Video Games

FIFA 23 Homegrown Eleven Token Swaps challenge called “pay-to-win”

Players furious about “impossible” Future Stars Swaps challenge

Marco Wutz

FIFA 23 Homegrown Eleven Token Swaps challenge called “pay-to-win”
FIFA 23 Homegrown Eleven Token Swaps challenge called “pay-to-win” /

It’s the final hours of FIFA 23’s Team of the Year promo, otherwise known as TOTY, but the next big and exciting content wave is already waiting: FIFA 23 Future Stars. This promo is all about the upcoming generation of top players and contains heavily upgraded cards.

Future Stars also features a Token Swaps program, which has already begun: Players can earn up to 30 FIFA 23 Future Stars Swaps Tokens by completing challenges in the game, which can in turn be traded for valuable rewards such as additional cards or packs.

What is the FIFA 23 Homegrown Eleven Future Stars Swaps challenge?

Poster for FIFA 23 Future Stars.
FIFA 23 Future Stars is coming, but a Token Swaps challenge makes players furious / EA Sports

While Token Swaps is a feature the community has wholly embraced, one of the challenges for Future Stars has players up in arms – Homegrown Eleven is being touted as “impossible” and “pay-to-win” by many members of the FIFA 23 community.

To complete Homegrown Eleven and earn a FIFA 23 Future Stars Swaps Token, you need to win seven out of a dozen matches in the Homegrown Eleven Online Friendly game mode. So far, so easy, right? Here’s the catch: This game mode forces you to use 18 first-owned players, which means that athletes you got from the transfer market are not eligible to participate.

Since you can only use cards you earned from challenges or pulled out of packs, players claim that using real money to buy additional packs provides a critical advantage, as those with more packs will have a larger pool of available athletes to choose from for their team. Winning against such squads is deemed “impossible” with a team that did not receive any investment of real currency.

The conditions of the game mode also make it rather awkward for players who have sold most of their first-owned cards on the transfer market – it’s possible that some users don’t actually have enough players meeting the requirements to compete in the mode, which is frustrating for sure.

So far, EA has not made a move to change the challenge in any way.

Published
Marco Wutz
MARCO WUTZ

Marco Wutz is a writer from Parkstetten, Germany. He has a degree in Ancient History and a particular love for real-time and turn-based strategy games like StarCraft, Age of Empires, Total War, Age of Wonders, Crusader Kings, and Civilization as well as a soft spot for Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail. He began covering StarCraft 2 as a writer in 2011 for the largest German community around the game and hosted a live tournament on a stage at gamescom 2014 before he went on to work for Bonjwa, one of the country's biggest Twitch channels. He branched out to write in English in 2015 by joining tl.net, the global center of the StarCraft scene run by Team Liquid, which was nominated as the Best Coverage Website of the Year at the Esports Industry Awards in 2017. He worked as a translator on The Crusader Stands Watch, a biography in memory of Dennis "INTERNETHULK" Hawelka, and provided live coverage of many StarCraft 2 events on the social channels of tl.net as well as DreamHack, the world's largest gaming festival. From there, he transitioned into writing about the games industry in general after his graduation, joining GLHF, a content agency specializing in video games coverage for media partners across the globe, in 2021. He has also written for NGL.ONE, kicker, ComputerBild, USA Today's ForTheWin, The Sun, Men's Journal, and Parade. Email: marco.wutz@glhf.gg

Home/News