EA: PLEASE Improve H2H Play
The opportunity to play actual games (not just simulated attacks like VSA) against actual opponents ought to be the BEST part of any football app. Alas, it’s the most routinely frustrating (if not ou...
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Appreciate all of this. Definitely helps to clarify some of what I (as non-IT person) could only intuit about the way H2H gameplay/data exchange worked. And what it suggests is that EA needs to keep working on their match-making algorithm so that they minimize these ultra-frustrating scenarios in which the ping is so slow that the game becomes unplayable (or at least un-winnable!). I’ve often wondered whether their developers ever test gameplay under real world scenarios (like H2H matchups spanning continents). It doesn’t appear to me that they do or else they’d already have learned that the game becomes a virtual crapshoot once you start to exceed 80 mps ping—particularly if your opponent is “hosting” and has a ping that might be only 25% of what you are experiencing. That’s a HUGE competitive advantage and one that essentially “breaks” the game.
As for the moderators, I don’t hold them personally responsible. That said, I DO hold a multi-million dollar corporation (EA) responsible when they waste my time and money if they can’t adequately support their product. Sure, we can all walk away from this if we don’t like it, but my approach is always to first voice my complaints to give the person/intensity a chance to fix them before simply showing them my back. Alas, I just got done watching EA take 2 months to fix a basic bug in FC 25 that dozens of us complained about and they handled that with a pretty abysmal level of efficiency and communication (i.e., weeks and weeks of radio silence). All of which is to say I have yet to be impressed with EA but hope springs eternal.
Thanks again for he time you’ve taken to help educate us all!
No problem. Hopefully, this will encourage people to actually assess and troubleshoot their networks first, ensuring they fully utilize their connection rather than relying on the default settings from their providers, which often involve subpar modems and poorly performing Wi-Fi access points. This is a very common issue, and unless someone is IT-savvy, they're typically left at the mercy of the providers. EA doesn't have jurisdiction there and would get nowhere even if they wanted to or cared.
Keep in mind that visible ping differences, especially in global reach games, are primarily a result of where you connect locally. However, in head-to-head matches, there's much more involved and it comes down to how the game is packaged and the IT/Network infrastructure behind it. Even with cloud computing, latency issues won't be eliminated because they are constrained by the speed of light which essentially carries your data around the globe in fibreoptic links (hence my reference to sub-space communications from Star Trek or figuring out how to use Quantum Entanglement to carry data, then we can say goodbye to latency).
In-game Latency differences become even more apparent when all players connect to the same centralised server in FPS games like Quake or CounterStrike or Fortnite. Locals to the server might experience sub-10ms pings, while players from across the globe may face 300-400ms, causing noticeable warping and frustration to the intended local player base. This issue has been around since multiplayer gaming began and it won't go away, what EA should be doing is trying to regionalise H2H as much as possible and even out the top championship tiers where 2 matches are played, one home and one away to progress further
As for support with the bugs and issues within the game itself (not just FC24Mob - but all games), it's a balancing act. Bugs are typically unintended flaws in logic or coding, and while some are easy to fix, others might resolve one issue only to introduce another.
Ultimately, the main product needs to remain functional, so we don’t want fixes that break the game engine.
Testing in NPE (Non-Production Environment) is quite different from what happens in real world and there is so much you can simulate. You see some of EA's FC24 NPE build in Antwan's streams.
If you're interested in more details about what's going on in the game, feel free to join the EAFC24 Discord server. A lot is discussed there, and some developers are present sometimes on the server.
Yeah, totally agree about regionalizing H2H play. I’d be more than happy to wait an extra minute in order to get a fair match. And my suspicion is that no one at EA is bothering to test H2H outside NPE, otherwise they would understand that the game becomes an exercise in frustration when pings regularly reach 80 mps. Thanks for the Discord tip. May have to check it out!
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