See all previous articles here.

It was back in 2004 that I first played FIFA online, having gone through the laborious process of connecting up a fat PlayStation 2. Things were simpler back then with far fewer features and there was only a single head 2 head game mode, but that was enough for me. I was hooked and addicted to the joys and frustrations of competing with an opponent which offered far greater variety and challenge than the FIFA’s AI could then and can now.

Ever since, it’s always been what FIFA can offer online which interests me most. I’m not nearly so addicted as I was then, but I still think online modes are where the greatest potential is at.

As my tastes have matured to the point where winning isn’t nearly enough, FIFA online represents one of the most frustrating experiences gaming has to offer. Frustration isn’t always a bad thing in games – frustration at your own failures is what drives you to get better – but in FIFA it tends to be frustration at the game’s failings or your opponent’s tactics.

Just occasionally, you get to see the rough gem which lies under all the problems. When there is respect between competitors, and when winning isn’t the only priority, you get to enjoy FIFA 12 as it should be. As opposed to the repetitive, unrealistic, exploitative tactics you’re used to, you get to see creativity and intelligent play. Against such play, frustration melts away, and you no longer feel like you are fighting against the game to enjoy it.

Other than when playing online friendlies though, this experience is very rare, or practically nonexistent when it comes to playing Clubs. It’s not that surprising that playing FIFA with friends is more enjoyable than playing it against random people – this is true of any game – but the gap between the experiences is uniquely large.

This is obviously a pretty large problem for FIFA and its community, because it results in the online experience being far less enjoyable than it really ought to be, to the point where many simply don’t bother playing online due to it because they know the experience they will get will be more bad than good.

So, who’s fault is it? It’s pretty common to see people stating that you should “Blame the player, not the game”, or the precise opposite, “Blame the game, not the player”, and I’ve even seen some individuals stating both!

Blame the Player

Though there can be no denying that players are causing the problem, it is very tricky to imagine how you could ever solve the problem from that angle.

It’s hard to imagine because it’s very difficult to persuade people that they ought to play differently, particularly when the way you would have them play would make it less likely they would win. Some would debate whether their style of play was genuinely unfair, arguing that it was realistic, or falling back to the pathetic cliche and stating that “it’s in the game, you could use it too”. Annoying though it is, they have some point – you can’t really begrudge people who play to win within the intended bounds of the game, imbalanced as they are.

However, I don’t buy another common argument – “I paid for this game, I can do what I want on it”. Playing online, albeit behind a wall of anonymity and long distance, is like being in any public sphere. There is much to be said for competitive spirit or a bit of banter, but when banter becomes trash talking becomes vicious insults, and when playing hard turns to cheating turns to hacking things have gone far, far too far.

That isn’t to say that change through players and the community is impossible. One thing that we can do as more conscientious gamers, is to try and prevent ourselves from playing their way. It’s all too easy to resolve that if you can’t beat them, you must join them, or to give up altogether. There is a continual pressure on gamers online to stop playing respectfully or stop playing altogether, and you see this play out over the course of every year.

In the first few days, the average player you find online tends to be a much fairer opponent than the one you’ll find a few weeks later, who in turn tends to be a fairer opponent than the one you’ll find a few months further on. They are less likely to be playing with one of the best teams, less likely to know exploits and less likely to use them even if they do. As time goes on, as the frustrations set in and the new-game-sheen wears thin, those who play respectfully start to play less, stop playing altogether, or start changing their play style so that they can cope with their opponents. It’s a vicious cycle which degrades the experience of FIFA online with a devastating predictability.

If we in this community refuse to bend to it, by persisting with the team we love rather than playing as Real Madrid, and by playing honestly, then we can at the very least not contribute to the problem. If a ‘Fair Play’ message could be taken on and pushed by influential members of the community (like popular FIFA YouTubers), then you might just see some noticeable difference.

To say that changing the players is an uphill battle would be an enormous understatement, and whatever change could be affected like this would be heavily limited. It might be possible to persuade a relatively small number to improve the way they play, but the vast majority will never change the way they play even if you could reach them. It is in many ways fair to blame the players, but it is totally impractical and completely unhelpful to approach the problem from a “Blame the players, not the game” perspective.

Blame the Game

So, is it fair to blame the game?

Any developer of an online game should be thinking about how to prevent its gamers from ruining the experience they have built. With a game as complicated and as vast as FIFA is, it’s certainly not a simple task, but I don’t think that can excuse the degree to which FIFA is defenceless against its player. The range of issues is immensely broad, from hacking to green-afroed prats in Clubs, but they all serve to lessen the joys of FIFA online. Though players are electing to do these things, it is EA who has made a game which allows, and often rewards them doing so.

