Thanks for chiming in and sharing your experience it’s reassuring (in a frustrating way) to see others dealing with the exact same inconsistent responsiveness, heavy feel, delayed inputs, and wild scorelines (I’ve had 13-4, 15-2 losses that feel impossible based on skill alone). Your point about it affecting Squad Battles too is huge sincerely for me, offline modes (Squad Battles, training) feel mostly normal/responsive, which means strongly to online-specific desync or server-side processing rather than a universal bug.
On your latency question (as a fellow engineer, I appreciate the detailed logic):
Yes, your reasoning makes complete sense. In a peer-to-peer influenced or hybrid server setup (common in sports sims), latency compensation/rollback netcode is supposed to reconcile timing differences so both players see a consistent game state. But if it’s poorly implemented (e.g., over-compensating for the higher-ping player or bad prediction/extrapolation), the low-ping player can feel penalized seriously, inputs arrive early but get delayed to match the slower side, creating artificial lag, mistimed tackles/passes, or out of sync interactions. That 26ms gap you mentioned could explain why low-ping Lagos players like my 4ms via local DC + WireGuard tunnel situation sometimes feel worse against 30-50ms opponents.
From community reports (similar threads since Jan/Feb 2026), this mismatch often leads to “heavy” gameplay where players feel sluggish or unresponsive, even with green connection bars and low in-game ping. Extreme score blowouts 10+ goals very annoying, could stem from one side adapting better to the desync or the game favoring the higher-latency player via compensation.
On AI: In online modes (Rivals/Champs), AI-controlled players (your team or CPU subs) seem affected by the same sync issues sometimes they occasionally feel switched off, slow to react, or heavy, which suggests they’re tied to the server authoritative simulation rather than purely local. In pure offline (Squad Battles), AI is local/client-side, so it’s usually snappier unless there’s a broader engine bug, some report slowdown there too post-patches.
sincerely i wont lie i am tired because i have optimized everything on my end, wired LAN, MTU 1473, Google/Cloudflare DNS, QoS/UPnP, port forwards, WireGuard for NAT 2/stable routing to Lagos DC because i was frustrated as a point had to ditch my old router, went ahead and bought a new ASUS gaming router that cost me close to $350 yet the heaviness persists online, passes fail 3/5 times, Evo’d pacy strikers feel slow, CBs like VVD/Konaté get rinsed, inputs delayed. Offline is fine, so it’s not hardware/network alone.
As at yesterday night, i played RIVALS, 3 different games with opponents i see as mid players, scores ended in 13-5, 9-3, 15-4 against me, i got so upset i almost broke my controller, i had decided from yesyerday i will not continue playing to avoid continous relegation.
To my understanding i feel its more like a netcode/server sync regression, possibly from recent title updates, where latency compensation or matchmaking isn’t handling low/high ping mixes well. EA needs to investigate how the system reconciles these timing gaps to avoid punishing stable connections or creating unfair inconsistencies.
Have you noticed patterns (eg, worse at peak hours, after certain patches, or vs specific regions)? Adding more details like this might help EA prioritize a fix. thanks again for the thoughtful post
Best.
sometimes i make my connection bad by downloading and it helps,other times no.
