It’s been a tough month or so for FIFA 20. Away from the game, EA employee Twitter accounts were hacked following the banning of a prominent but controversial esports player and content creator, leaving FIFA without any Community Managers on Twitter.
Much of the social media discontent can be sourced back to gameplay issues though, the biggest of which being the server issues. Input Lag, Delay, and Unresponsiveness are terms you’ll hear banded about in the FIFA community all the time.
For a lot of players, the game can feel slow, with it being difficult to play quickly and the game often even ignoring player inputs when trying to shoot or pass.
When FIFA 20 plays well, the potential is clear to see, so that makes it even more frustrating when the issues are so prominent. When you turn the game on, you don’t know how it’ll play from game to game.
With EA Sports ignoring fans’ complaints, players have started to look into it themselves. A detailed post on Reddit from Berfik, who says they have worked in the networking sector of game development, mentioned that lag compensation and strange server routing play a huge part in the issues.
The claims in the post are completely unconfirmed, but it’s spread throughout the FIFA community over the past few days and it’s detailed enough for it to seem legitimate.
However, it has become clear these past couple of weeks that issues with server delay and input lag effect more than just the hardcore, FIFA Reddit using section of the FIFA 20 fanbase.
Since Nov. 11, three current and ex-professional soccer players have called out the server issues on Twitter. First up was Chelsea and Belgium’s Michy Batshuayi who tagged EA Sports asking them to fix their servers.
Then, just four days later, Manchester City and France’s Benjamin Mendy tweeted EA France about the connection issues, asking why offline and online modes play so differently.
Then today, ex-Hull City, Reading, and Ireland midfielder David Meyler said he found the game unplayable after taking two weeks off from it.
Over the past few years, Meyler has started a FIFA Youtube channel, reaching nearly 400,000 subscribers, and has hit top 100 in the world numerous times.
Therefore, it’s kind of expected that he’d speak out about the game’s issues, but today’s tweet is just another comment from a high-profile member of the soccer world about FIFA 20’s issues.
Surely EA Sports aren’t going to like professional players with upwards of a million followers tweeting about their issues with the game. Not only does it look bad for the game, but it goes some way to legitimizing the complaints of the general FIFA 20 player base.
Professional players are often used in EA’s promotion of FIFA games, so to have others publicly complain about input delay and responsiveness has the opposite of the desired effect.
Other than a Pitch Notes article six months ago, which was for FIFA 19, we haven’t heard anything about server issues other than that they’re still being worked on.
Hopefully, such high profile players making public comments will prompt EA Sports into commenting on it further and making the fixes needed because, without that, the discontent is only going to get more widespread and toxic.
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