Madden NFL 17 Auction House servers were temporarily shut down on Friday night due to a glitch found in a new set of cards that were released.
The original plan was for a new set of cards to release, which allowed players to trade in five 85-86 NAT player cards (which are normally untradeable and unsellable) in exchange for one player rated at 87 or above with no restrictions and limitations. According to the website Pastapadre , the set was incorrectly programmed and those with just bronze cards were able to exploit the glitch and trade those in for the better cards. This was repeated over and over by those who realized the glitch.
EA shut down the Auction House for the rest of Friday and did not reopen it until Saturday morning. EA Sports had this message to those who were affected by the outage.
“Our thanks for sticking with us during the Auction House outage last evening. Please accept 10 thousand coins for the inconvenience.
We experienced an error with one of our sets within Ultimate Team that was exploited in violation of Terms of Service. In the interest of fair play we have removed exploited coins and players.”
According to Reddit user cmaddog , those users who acquired cards through the flawed set was banned from the Ultimate Team Auction House for 72 hours. There is also no indications as to whether or not the banned players will be restricted for just 72 hours or whether those users could face a longer ban, if not a permanent ejection.
EA has to hope that this glitch is a one-time thing as Ultimate Team is one of the most popular game modes in Madden NFL 17. It is also a major money maker for the company as new packs are always being purchased regularly by those who just want to get the best players without going through the challenges and auctions. With the recently announced Madden NFL 17 World Championship Series , this is something that EA is hoping will not affect the competition.
Were you affected by the Auction House suspension? How do feel now that it is reopened and it’s back to business as usual? Let us know in our comment section.