Hacking

Fortunately hacking is pretty rare in FIFA. The only relatively widespread hack that you see is people boosting their VP ratings to skip getting accomplishments or, worse still, to make their VP impossibly good/strong/tall/fast, and so on. EA have been reasonably good at reacting to this abuse and banning those who do it, but I still hold out hope that FIFA 13 will have VP data stored online to prevent this kind of hacking properly.

Quitting

In the last few years the frequency of people exploiting the ability to quit in the first five minutes without punishment has become endemic. I don’t have any precise statistic, but if I score in the first 5 minutes I fully expect my opponent to quit out. It’s got to the point where if someone doesn’t quit I’m totally overjoyed with surprise that I’m not playing a scumbag. The current system is designed so that you can quit out if problems with lag arise, or there is a kit clash, but right now it’s more frequent that people use the 5 minute window to quit out when they go behind than to quit out if they have a genuinely justifiable reason. If anything, it would be better to have no such system right now.

Obviously EA could do much better. A fairly simple solution would be to prevent quitting after you concede. This would improve the situation tenfold, though if you conceded straight from kick off in a laggy game you might be slightly worse off. A more complex solution could try to actively detect lag so that players would have an opportunity to quit freely in high lag situations. What should be blatant obvious to anyone who plays online much, especially Clubs, is that this has to change. Almost everyone knows about this exploit, and it’s a straightup way to cheat a win from your opponent. It strikes me as pretty shocking that it’s stayed this way for so long.

Tactics

Dodgy tactics are rife in FIFA online – high pressure, repetitive one-twos, stupid formations, balls-over-the-top, sweetspot shots, backpost corners, etc, etc. These problems are no doubt the hardest to solve, because they are deep rooted in the flaws of FIFA’s gameplay. Together these flaws and the ability to consistently exploit them make FIFA a game where the players who are best at FIFA play a game which has practically no resemblance to real football. That lack of balance is the root cause of the most major frustrations in FIFA.

I’ve talked about most of these problems before in one article or another, in most detail here, so I don’t think much more needs to be said here.

Assistance

I rattle on about assists more than pretty much any feature of FIFA, and this topic gives me another perfect chance. In the assistance settings EA have implemented a system which allows users to choose to take no responsibility over their game, which doubles as the most unrealistic way to play the game, and which facilitates the easy exploitation of FIFA’s gameplay flaws. Playing, as I recently did, on Clubs with an exclusively manual bunch provided the latest and greatest example of how broken this system is.

We were conscious going into each game that we would likely not win due to our choice of controls, a cost acceptable because playing on manual is that much more enjoyable than playing on assisted. Even with the expectation to have to play far better than our opponents to even draw, I was flabberghasted to be reminded just how unfair such a fixture really is. It wouldn’t be a grand exaggeration to say that our opponents gameplan was to press A+LB (one-two pass) a few times, followed by Y+LB (lobbed through ball) once, followed by B+RB (finesse shot) over and over again to score.

It was startling to me, as I haven’t played Clubs much this year, just how easy it is to pull off such a tactic. Pretty much every time the opposition would shoot it would fly automatically into the net, proving more clearly than ever that the finesse-sweet-spotting is alive and well. Of course, it is not just the assistance which causes the problem, rather the way that the assistance fits in around other flawed game mechanics. Any half decent ball over the top in Clubs will be pulled off because the attacker will be so much stronger and faster than the defender that he will almost always get the ball – the ability to pretty much guarantee that the pass will work out means that you have a near guarantee of a good chance every time you time a ball over the top well.

I know of no clearer example of a game developer allowing their gameplay to be wrecked than what you see with FIFA’s assists. I do not believe that everyone should play on manual, nor that assisted should be removed, but EA must put features in place so that I don’t have to have my game ruined by assistance; (see here for what I would do in more detail). I do not blame gamers for using assists (especially as most do not even know there is any other way), but I do blame EA for allowing this to happen in their game. Not only is there a much better game in FIFA than how it plays on assisted, but this failing near enough ruins any competitive aspect of online gameplay for those who know just how much better FIFA is once you take the stabilisers off.

Human Goalkeepers

Human GKs have been damaging Clubs for a couple of years now, and for a short period with FIFA 12, they were also allowed to ruin H2H Seasons gameplay too. Though I’m very pleased EA did decide to remove the ability to swap to the goalkeeper in H2H Seasons after a while, EA haven’t gone nearly far enough. I do wonder on some level why EA agree that it’s unfair in head to head play, but don’t recognise that it must be unfair in Clubs too. In fact, in Clubs where the keepers’ rating (and other attributes like height) can make them far, far better than any of the real keepers in the game, it’s actually worse than it was in H2H Seasons.

A human keeper who knows how to exploit the controls (particularly on assisted) can pretty much prevent any shot from outside of about 10 yards. Outside of headers and pass-across-goal chances, they can save pretty much anything and it isn’t even very difficult. I think it says quite a lot about FIFA’s community that so many people would play in the most boring position on the pitch just so they can vastly boost their team’s chance of success.

