I don't know anything with certainty. I just now all of the following >things with certainty.
You're an idiot. Here's some economics for you. Coins on the black market cost less the FIFA Points. People buy coins because they are cheaper. If FIFA Points were cheaper than coins, then people would buy coins.
7,500 coins is worth more that the 150 Fifa points or whatever a gold pack costs, because the expected pay out is less than 7,500 when you open a pack. If it was more than 7,500, then opening packs wouldn't be stupid.
The reason coins are cheaper to buy form any source, legal or otherwise, is because people have found a way to steal/counterfit them. The reason EA needed to create the bands is because people were stealing from them. They have created a game, and the mechanics of that game create the oppurtunity for profit. That game is 100% their property, and nobody should be able to profit from EA's game except for EA, or someone, working in conjunction with EA, who is adding value to the users of the game.
Coin sellers, and the people who sell them their coins created by either trading or glitching, are stealing from EA, and cheating everyone who is playing the game. The way people distribute stolen coins, after selling them for real money on a black market, is by overpaying a substantial amount for a card listed by a cheater. EA has cut of the distribution of stolen goods, by making it take much more effort to distribute the coins.
They have also not destroyed the free market, just made prices inside their market markedly more inelastic. We are not fully sure how long it will take yet, but EA has stated that the 'bands' will move. If no cards are listed, bands will go up. If too many cards are listed and nobody is buying, bands will go down.
EA has every right to stop the theft that is occurring from their property. The same way stolen goods are confiscated, or bootleggers or torrent downloaders steal from artists/movie studios.
What will happen, since everyone is so eager to thing they are an economist, is that over a long enough time period, EA will extract the optimum profit from this game, or its users will stop getting their optimum utility (fun) from the game and quit it. EA has drastically altered the mechanics of the FIFA Macroeconomy, but not in ways that will destroy it quickly. The next step in the cycle will be individual player bands reaching equilibrium, and point prices/coin rewards in game doing the same.
I have bought coins, I do not work for EA. I have felt the rush of packing a good player, the suck of wasting millions of coins on packs (all of which I bought from coin sellers), bought players I can't afford, and then also traded for profit. At the end of the day, I know buying coins was theft, and that this game is not mine. The game is EA's, and its fucking fun to play. As long as I get to play a game that lets me pretend I am a world class soccer player, fantastic GM, tactically genius coach, and omniprescent passer and scorer, and not let me face the fact that in reality I can barely dribble a soccer ball, and in the last rec season of 7 v 7 soccer I played, the closest I came to scoring was when a cross hit me in the nutsack, I will love playing this game however EA sets it up.