The servers of EA sports are heavily criticized for years. But what would be different without connection issues in FIFA? This article discusses such a scenario.
The „What if-articles“ take a deeper look on interesting questions relating to the FIFA games published by EA Sports. They focus on different scenarios in which one of the biggest problems, affecting FIFA in a negative way, is solved or discuss the consequences of a decisive change in EAs actions.
This article focuses on the state of the servers, which are for years heavily criticized due to the fact that their inconsistency causes connection issues. This leads to thousands of frustrated players around the world. As a result, people tend to lose interest in the game at all. If the servers do not work properly, frustrating moments, while playing the game, occur more frequently, but less self-inflicted. Moreover, they reduce the enjoyment of the gameplay as well as the long-term motivation to improve yourself. Disconnects pose further important problems. In this case players lose the connection to the servers completely unintended, which raises even more anger as the match counts as a loss. Although it should be possible to incorporate a mechanism maintaining the game session open for a limited period of time, EA seems not able to implement a proper solution into FIFA. Therefore, the player, who lost the connection to the servers, has no chance to enter the game session again. As a consequence, they have to deal with plenty of negative reviews, where the community urge them to fix the servers. All of this raises the question:
What if EA Sports had no server problems?
Good gameplay responsiveness
Under the assumption that EA Sports has well-functioning servers, one of the first things to notice after playing a few games would be a different feeling gameplay wise. In contrast to the current state you would feel a continuity in gameplay speed and moreover instant button response. The gameplay responsiveness would increase.
With malfunctioning servers people often talk about playing a different game any time they log into FIFA. In extreme cases the community compares the game with a tractor simulator, due to the fact that the players of your own team feel very slow and sluggish in their actions. This makes it very hard to show your best performance in a match against another person. The slower the gameplay the more difficult it is to beat weaker opponents regularly. Without that inconsistency players would not experience playing several versions of the same FIFA in a short period of time cause the gameplay speed would not change. The result would be a bigger skill gap synonymous to a better game at all. If skill matters more, Weekend League rankings, Division Rivals skill points and FUT Draft results would become more representative as a big factor distorting the outcome of a competition or even a single match disappears.
Furthermore, connection issues lead to complaining about button delay in the community. This means that your controller input does not get immediate response from the servers so e.g. it takes too long for your striker to execute a skill move. Whereas a result, despite timing everything precisely to beat your opponent's last defender, you get punished from the servers as they hinder you to go past the player and maybe even more to score an important goal. This example is just one of various possible scenarios in which button delay gives you a disadvantage. You could easily switch the roles in the instance described above. This is another massive problem reducing the skill gap of the game. Not to mention the frustration of anyone trying their best to get better, but in the decisive moment the connection turns against you. So if delay wouldn't be a thing, the gameplay benefits even more.
Increased play time and gaming fun
Nowadays FIFA is not all about playing anymore. The gameplay will always be the fundamental part of the game for sure and the most important factor to decide if its a good FIFA version or not, but other factors despite pure playing matter for the community as well. In ultimate team for instance, they like to hang around in the menus doing SBCs or trying to gain more coins through trading on the transfer market. In this case server problems sometimes hinder the players to log into the game mode at all. Therefore, despite having the time and motivation to play, you can't. This often happens at the start of a big event like a new promo, because there is too much traffic going on causing the servers to go down. FUT users are very familiar with the message on screen informing them that it is not possible to connect to the EA servers at the moment. Especially for people who do not have the time to play more than once or twice a week, this could destroy their entire motivation as they can't progress in the game mode.
In the end FIFA is still a game made to play and to have fun. If you are not able to do so, the core element is taken away. If this happens too often, even the biggest fans of the football simulation tend to lose their interest and focus on other games. Having fun while playing is key. People who enjoy the game, spent more time with it. Moreover, players are more likely willing to invest money, which is very important for a company like EA sports, because most of their revenue is made from micro transactions. So if there would be no server problems, EA would earn even more money, but the players would also be happier.
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