It’s really as simple as this – Clubs is absolutely ruined from a competitive angle like this. EA has made a clear admission that they realise the feature is broken. Not dealing with this for FIFA 13 would be practically unforgivable.

Over-used & abused Teams

A dull fact of life on head 2 head Seasons is that you will have to play the same handful of teams over and over again. Though you’d expect that better teams will be considerably more popular, both because better teams tend to have more support, because playing with the best players is often the most fun, and because playing with the best teams helps you to win. Right now, there are so many reasons to use the best teams, and only discouragement from using lesser teams, for example the team you support. For gamers what it means is that they get very little variety of teams to play, and for supporters of particular teams, it means they are almost always playing with the weaker team.

Teams who make up the top of a star bracket are advantaged under the current system as they will only ever be matched against teams who are weaker than them, and the reverse is true of teams in the bottom of any particular bracket. Changing the system to one where matchmaking is based around a 100-scale numerical rating for each team would solve that part of the problem.

To really knock this issue on the head though, EA need to look into introducing some incentives/disincentives to try and encourage people to play with a greater variety of teams. People should not feel disadvantaged if they play with the team they love, but right now that is the case.

Trolls & Clowns

A telltale sign that you’re about to play a Club of annoying idiots is when, at the kick off you see that their virtual pros are freaks-of-nature. Minute speedfreaks or gigantic gangly Crouch-alikes with ridiculous hairstyles and colours and faces which wouldn’t be out of place in a horror movie. Though I wish people didn’t make their players like this, I’m more confused at why EA allows them. I play FIFA hoping to experience the sport I love, and nothing kills me immersion more than having to watch a cobalt-afroed moron doing backflip celebration while his mates do handstand walks. It makes an absolute mockery of FIFA as an authentic recreation of the sport, and these factors blight Clubs as a mode.

Personally, I would be happy if the extreme celebrations were cut out, and if EA toned down the player customisability a tad so that the options are a little more believable. Hair dye is fine, but at least make it look like hair dye rather than just turning each strand of hair a stark blue, green, or white. Rugby head protectors for outfield protectors though? One pink glove and one green one? It’s hard to know what ‘cool’ customisation will be added next. How about allowing any colour for skin tones? Clearly a stupid idea, but you can be certain that you’d come up against bright purple players every other game.

Unfortunately, I don’t think EA are likely to take a more serious line with visual customisation, so I will instead ask that they provide options so that I can opt out of having to see my opponents VP and their stupid celebrations. In my opinion, Clubs has the potential to be the greatest mode in any sports game – it’s incredibly painful to see the circus it has become.

Conclusion

It’s pretty clear to me that it is wrong to say “Blame the player, not the game” or “Blame the game, not the player”. The player and the game are both to blame. However while the playerbase is mostly unchangeable, the game could be improved in a lot of ways to prevent it from being ruined by its players. Some of these ways are simple changes which would mean a lot, some are more complex, but in both cases they are things worth devoting serious attention to.

EA could make a lot of major changes to gameplay this year, and I hope they will, but from an online perspective it is probably more important that they attend to the problems I’ve elaborated on above. Playing FIFA 12 online shows you the worst of FIFA, and the worst of its community. It is up to EA to change that.

As well as the early strategy EA adopted to try and revive FIFA that centered around online gaming, this interview also goes in-depth on how the development team were assembled, how Pro Clubs came to fruition and it even offers a hint at what the future may hold for FIFA. The full (and excellent) interview is right here.

“The first time we stood up and gave the presentation about 11 versus 11 online the company thought we had rocks in our head”

After you’ve had a read gentlemen, hit the comments.

Another week, another Back To The FIFA post for you to start thinking about. If you’ve missed this before, you can catch up on the previous posts with this tag.

In the last post we asked about Online Modes, but this week we wanted to concentrate specifically on Pro Clubs and OTP. Virtual Pro hacking has been an issue ever since unlockable progression was introduced. There are always assholes that don’t want to level up fairly and just want an edge as quickly as possible, but there must be a solution.

Is having two virtual pros the answer? Having one stored online and one offline removes the issue of VP hacking, but it presents it’s own issues. Do you keep the existing accomplishment system and have to unlock everything twice? Do you remove the accomplishment system from online altogether? If so how do you reward frequent play and determine growth? Should VP progression stay offline and have stats levelled out like FIFA 09 online? How about a system where your VP is stored on the cloud and pulled down when you log in to the servers, with unlocks only being available if you’re connected?

What about features? What do you think is missing from the modes that would make managing and playing with your club easier and more enjoyable? Could there be more options in place for OTP to deal with idiots? We want to know what you guys think about all of this. As ever, let us know in the comments.

