It's been real, boyz. FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF 🤮

Just saw this now. Holy shit EA!

you all need help

peatrick said:

Well, well, well... let me read through this again, possibly even a third time to ensure I've fully digested things and understand my (albeit extremely limited) options. Cannot thank you enough for your wisdom, experience and sharing your obvious expertise. You have no idea how much I appreciate you taking the time to write this all up.

My sister went to law school and is practicing (in NY), but highly doubtful she'd agreed to invest much time or effort into my fatball and/or video game hobbies and passions.

You have without a doubt motivated me to pursue this, however, based on prior experience, I assume it'll be difficult to get much (if any response) from EA Legal. Last time I went through this nonsense I had my account access restored, but they never actually wiped any coins, despite saying they had done that, just restricted account access to auction house.  This time the coins were gone before I even finished our Squads session. Will start documenting everything and putting together what limited info I have available. 

EA makes it more and more difficult to continue caring about the once great and storied John Madden Football franchise, was preparing to walk away or take a break, but that has now changed, thanks to your input. Genuinely appreciate you helping to light a fire under my ass, cannot say that enough... I've got nothing to lose at this point and quite a bit of extra free time on my hands all of a sudden. What little disposable income I had went towards gambling in the MUT casino, might as well divert those limited funds towards this battle.

Thank you kindly, sir. Wish I were able to properly compensate you for your time and expertise.  Should you ever find yourself in need of tech support or light DevOps, that's about all I have to offer at the moment. If my coin stack were to ever come back, I'd offer to donate to your MUT team, but even that runs afoul of the almighty terms of service. Tsk tsk on me for even having or expressing such naughty thoughts.

Power to the people. ✊  Much obliged, kind sir.

I'm confident in the bulk of my suggestions, although I want to emphasize (as you previously have) that I am not a lawyer.

As to law, I'm pragmatic: It's impractical to expect absolute justice, and there is a point of diminishing returns. While representing the interests of all injured gamers satisfies the ego, it's not advisable under the circumstances. Win this before it gets to arbitration, but don't settle for 12,000 Madden Points if you've spent more than 100,000. There is the legal principle of proportionality, which dictates that remedy should be proportional to the loss. If the remedy doesn't leave you with peace of mind when making legitimate use of the Auction House, it's not a sufficient remedy. If they're not going to give you the tools to know how to avoid illegitimate ban hammers, they'd better cough up some real points. If they'll disclose their algorithm behind the ban hammer trigger (even if under the terms of a Non-Disclosure Agreement), you'll appropriately settle for fewer Madden Points.

Just some angles. You'll retain more latitude with less risk in an escalated informal settlement. (Tier One techs likely lack the authority to grant the remedy you should reasonably be entitled to given the circumstances.)

Ugh, I feel bad. Something similar  happened to me season 1. buy packs and sell the not so useful ones and get snagged for coin distro.

peatrick said:

Welp, finally happened. Somehow I managed to dodge a bullet during M25, but the dreaded ban hammer got me too. They wiped my coins a couple hours ago, for alleged, you guessed it, "coin distribution" ohh F off.

I barely participated in Blitz, wasn't really much to do - sold a couple 92s I got from 20k Bolts for whatever the going rate was at the time. Last evening I decided to do the Collector's set to grab my Rod Woodson BND, spent today selling all the components. Nothing out of the ordinary, unless the purple Epic strategy items for 449k somehow triggered the bot ban. This is so stupid.

Not sure if I've got it in me to wait out another Binding Arbitration. Maybe I still have an extra hard copy I printed out back in 2023, I'll just scribble out the date and reuse that. 😡

For anyone suffering from a similar ailment, this form letter is what I've used personally and recommended and shared with users in these fine forums. No guarantee, but this is all we've got. Please make suggestions if you can help improve upon the document or anything related to the process of pushing back on these ridiculous waves of bot bans.

Be advised that I am just some asshole who did a bit of research, spoke to more senior and knowledgeable members of the community to solicit advice and cobbled together the document, mostly using uhhh GPT3? It was quite a while ago. Either way, I'm definitely not qualified to provide any legal, nor financial advice... but if you wanna team build or bullshit about MUT, I'm your guy. Thanks for listening to my little diatribe. May the Madden gods spare you such a fate.

What we really need is a massive Class Action Lawsuit if we expect EA to ever change their ways.

tmac1023 said:

IT STILL IS REAL! YOUR TEAM IS STILL TOP TIER! WE WILL ALWAYS SQUAD TOGETHER!

Come to think of it, I remember smokin you two in squads just a day or two ago

Crab5 said:

Come to think of it, I remember smokin you two in squads just a day or two ago

Yessir! You be cheatin..

tmac1023 said:

Yessir! You be cheatin..

Hey man, we didn't ask you to throw the ball straight at us

YOU'RE RIGHT I SUCK

Crab5 said:

Come to think of it, I remember smokin you two in squads just a day or two ago

Highly doubtful, i'm calling SUS on this.  Rule #1 of teh internets, pics or it didn't happen, right @tmac1023 ?

This company truly is the lowest form of scum on earth.

optimuschip12 said:

This company truly is the lowest form of scum on earth.

I'm old enough to know better... yet somehow i still cannot help myself.  It's almost as if the monopoly on NFL video games is bad for consumers, who would have guessed?  Uff.  Thanks for chiming in.  We're all in this together, unfortunately.

peatrick said:

I'm old enough to know better... yet somehow i still cannot help myself.  It's almost as if the monopoly on NFL video games is bad for consumers, who would have guessed?  Uff.  Thanks for chiming in.  We're all in this together, unfortunately.

its just ridiculous how they act. this automated garbage nonsense because they don't want to spend the time actually listening to their customers. they create an auction house, but then penalize you for selling something at a high price? gtfo. they know exactly what they are doing, they love enforcing their bullshit "rules" or TOS when the very idea of it is just because THEY want your money

we're using fake coins in a computer game to buy fake cards of fake players to play the game with

peatrick said:

Highly doubtful, i'm calling SUS on this.  Rule #1 of teh internets, pics or it didn't happen, right @tmac1023 ?

That's exactly what I meant...