FUT 15 Trading Guide #6: The Maintenance Method

Markets are not perfect. Not even in reality, neither in FIFA 15 Ultimate Team.

Cards stuck in transfer targets list, players who disappeared, FIFA Points that never entered into our account. All those who play FIFA 15 Ultimate Team are aware of these and other problems with this game mode. The only way that EA has to try to solve them is to perform maintenance to their systems. As if that were not bad enough, EA also performs periodical routine actions. Nobody likes to be deprived temporarily of the game for which have paid but we have to know to take advantage of bad times. That's what this method does.

When EA performs a maintenance operation that prevents players from accessing FIFA 15 Ultimate Team, the market does not stop.

This is the window of opportunity that must be seized.

If an auction expires during an outage or maintenance period, the auction will be completed, and accept the last bid made prior to the outage or maintenance.

EA recommends that for any high value items, the players should utilize the minimum bid option so that they can set the minimum amount they would be willing to accept for the item. This will ensure they get a fair price for their item, should bidding be halted due to downtime with FUT 15. However, many people do not follow this recommendation. Most of them do not know when the maintenances are. This is because many of these interruptions are not announced. Many others players do not know the rules of the auction during these stops, allowing their cards to be sold at bargain prices.

The maintenance method consists in to know when the interruption will take place and to bid on as many cheap cards as possible. If no one else bids until the beginning of the maintenance, the cards will be yours.

The optimization of this method is extremely important. This allows you to pass from reasonable profit to millionaire profit.

Almost all the optimization is made at the time of bidding. You should focus on the items that you will bid for and the timing of bidding. These are the two main aspects which we will cover with a bit more detail.

Filter items to bid

To filter the items that you'll bid on is critical to being successful in this method.

We encourage you to bid on a large number of cards, because many of them will eventually be overcome. However, there may be a problem: your budget. It is therefore important that you bid intelligently. Follow our advice:

> Bid cards with large profit margins

Why bid for contracts in which you can earn 100 or 200 FIFA 15 coins when you have a whole market full of cards, worth thousands of coins, waiting for you?

The opposite way is not always the best solution. That is, Messi and Ronaldo are rarely offered for sale with a low starting price, so it will be too hard to find one which you can make a bid.

Among the players who worth tens of thousands of coins, try to find those who their prices are at least 50% below and bid on them.

> Bid on cards with large quantities on the market

By filtering cards which exist in large quantities in the market, you will make your work easier. It will be easier to identify the normal value of these cards and to find more bargains.

> Bid on cards that other players usually don't bid on

This method is poorly known but probably there are those who use it. To beat the competition, the idea is to bid on cards that players usually only bid at the end of the auction. Your offers will have more chances to not be exceeded. Differentiate yourself in the filters that you use and you may have a whole market just for you.

If you had difficulty understanding our tips, an example will help.

Think about the market of positioning cards. The cards CAM, for example, can be sold between 2k and 5k, depending of the FIFA 15 Ultimate Team age. They are a great target for this method.

First for allowing a reasonable profit, since many are put up for sale for 150 coins. Then for existing in large quantities so that it is possible to bid on dozens of these cards in just a couple of minutes. Finally, they are also a good niche because most of the players only bid on these cards in the last seconds of an auction, keeping its price low until there. If the auction is over before the ending of the outage, you may be able to buy dozens of cards with a profit of a few thousand coins to each one. Easy, no?

Choosing a good timing to bid

To choose the right timing to bid is more important than to use the filters well.

This method is based on being the last to bid on an item before the maintenance. There are some precautions that are extremely important:

> Start early

Do not wait for the last minute to bid. Try to do it 30 minutes before the start of the maintenance scheduled. You will need time to search for the cards that interest you. As the allocated maintenance time gets closer, there is less time for other players to overcome your bids and your chances of success increase exponentially. Book this period for the targets which you consider most important.

If you want to take full advantage, you can make some preparatory work before starting to bid, noting potential targets and their normal market prices ​​in FIFA 15 Ultimate Team.

> Use the Transfer Targets List

This is probably the most valuable advice we can give you. Two or three minutes before the start of the outage, when you have already bid on dozens of items, exit from the transfer list and focus only on your transfer targets list. That way, you can ensure a higher success rate because you quickly identify the bids that were overcome.

Always bid until the start of the maintenance. In FIFA 15 Ultimate Team, most of the times, it delays 10 to 15 minutes.

> Take advantage of the whole period of maintenance

Typically, the maintenances last a few hours. The vast majority of bidding occurs in the last hour that the cards are up for auction. It's a smart move to bid for cards with more than an hour before the auction expires and less than the scheduled duration of the maintenance. The probability to be exceeded will be very low.

We recommend that, if you find good deals, you should bid on cards that expire just a few minutes after the end of maintenance. In these first moments, the number of people in the market is very low.

This is undoubtedly one of the most profitable methods in FIFA 15 Ultimate Team. Profit margins are huge. Furthermore, the fact that most of the scheduled maintenance will be done in times of low traffic, means that the competition is lower.

The less positive aspect of this method has to do with the fact that it can be applied only at certain times. Still, usually twice a month there are service interruptions that can be exploited for great deals. The main problem is to be informed of when the maintenances will occur. Take a look here to the complete list of maintenances or browse to ‘live' – ‘maintenances times' in the top black bar of our website.