If you want to add feedback via Twitter use the hashtag #WishFIFAWouldBe and head over to Sweetpatch.TV

It’s Wednesday and that can only mean one thing, it’s time for the next installment of Back To The FIFA. This week we want you guys to have a think about FIFA’s online modes and what new features you’d like to see over the next five years?

FIFA 12 marked a revolution of sorts for FIFA in the online space and there’s no doubt that Head To Head Seasons has improved the multiplayer experience immeasurably in comparison to previous games. But what do you think is the next step for H2H Seasons, or do you have a totally new idea for an online mode you’d like to see in FIFA?

As well as game modes that form a core part of FIFA on our consoles, this generation has also seen a swathe of supplementary online components like Game Face, the FUT Web App, Creation Centre, EA SPORTS Football Club and the  recently announced FIFA Street Network. These are all great but they can of course all be improved and what other FIFA online “apps” would you like to see? We’re dying for EA to put Custom Tactics online, which is surely a must for FIFA 13 and beyond?

Finally, an area of online play where FIFA has yet to excel is the mobile market and although an iPhone version of FIFA is great, we’d really like to see our FIFA console experiences connected persistently where ever we go. How could EA do this, what in-game content do you think would transfer well on to a handheld?

Your feedback has been amazing so far, and we’re recording absolutely everything. Hit the comments and help shape the future of FIFA online.

If you want to add feedback via Twitter use the hashtag #WishFIFAWouldBe and head over to Sweetpatch.TV

So on Wednesday the Back to the FIFA: Career Mode post was put up on FSB requesting your ‘blue-sky-thinking’ ideas about where Career Mode should go in future. If you haven’t already, be sure to post any ideas in the comments of that post. For my part, I’ve been reading through all of your ideas, and there are plenty of good comments there already, including some really interesting ideas. I myself have been giving Career Mode’s future some thought too, and so I thought I’d devote this article to the most ambitious possibility: putting Career Mode online.

One area FIFA has innovated greatly in over this current generation (one which is quickly coming to an end) is in expanding the online game modes beyond the general drudgery of endless head-to-head matches to provide longevity and continuity in the form of Virtual Pro Clubs, FIFA Ultimate Team, and most recently the Head 2 Head Seasons mode.

Career Mode on the other hand remains a lonely offline experience. This is one of the few online areas Pro Evolution Soccer has FIFA beat with Master League Online, and one could also point to both Football Manager and Football Manager Live as other examples of online management experiences.

So if this was to change, and FIFA was to implement an online Career Mode (let’s say, “CMO”) how would it be? The current examples can more or less be divided into two types – open, where everyone plays in the same large almost MMO style system (as with say, Virtual Pro Clubs and FUT), and closed, where groups each play in their own instance.

So let’s say FIFA’s CMO was to go down the open route and mimic PES’s MLO. There are no real teams, nor real league structures, and buying/selling players is done through a central trade house, where players worth falls and rises as their popularity does.

There is nothing especially wrong with this, but the structure is far removed from that of real life or of Career Mode due to the lack of real ‘leagues’, fixtures, seasons, and of course teams. Though you could call it a Career Mode online it’s really not much more than Head 2 Head Seasons with trading. Probably an even larger issue is how similar it would be to FUT. Imagine FUT without the ability to spend real money, the existence card packs, and the ridiculous chemistry system: it would basically be an open CMO.

For that reason it seems difficult to imagine that CMO would have a significantly large userbase above and beyond what FUT already has, and EA are unlikely to split the FUT userbase when FUT is such a great income stream. If they did it would likely end up being a niche for users put off by the fact that FUT values real money at least as much as footballing know-how (though one might note that with the rise of the ‘Sugar Daddy’ owners this is somewhat analogous to real football!).

A Different Direction

That doesn’t mean FIFA can’t have CMO. Increasingly, what I think might be the best answer would be a closed system, one which doesn’t so much represent an MMO but works to make a Career Mode an event between a private group of friends.

This harps back to the days where you might play a manager mode or tournament locally between two or three people, and I’m sure a lot of the older FIFA players will have done this at some point. Sure, there were pitfalls – it wasn’t all that fun watching your friend grind out matches against the CPU but then it certainly added something above the exhibition mode matches or the lounge mode. In fact, I still see plenty of people pining for the local multiplayer CM’s return.

But what if you could start a multiplayer Career Mode like that, but online? What if you and one, or two, or five or twenty others could all play in one footballing world together? You could take on your favourite teams, or take over some of the best teams in the world. Maybe you’d choose to start with the teams at the bottom and race to the top. The possibilities are both exciting and innumerable.

This isn’t an entirely new idea. The Football Manager titles have supported online play like this for a long time. It’s not remotely user friendly, but even so there is a small hardcore community which organises network FM games online, and I’m sure plenty of friends have played with itover LAN. I dabbled in it for a while, and though it’s hard to organise, it adds a lot to the normal FM experience. The network games in FM are built into the single player structure with connected players joining as new managers.

