Hello all - time for a new blog with some new information for Ultimate Team! To quickly recap - so far we have chatted about building and managing your Ultimate Team. Today I’ll be talking about how you go about competing with your Ultimate Team.

I’ll walk through some of the details on this year’s tournaments - which includes more information on the entry requirements - changes to the coin rewards system, and also the post-launch plans for introducing new tournaments over the year.

The last bit of news is detail on a new feature that will reward people (with coins!) for actually completing matches and not quitting half way through!  Take that quitters!

This year there will be 18 single-player and 18 online tournaments available at launch. There are many different types of tournaments, but probably the most obvious difference is their varying entry requirements. Each tournament can have up to two entry requirements, such as “limited to 3 stars”, “no more than 2 people from any one nation”, or “only silver players”. As you complete and win tournaments you will be able to unlock some of the more difficult but more rewarding tournaments the game has to offer.

Tournaments also have different difficulty levels associated with them - this is represented by the stars by the tournament name. For single-player matches this will change the difficulty of the AI, and for online we expect only the best of the best to be able to win the 5-star trophies. Tournaments also have different coin multipliers for the round you are in - in most cases the further the round you get to, the more coins you will earn.

Lastly, tournaments for this year will have a coin bonus that is earned for the best team in the tournament final. This can be anywhere from 150 coins to 2,000 coins! It’s crazy the amount of pressure there is in a final game now with this many coins on the line! And who knows, we may even see some higher coin bonuses throughout the season… but I shouldn’t comment on that quite yet!

On that note, there will be new Featured Tournaments released each week. Within the game, you’ll see announcements on what tournament is coming up next, what the reward structure is like, and what kind of a team you will need to compete.  We will announce these a few days before the tournament, so everyone has some time to build their best teams. These tournaments will also only be open for a limited time, so you’ll have to act fast! Only the best Ultimate Teams will have all the trophies!

Now there’s one more thing I’d like to let everyone know about - it’s an area we have been thinking about a lot. Simply put, we do not like when we are playing a game and someone quits on us.  It is not a fun experience and it doesn’t feel fair. So for FUT 10 this year, instead of penalizing people for quitting, we are going to reward people for being reliable. This is where the reliability multiplier comes in to play for all online games.

If you successfully complete a game, we will give a small boost to your reliability rating. If you continue to be reliable, this rating can increase to 1.25. This multiplier is applied to the coins you earn in a match - so this can be quite the nice reward! However, if you choose to quit out of a match in an unfair manner, your reliability rating will be knocked down by a larger margin. This makes quitting a very poor decision as you’ll be missing out on a lot of coins in future matches! And don’t think about yanking that cable either - we’ve thought of all that. While we are sure there will still be people that quit, we hope that everyone will realize that it won’t get them any further in building their Ultimate Team.

That’s all the news for now! Look for more videos and info as we get closer to the launch date.