EA SPORTS FC™ TeamHi,
I have some suggestions that you should add to your task list, if you like to improve the game.
1. AI Difficulty: As many others pointed out this problem, it really destroys the fun in myteam-mode. I used to play on 100-103 AI and I am usally 1 to 1,5 seconds slower then the best players on Time Trial. Today I had a race in SIlverstone in myteam mode. I was easily 1,5 seconds faster in the "race strategy" practice mode without using ERS and I was 1 second and purple on "tyre management" practice mode. In the qualifying I was 1,5 seconds slower than my teammate and almost 2 seconfs slower then the pole positions. In the race it was exatly the same, as I was 1,5 seconds slower than my teammate per lap. It was a 50% race btw. These differences between Training mode and race make no sense.
2. Online Lobbies: To be honest I don't know where to start here. I wasnt't expecting that this could get any worse. There are literally hundreds of other games where online Lobbies work perfectly since decades and it is not a great testimonial for your developement team that not even this works in a stable way. I get it that the handling model and the AI is a very complex task to do so the majority is pleased. But frustrating your player base with endless connection errors and loading screens is really something you should put your effort in.You can see on one of your rvials game (Pro Evolution Soccer from Konami) how they destroyed their player base with bad online lobbies over the last years.
3. Tyre temperatures on 5 lap races: As a user already mentioned, the tyre temps shlould not be 70° at the start of a race. In ranked mode there is no possibility of doing a formation lap and if you play 5 lap races on social play, you do not want to drive a formation lap, which uses as much time as half the race itself. There is also no rule by the FIA that the max for tyre temps on the start ist 70° as another user mentioned.
4. AI Cornering: There are several corners where the AI ignores you completely, like turn 4 in silverstone (hairpin). The AI will always turn into you no matter what you do.
5. Changing something significant like the tyre pressures via patch: Although I find it very positive that you constantly try to improve the handling model of the car I just wanted to show you how much time it costs a regular player (playing in leagues) like myself to adapt to this changes. There are 21 tracks and you need setups for Time Trial, Quali, Dry, Inter and Wet. So you have to adjust 100 setups if you want to play on a competitve level. If you just load an "old" setup in an online race, your tyres will overheat and you lose more than a second on a lap.
6. Race director: In some modes it is not possible anymore to see the lap times of the other players after the race. I think it is in myteam mode and/or Grand Prix.
As I work for a software company as implentation/project manager myself I know how frustratiung it is for developers to always get bad messages. So I decided to end my complaints with some suggestions and with a positive note.
Feature Requests - Improvement Ideas
1.Time Trial: It is very annoying in TIme Trial when you switch from Car Setup to Leaderboard that you always get a message that your friends didn't set a time yet. I don't have that many friens who play the game and it should be easily fixed to just remove the message.
2. Setups: As I mentioned before you need about 100 setups to cover all tracks/ possibilities. While loading a setup there is no possibility to sort the setups after you saved them and to move setups up or down in the list. I think it would be great if the setups for the track that is loaded will automatically appear on top, while the rest of the setups stay in the same order as always.
3. Throttle and Braking input in replays: I would love to see this in the replays, because often I have the "feeling" that I didn't accelarate to fast, but there is no way of finding it out, without recording with anoter software, which I don't want to use beacause of performance losses.
All in all I think you are doing a great job and I struggled for years to find another game that hooks me as much as CS 1.6/Go and Pro Evolution soccer which OI played quite competively. WIth the F1 series (I started 2019) I found this game and it makes so much fun and the way you created this game feels so enjoyable. I hope you listen to your customers and fix the most urgent problems step by step. The fanbase for Formula 1 will continue to raise in the next years as the Formula 1 will presumably enter the stock market this year and more and more people will join the "circus" 😉
So keep up the good work and thanks for communicating with your "fans" 😉
Best regards, Michael.
Hi David and thanks for your fast response. I really appreciate it!
ad 3) There was not a single F1 race this year where any driver started with 70°C Tyre temperature EXCEPT the drivers who started from the pit lane and weren't able to heat their tyres up during formation lap. In the Ranked mode you dont give us players the possibility to heat our tyres up and in Ranked mode you can't deactivate the tyre temps like in Social Play or Single Player mode. I don't understand where my logic goes wrong, when I as a player want to start a competitive race with the same temperatures as real formula one drivers. This setting alone destroys many races because the first corner(s) get even harder to handle for most of the players.
ad 5) I meant that you as developers should know that although changes to better the game are in general welcomed and much appreciated by us customers, that huge changes like the ones regarding tyre temperatures also can lead to frustration, because after spending several hours on the setups for all of the tracks for races, the player has to do it all over again because of the new handling model. Although it would have been nice to have a perfect game from release on I understand the necessity of updates and find it hugely positive that you "corrected" your "mistakes" or in other words improved the game. Furthermore I really liked the fact that you actively told us in your patch notes that you changed the tyre pressures, what the consequences are and how we can fix it and adapt our setups. No transperancy issues in this point!
Your solution regarding a "custom setup per track" would be a big step in the right direction. If you would allow a custom setup for dry AND for wet races it would be almost perfect! If the "game" suggests dry tyres the dry setup would be applied and on inter and wet tyres the wet setup.