There are really only two major issues. First is that you need everyone to be online at once to play, and second is that gameplay slows down a lot when a large number of people all have to agree to ‘continue’ after each turn, or proceed to a match. Sports Interactive have created some features to soften the problems, like the assistant managers which can take over if you are absent, and having time limits for goes. Even so, it still takes a high level of dedication to get a really good game going over a long period of time, but you could say the same of FIFA’s Virtual Pro Clubs.

So the feasibility is definitely there, but could FIFA improve upon this model to bring more of the good, and less of the bad in this potentially awesome mode? It would undoubtedly take a lot of work: no implementation of CMO is going to be anything less than a massive undertaking for EA, but I do think a CMO which worked like this could end up being a really popular mode across a wide demographic.

What follows is a plan for a mode like this. It should be noted that this is not a plan for how it could fit on top of FIFA 12, but rather an outline of how it might fit in on FIFA in the coming next-gen.

How it might be done

Ideally, this vision of CMO ties as closely as possible to the offline version. This should reduce development costs while ensuring that CMO keeps as true to what CM is as possible.

The biggest issue such a mode would have is the difficulty of getting people online at the same time to play, and this gets worse if you are in a large group. It’s important then that any such mode has a number of features which aim to get around the worst of this problem. As best as possible, the mode should be designed to reduce the amount of times that players have to be on together, and also that the mode should be tolerant of situations where players aren’t available.

The traditional method way of constructing a mode like this would be to have a host who owns the game, who stores the saves, and who everyone connects with to play. It would work, but it also makes it harder to organise: the host always has to be on for every session and people can only play when the host is there. But what about if the game’s data was saved into EA’s servers – the ‘cloud’ – like Clubs, and Ultimate Team are? This would remove the dependence on a single host.

In this plan, CMO would be a turn based game. This means that each player takes their turn and does whatever they want to do for that turn before ending their turn. When every player has ended their turn, all of their actions take effect on the game, and then each player gets their next turn. Fortunately, for the most part, FIFA’s Career Mode already works like that.

When you combine the cloud based functionality with the turn based nature, you remove the necessity for players to be online simultaneously to make their moves. Obviously the mode will be at its best and fastest if everyone is on at once playing ‘live’ as it were, but it would no longer be a necessity. People could log in to do some transfer dealings and adjust their formations throughout a day, preparing for the matches later, for example. This whittles down the times when you absolutely must be online simultaneously to matches, much like in Clubs.

Another exciting possibility for the mode would be the incorporation of a web portal and mobile apps so that some management could be performed online. You could set up your tactics for your next match, scout around for players, or even put bids in from work or while travelling. This would both further the modes viability, as well as continuing to expand into an area EA is clearly very interested in.

Even so, there will be times where the game becomes deadlocked when waiting for players, and the game needs to have rules to deal with this. It really becomes a question of at what point does the game progress, even when not everyone is ready to. Here, it would be best to provide a range of methods for choosing when to proceed. It could be only down to a unanimous vote or the hosts choice, but I’d imagine most popular would be a solution which took into account how many people were ready to proceed, and then imposed a time limit based on that. For example, if half of the players are ready to proceed, it could enforce a five minute time limit, but if all but one player was ready, it would be one minute.

It’s crucial that users have the control over options like the above. Some groups may want to play every moment of every game together in a strictly organised set up, but some won’t. CMO should cater to this. Other options that should be available would be the ability to tune how many turns existed throughout a season, especially if you could choose a separate value for the transfer windows. For instance, a group might want to have a turn a day through the transfer window, but then reduce to a turn per matchday throughout the rest of the season.

Given that it’s possible that turns can be taken without a player, CMO would need some form of automation to make up for it. In Football Manager there is an assistant manager who can take over all of your duties, and that really is the ideal solution. He should be able to keep the club ticking over as well as managing matches that their managers are absent for. This way, if someone is away it has the least possible effect on his game, and everyone else’s game.

As for matches, there are a few things that CMO should do. First, all matches for a particular round of a particular tournament should be collated into one turn. This removes any unnecessary waiting around. I’d also suggest that players are able to start their match at any point within a turn. Matches of a particular turn don’t need to occur simultaneously, so once your opponent is online (or your opponent is a CPU) you can get it done. If players don’t turn up for a match, then the game should either be postponed, or played out by CPU substituting for the missing player.

