FIFA 17 is injuring the hell out of players
Is this how Ars¨¨ne Wenger feels?
In real-life there are plenty of injury prone players knocking about. You know the type: they play a few games, get injured, spend a few weeks on the sidelines, come back, then get injured again. Think Jack Wilshere, Andy Carroll and all Arsenal players ever.
Well, in FIFA 17, it feels like every player is injury prone. Either that, or there's a bug messing about with Ultimate Team and Career mode.
If you've spent any time with either of these modes in this year's FIFA game you'll have noticed your players getting injured. Now, injuries are a fact of life with football. They happen. I, for example, tore my cruciate ligament in the run up to Euro 2004, which killed my chance of making the England squad. But FIFA 17 feels like injury overload.
Going by online discussion on Reddit and the FIFA forum, players suffer on average an injury per game. Sometimes two. This rate of injuries is difficult to cope with because, typically, an injury sparks a four game recovery period. And while players are injured they cannot be played. This isn't the '70s, you know.
So, what can you do to cope with injuries? Well, you can have a massive squad of players, so you've got someone to come in when you suffer an injury. Or, you can heal the players by applying a healing card. This either lets you use the player again immediately, or reduces their downtime.
There are two types of healing cards in the game: those that are specific for each type of injury and those that cure a player no matter which type of injury he's got. You can keep applying healing cards to a player to reduce the downtime to zero weeks.
So, how does FIFA 17 work out if a player gets injured? It's a bit of a mystery, but most agree that the chances of a player getting injured are higher if he has low fitness and if the opponent uses an aggressive playing style.
Players also have attributes that determine how injury prone they are. That is, players have ratings in the game that reflect their susceptibility to getting injured. The idea is injuries are the result of gameplay physics that are at play when tackles fly in, fused with these attributes.
EA will say injuries are a part of being a manager, and so it's only right they're in the game. EA will also say injuries add an extra layer of strategy, because you need to work out whether to risk playing an injury-prone player. But players are saying injuries occur so frequently, that FIFA 17 crosses the realism line into frustration territory.
Injuries are also expensive, in a virtual currency sense. Healing cards come in packs, but you can also buy them for coins. The market for healing cards is pretty hot right now, with some going for 1000 coins. (If you're having trouble, we have a useful guide on FIFA 17 coins.) The upshot is, with FIFA 17, players are finding they're spending most of their coins on healing cards, and that doesn't seem right.
The injury problem in FIFA 17 is so severe, some players wonder whether the system is broken and not working as intended. I've seen more than a few reports of players with 99 fitness getting injured in a match. Then, players heal them back up, only for them to get injured again in the next match.
What to do? The FIFA community is calling on EA to issue a hotfix, or at least explain what's going on with injuries.
Meanwhile, playing FIFA Ultimate Team or Career Mode in FIFA 17 is a lot like managing Arsenal. Perhaps this is what Arsene Wenger feels like?