Coin Farming, Selling and Bots Force EA Sports to Deploy Automatic Abuse Detection

Since February, FIFA 15 Ultimate Team Coins has been banning several thousands of accounts in FIFA's Ultimate Team mode.

Nonetheless, it is still a major undertaking to stop cheating, coin farming, selling and bot abuse. They have resorted to warning users that they will be facing permanent and automatic bans if they continue with their prohibited activities, according to Polygon.

Marcel Kuhn, lead producer of "FIFA 15," said they will deploy automated systems that will identify the abusers. According to the official site of EA Sports, any violation will get them a straight red card, which means a total ban of the account once it is discovered using exploits to either record false match results, coin farming, or selling.

They had been doing the policing manually in the past but it has become too labor intensive. There are more than 12 million unique players of FIFA Ultimate Team, which introduced the fantasy-sports/card-collecting mode in "FIFA 09." However, bots have attacked its transfer market. Players buy and sell cards as in-game currency and bots automatically buy the items and farm them for coins that are later resold.

These coins are used by players to acquire boosts and randomized packs of player cards in order to build an Ultimate Team.

EA Sports exclusively sells a separate currency which can be bought with real money that can be used to acquire the packs. The currency is not transferrable. Therefore, any other person selling coins are doing so illegally and promoting or trafficking the sales of coins several times will get the player permanently banned.

Not only do the bots hijack the transfer market, the legitimate transfers get stuck and the transaction cannot be completed. Players end up losing coins or lose the items that were for sale.