Summary

• Stays true to how CM works so as to remain authentic and reduce costs
• Would be aimed at dedicated groups like online leagues, and at groups of friends
  
• Game data is stored on the cloud to remove reliance on host
• It would be a turned base scheme ala Football Manager, which would reduce the need for players to be on simultaneously
• Players would only have to be online at the same time as their opponents for matches
• User control through a variety of options is paramount, allowing the mode to be tuned to different groups’ needs
• Possibly offer web and mobile apps to allow some management remotely

Conclusion

There are obviously thousands of little details to be thrashed out, but the outline is there, and of course much of the mode already exists in offline CM. That’s one of the advantages. Unlike the open style system, this one actually does stay true to what Career Mode is all about: you launching your managerial career into an authentic footballing world – just this time you’re competing against your friends as well.

By decreasing the amount of time players have to be online at once to a minimum, it changes what could be an organisational nightmare to something which groups of friends could manage, just as easily as playing as part of a Virtual Pro Club as many groups of friends do now, and the same could be said for online formed leagues. It may still seem like a big jump, but at the start of the current generation in 2005, how many people thought just five years later we’d able to play as individuals in full 11v11 matches through leagues and tournaments? With another generation on the horizon, perhaps an online career mode in some shape or form will be the next big innovative mode for FIFA, and just perhaps it could be something like this.

So I’ve gone into some depth on one way that a career mode online could work. What I’d love to know from readers is this: Would you be interested in a career mode online of some sort? Would you prefer it to be an open-network version like PES’s Master League Online, or FIFA’s Ultimate Team, or a closed one, like Football Manager offers and like the idea described above? Perhaps you’d go for something entirely different. Either way, I’d love to hear in the comments below.

This isn’t a great indicator as to which game is/was more popular in general because FIFA 11′s 2010 release months aren’t taken in to consideration. But it offers an interesting insight none the less in to the popularity of FIFA on the Xbox 360 and the strong start FIFA 12 made in 2011. Here’s the top ten based on global unique users:

1. Call of Duty: Black Ops
2. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3
3. Modern Warfare 2
4. Halo: Reach
5. Battlefield 3
6. Skyrim
7. Gears of War 3
8. FIFA 12
9. FIFA 11
10. Madden NFL 12

The FPS was certainly the weapon of choice for Xbox 360 gamers in 2011 but after that, FIFA was next on your list. Thoughts?

The prize on offer once again is a cool 20,000 USD and the much coveted VIP trip to the Ballon d’Or Gala where you’ll be able to rub shoulders with the greatest footballers on the planet.

There will be 6 online FIWC 2012 qualifiers in total and here are the details:

Online Season 1: 1-31 December, 2011

Online Season 2: 5 January-25 January, 2012

Online Season 3: 1 February-25 February, 2012

Online Season 4: 1 March-25 March, 2012

Online Season 5: 1 April-25 April, 2012

Online Season 6: 1 May-18 May, 2012

As well as six oppotunities in the online arena there will also be eleven live qualifiers over the next few months and we’ll bring you details of these as and when we get them. For more information, head over to the FIWC 2012 website.

So FSB fans, are any of you going to try and win the top prize on the pro FIFA gaming scene?

“The ability to take a ball between an opponent’s legs–known as panna or nutmeg–is actually the basis of one of the modes. The idea is to pull off this maneuver of humiliation while scoring a goal during the same play”

“Equally intriguing is the feature-filled multiplayer component of FIFA Street, which offers not only the traditional versus and co-op online play, but also the asymmetrical multiplayer inspired by Need For Speed’s Autolog”

If you played Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit then that last line about a variation of Autolog being in FIFA Street should definitely get your pulse racing and personally Autolog was one of my favourite additions to one of the best Need For Speed titles I’ve ever played.

Make sure you check out the G4TV FIFA Street Preview in full for even more juicy information.

Yeah…. we’re excited too.

For FIFA 12 EA have gone to work changing up systems which have been part of FIFA for years, and adding new innovations like EA Sports Football Club – but outside of the big promises and buzzwords, how does FIFA 12′s online hold up?

Head 2 Head Seasons

Undoubtedly the largest changes that the online segment of FIFA has experienced this year are in the way that the ranked head to head games are held together. The entire matchmaking and ranking systems have gone to be replaced by a newer, smoother, simpler, and, almost inarguably better system.

This comes in two parts, first, the Head 2 Head ‘Seasons’, which is a revival of the FIFA 2010 World Cup games’ ranking system. It’s a very simplistic ranking system which works in a way very similarly (but much faster than) the real world system of national divisions, ranking players by challenging them to beat those in their division.

In terms of being able to rank players accurately it’s fairly crude, given that there are only 10 divisions, meaning that the game barely differentiates between the top player and bottom player in any particular division. Mostly though, the accuracy of ranking is something I’d trade every time for what Head 2 Head seasons grants FIFA, which is a much more exciting structure which prevents ranked head to heads from being match after match, and instead being a fight, every game, to prevent relegation or to reach promotion. There are also cups to play in which aren’t out ’til after this is published – but an extra enjoyable way to compete is always wanted.

