Community ManagerThank you for at least acknowledging the weeks of responses attached to this thread. Obviously, the next step should be EA telling us what they have heard and what issues they plan to try and address. The biggest issue EA faces right now with the community of users isn’t actually the myriad in-game problems we’ve highlighted on this thread — it’s the lack of consistent, clear, two-way communication from EA.
It took approximately 4 weeks to get this acknowledgment fromEA_Pulsar, but it contains no information about how (or if) EA intends to act on our feedback, and it’s going to do nothing but frustrate and anger the community if EA goes radio silent again for another 4 weeks without some indication of how it plans to respond to the community’s input. Put simply, platitudes that our feedback matters aren’t sufficient unless there is tangible action. And while we can all appreciate that fixes take time on the development side, EA can reduce the angst among users and engender loads of goodwill by simply communicating with us on what issues it plans to address and when.
For example, the update “broke” VSA in some fundamental way that produces network connection error messages in virtually every match. Why not just revert to the pre-update code for VSA until the kinks can be worked out? It doesn’t seem reasonable or necessary for us to suffer through weeks more of the current mess when VSA was never a problem before the update. This seems like low-hanging fruit, so why not address it straightaway? And if it’s not that easy then just say so. But COMMUNICATE with us!
When users experience points of pain every time they load up FCM (which is multiple times a day for most of us in the forums), one post from EA per month is not nearly enough to make us forget about these daily frustrations and feel good about the company or the game. EA can fix this — it’s not rocket science. It’s simply a matter of committing the time and resources to providing regular updates (e.g., a weekly post to this thread fromEA_Pulsar?). Does EA care enough to do the bare minimum?
Careful with rollbacks. By definition, in Agile development, the standard approach is to roll forward and resolve bugs through incremental updates, especially on the backend. Rollbacks are usually avoided unless there is a critical failure that makes the application completely unusable, for example if the app or game goes offline entirely. Whatever went wrong here with the netcode and gameplay hasn’t caused a catastrophic failure. The game is still online, even though it's barely playable right now due to lag and broken mechanics.
From a technical standpoint, broken or unbalanced gameplay doesn’t count as catastrophic, even if many players would think it should. A rollback could also cause major issues with player inventories and live data, which would likely trigger even more outrage. Just look at what happened with Rivaldo when a simple visual bug led to people accidentally exchanging him. That’s why devs may choose to disable parts of the apps temporarily. In the case of FCM, that might mean disabling the market, the store, or Daily Rivals instead of risking a rollback. I’ve never seen them do one.
Also worth keeping in mind, a lot of features in live-service games are shipped under the MVP (Minimum Viable Product) model. That means publishers will often release the bare minimum functional version of the app, then rely on player feedback to fix, expand, or enhance those features. Obviously, a two-way conversation is needed for feedback to actually work. *Cough*.
Anyway, by design and by the framework used, bugs or missing functionality are unfortunately expected. That doesn’t make it right, but that is how the process and the framework work in simple terms.
In my view, Agile is basically a licence to cut corners, so yeah.
One thing that is definitely missing here, and has caused a lot of frustration and anger over the past month, is clear communication. Updates from EA should be happening more frequently.
Like I said (with regard to a VSA rollback), if it’s not that easy (and you make a convincing argument that it’s not) then EA should just communicate that to us and indicate what they plan to do. But creating an update that not only doesn’t fix well-documented points of pain but actually creates new ones deserves more than a “thanks for your feedback” message from EA — it deserves some immediate action. On that I think we all agree.
Yep in most cases its not as easy as rolling back a windows update so keeping FCM with broken gameplay was probably lesser of a headache/evil at least that is how it appears from distance when you are not a part of the dev group.
We wont know until its shared (if they ever will share), to regain the community trust they definitely should be transparent and open a proper feedback channel where you can have a two way conversation
I'd love to get my hands on their test plan and the test summary report to see where it went wrong, and what mistakes not to repeat at my work hahah.
