find out how TOTW Moments works and what other changes are being made: https://t.co/gekIknio04 pic.twitter.com/dlgpH9t3yF
— EA SPORTS FIFA (@EASPORTSFIFA) March 18, 2020
On one hand, you can see where EA is coming from. It’s a neat idea with a gorgeous card design. It’s also a relatively easy thing to implement. An important consideration since so many of their team members have to work remotely during the quarantine. However, while the core idea is a good one, the actual execution isn’t up to snuff.
Let’s start first with the actual player choice. There were quite a few options in front of them. EA could’ve easily thrown together a few “Best of TOTWs” from this or previous years. Alternatively, they might have just made several non-performance based promos to fill in the gaps. Instead, they went with this idea. Bringing back old TOTWs is, again, not a terrible idea. The problem lies in how they did it.
In FIFA 20, we should be on the 27th TOTW. This first TOTW Moments is the 28th TOTW from FIFA 18, which includes some incredibly average players in the FIFA 20 meta. If we take a look at the 27th TOTW in FIFA 18, we can see that it’s absolutely stacked. You’re looking at guys like Mo Salah and Josip Ilicic instead of Gareth Bale and Andres Iniesta. And, given how they’ve decided to implement player upgrades for TOTW Moments, these two teams aren’t even comparable.
See, instead of taking those players from old TOTWs and putting them directly into FIFA 20, they’re keeping them on their upgrade path from the current game. So, instead of getting a 91-rated Bale, he’s an 86. In fact, most of the players on the Moments team haven’t been performing in 2020, meaning the majority of these cards are significantly lower-rated than last year.
And here’s the worst part. If they’d actually used FIFA 18‘s 27th TOTW, we’d have a 90-rated Ilicic, a 93-rated Salah, an 87-rated Hakim Ziyech, a 90-rated Toni Kroos, and an 86-rated Raul Albiol. The highest-rated player in this current TOTW Moments is an 88-rated Matthijs de Ligt. I hesitate to say EA is trying to make Weekend League Rewards even worse given that this is just the first version of this new promo. However, they’ve certainly made a strong case that this “solution” is just another way to handcuff a player’s ability to get great cards through gameplay.
Hopefully, EA does a better job going forward with these promos. People are going to be playing a lot of FIFA over the next few weeks. They might as well give them a better reason than boredom to do so. I know I haven’t exactly been selling you on the game, but if you want to jump onto the FIFA 20 train, the game is available now on PC, PS4, and Xbox One.
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