Match Flow

Intertwined heavily with this is the new Match Flow, which replaces the old quick and custom searches. The major change is that now you choose your team, and setup your team before searching, and get put straight into a game. Cleverly, it searches to find an ideal game, trying to match you to a closely rated opponent team, in your same division, with similar did-not-finish percentages, and gives you the option for searching for a manual game.

It’s a fairly unexciting number of changes which in many ways radically change how online games work. Most importantly, I can now get fair games with lower levelled team – and the increased prominence of the manual search, at least for now, means that I can always get manual games as and when I want them, usually with fair teams.

It does have some issues, mostly in how it reacts to situations where it struggles to find a perfect opponent, something which even now happens quite frequently when searching for manual games. When this does happen, players can be matched up with people from different divisions to them, or to teams which are massively better than them. Given that the ranking system pins on the fact that you are playing against people in your division, this seems an odd decision. Take an example of someone from Division 10 who then gets matched up against someone in Division 8, is that really fair? Equally, is it fair for someone playing as Charlton Athletic to be matched up against Real Madrid?

Even when it does find a ‘perfect’ match, you may well find yourself in an unfair fixture. The system matchmakes you to a player with a team of the same star rating, but the difference between the bottom and top of any (half) star is enormous (ie, Arsenal and Barcelona), and this is already leading to people converging towards the best teams in each half star, which probably explains the sudden rise in fans of Anzhi Makhachkala.

Finally, it’s worth questioning the reasoning behind having the team management done before you search, when arguably what I want to do with my team management is dependent on the type of team I come up against. FIFA’s gameplay does lack in the tactical department, and forcing us to pick our team set up before knowing what we’re going up against simply exacerbates this.

Head 2 Head Gameplay

Of course, what happens off the pitch is not as important as what happens on it. Though the ranking system and matchmaking system contributed to the problems and frustrating of online gaming in the last few years, it was gameplay, and the way it translated online which caused the most problem. Like with the rest of FIFA 12, the most striking change is Tactical Defending. Given that online players for the last 5 years have had the press system, and high pressure ingrained into them, the removal of these ultimate crutches has caused a bit of a culture shock – and it’s common to see new players making comical and useful mistakes, and though after a while people will get used to the new way to defend, the lasting effect on the balance of FIFA online will be remarkable, and will massively improve the way FIFA feels to play in the long term. The amount of time you have on the ball to play your football is revelation, and for that EA deserve much praise.

Otherwise, changes to FIFA’s gameplay seem quite small. My biggest frustrations are almost always aimed at the AI, which are questionable defensively and offensively. The result is that far too often conceded goals feel like matters of fate rather than matters of fault – and in attack players almost have to become reliant on the player-run, and one-two triggers to get things moving forward. In some ways the most important thing for an online competitive game to do is to achieve a feeling of fairness and balance: you need to be able to feel that you deserved to win, and understand what you did wrong when you lose, and frankly, I don’t find that much in FIFA 12.

Whether it’s a case where your goalkeeper inexplicably spills the ball straight back to an attacker, or you tackle someone only for the ball to ricochet perfectly back into his, or his teammates control, or you get taken out in the penalty area without a penalty or taken out from behind when one-on-one without the opponent getting a red, or when you perfectly position your player to header only for the game to swap you to a less well positioned player: it’s a constant list of things which are guaranteed to have you raging against the game – and they are things which happen far, far too often, and far too randomly.

The football is still startlingly end-to-end, the most successful attacks often coming off of perfectly placed clearances – midfield play is as difficult to find in FIFA 12 as ever. Add to that the fact that gameplay is still very much dominated by assisted controls, which are still too accurate, and thus very exploitable – and this will put a lot of players between a rock and a hard place. FIFA 12 has made playing manually online easier than ever thanks to the more prominent filter, but for everyone else it’s very difficult to be successful playing anywhere in between the inaccessible, and somewhat flawed full manual scheme, and the overpowered, unrealistic, and exploitable mostly assisted ‘ideal’ setup.

And, as we’ve come onto the subject of exploits, I will take this opportunity to state in no uncertain terms that the ‘Goalkeeper’ exploit where users take control of the keeper, and leave the CPU to do all the defending for them is an utter farce which absolutely must be fixed. I am amazed that after all the criticism of how overpowering human goalkeepers are in Clubs, EA actually opened the door to this being used on ranked multiplayer. It seems that they will be able to fix this, hopefully it will be so sooner rather than later.

Almost purely because of tactical defending, FIFA 12’s gameplay online is the most enjoyable in a long time: where I barely played FIFA 11’s online due to utter frustration, I have enjoyed a lot of my time on FIFA 12 online so far and plan to play a lot more, but it could be so, so much better.

Online Friendlies

Head 2 Head Seasons is not the only area of considerable change, because EA have also changed up the way that online friendlies work. The system works sort of like the head 2 head seasons, except that you have a ‘season’ running against each friend. This gives a level of continuity between friendly matches, and will undoubtedly add that extra excitement in matches between friends.

FIFA 12 Clubs

While it’s all change with the Head 2 Head Seasons, Online Friendlies, and the Match Flow, it’s all the same when it comes to Clubs. Unfortunately, it has to be said that Clubs in FIFA 11 was simply not a mode which could be released again unchanged, and the result will be that Clubs will denigrate to the same mess that it has for the last few years, but this time around it will happen even faster.

I will not use this opportunity to go over the problems with Clubs, as I quite recently wrote about them in a Xaor’s Corner post. Unfortunately, the issues talked about there recur almost in their entirety. It has to be said that so far it seems the servers are holding up considerably better than they did in FIFA 11 launch, but that really is a bare minimum. Worst of all, it seems that the 100% VP hack which only appeared in the last few months of FIFA 11’s lifespan, has already been replicated in FIFA 12. Even for those not willing to go as far as explicit hacking, boosting your VP is easier than ever thanks to the gameplay sliders making even the hardest accomplishments extremely easy.

All of this put together probably means one thing: those who still tolerated Clubs last year will probably continue doing so, albeit with even more gritted teeth, but those who couldn’t tolerate it last year certainly won’t be able to this year – a dreadful disappointment for FIFA’s cleverest, most unique, and most potentially brilliant feature.

EA Sports Football Club

Lastly, FIFA 12 features a number of new concepts housed under EASFC. This allows you to connect better to your friends – getting updates for everything they do, get rewarded for playing FIFA 12 through experience points, challenge yourself with dynamic scenarios, and contribute your supported team’s league position. As you play, you gain experience and this contributes to your level, but so far I can’t see any reason to care about my level.

It’s certainly a well implemented feature, both smooth and stylish, but frankly I fail to see why so much effort has been focused on it. While it’s occasionally nice to know that a friend has won a game in X mode by Y score, I certainly don’t need to be informed that a friend has uploaded a video (especially given that I can’t watch the video from the game).

Then there is the Support Your Club feature, a virtual football league based on how much (on average) a fan of each particular team plays FIFA. This is at best an interesting statistic, but I can’t realistically imagine anyone caring a huge amount about how their team does in this league. After all, your contribution is capped so heavily that unless you support a club with very few other followers, you won’t be able to make a jot of difference – and even if you could, is having the ‘Most FIFA addicted’ Club really anything to get excited about? I can see as many reasons to hope that my team would do badly as well!

Finally, the challenges feature allows you to play a scenario which EA has set (they roll over every few days) which allows you to try to recreate a real world result, starting at a particular point in the match at a particular score. I cannot know what type of scenarios there will be in the future, but so far almost all of them have been: “You are X goals down with Y minutes to go – go  win”. I hope that in future the challenges will become a little more varied – perhaps having us hold on to a lead, giant killing, or surviving with 10 men. Even so, it will only ever be a small nice idea in the EASFC package of small nice ideas – and that begs the question: was it worth the hype, or the time?

Verdict

FIFA 12′s online is a bit hit and miss. On the one hand, the new structure for head 2 head ranked games is a superb success, not that this is a particular surprise given that the system had already been tried in FIFA 2010 World Cup – and the new matchmaking system is a triumph for manual users and small team supporters. On the other, we have a whole host of modes which have experienced almost no change at all: Leagues, Online Team Play, Pro Ranked Matches and most importantly Virtual Pro Clubs, which will no doubt be a huge disappointment to many. EA’s big new innovation this year, EA Sports Football Club, fails to prove its worth as something which will revolutionise the way we play FIFA. Crucially, the gameplay online feels very different to how it did in FIFA 11 thanks to the changes to defending, but outside of this the old cracks are appearing thick and fast.

7.5/10

*This is not the final score for the game. It’s the score for this portion. The final score based on all aspects considered will be live at 3pm*

We have just reset the leaderboard stats of a number of people who we have caught artificially boosting their records, including the No.1 ranked player on PS3 and the No. 1 and No. 2 ranked players on the Xbox 360.

They’re not ranked No. 1 and No. 2 anymore. They’re now ranked as low as it’s possible to get, as well as dropping back into Division 10. If we had a Division 11, just for them, that’s where we would have put them. If they try it again, we will take even more robust action.

Throughout the lifetime of FIFA 12, we will be monitoring game records and scrubbing cheats from the system every week. Anyone attempting to boost their accounts by manufacturing artificial wins – via any means – are easy for us to identify and will face a similar fate.

Moreover, if the means of doing so negatively and directly affect other people – such as using third-party tools to force disconnections – the perpetrators will receive immediate outright bans.

It’s great to see EA getting stuck into leaderboard wiping so early on and long may it continue, prefferably weekly, as stated.