Needless to say we’re very, very impressed and the original change log is can be found here and it also details the issues the team are still working on so well worth a look.

*Update* It’s been confirmed on Twitter by EASportsFIFA that the Career Mode fixes will apply to existing save files, so there is no need to restart to apply the fixes. Excellent News.

*Update 2* If you’re experiencing issues after installing the patch, please post them on the Official EA Forums, following the format at the top of the post.

FIFA 12: Patch 2 Details

Gameplay

• Sometimes the game would get confused when a user called a second player to take a quick throw-in, where the game would consider the ball to have re-entered play. We’ve made sure this won’t happen anymore.
• We have fixed an occasional problem where a user’s crossing setting would default to Manual and need to be reset.
• Very rarely indeed, a physics error could cause a player’s leg positioning to become misaligned. You may have seen some videos of that around the time we brought out the demo for FIFA 12. As rare as it was (the vast majority of people will have never experienced it), it’s now fully extinct,

Career Mode

• You can now select the weather conditions before entering a game.
• Your chief executive’s salary suggestions when offering a youth player a senior contract will now remain consistent when exiting and re-entering the negotiation screens.
• We have made sure that, after releasing a player from the Youth Squad, his salary returns to the Wage Budget.
• When loaning in a player with an option to buy him at the end of the season, if that player caused you to reach the maximum squad size, you wouldn’t be able to buy him. Now you can.
• It’s now no longer possible to sign a Youth Player with a wage greater than your available wage budget.
• We have addressed a couple of rare situations where specific actions would cause controller buttons to become unresponsive.
• When playing as a player in Career Mode, your manager will now be more inclined to sub off your player if he’s getting too tired.
• We’ve made sure that commentary won’t fail to show up when playing League Cup games involving Manchester United.
• We have fixed a situation where, given a certain set of circumstances when editing and saving player positions, you could see player names converted to numbers before experiencing a console hang.
• We fixed an issue where it was possible for the user’s player’s team to enter a new season without a goalkeeper, or without the minimum number of players needed to play a match.
• We have solved a problem that involved the player’s team recording a win despite forfeiting a league game because of an insufficient match-day squad.
• Recently signed Youth Squad players who you’re attempting to sell on will now enter negotiations with an accurate, consistent ‘Current Wage’ displayed, meaning you’ll see them picked up much more easily by CPU teams.
• If you and a friend entered a Career Mode game with two controllers, advanced beyond the Player Selection screen and then backed all the way out again, the game would hang. We got that fixed.
• We have taken care of a bug that caused apparently random crashes in Career Mode, with players sometimes appearing with a zeroed cash value.
• Physical attributes of players were growing a little unrealistically since they were tied to their overall growth potential. We have made a change that separates the growth of these attributes from others, resulting in much more steady progression.
• You can now offer a new contract to players you have loaned out for the last year of their contract, before they run off and become free agents.
• Loaned players weren’t always growing fast enough. We have tuned this to be more noticeable, making loaning players out much more rewarding.
• More mid-week Career Mode games will now be played with night-time lighting conditions.

FIFA 12 Ultimate Team

• Using an outdated “Take Me There” link on a Trade Feed notification in the FUT hub will no longer result in your coins not being returned if you lost the auction.
• The Trade Feed notification in the FUT Hub for a newly acquired Goalkeeper Coach will no longer cause the game to hang.
• Creating a new squad, then immediately deleting an old one before then applying an item to your new squad could result in a disconnection. Not now it won’t.
• We have made sure that real-time information is displayed on active auctions. You’ll no longer find yourself unknowingly outbid while waiting for those auctions to count down.
• We have isolated and eradicated a data-flow interruption that sometimes caused the game to crash while players were on the Match Setup screen before a FUT game.
• You will now see your EAS FC XP increase – and your news feed update – after playing a single-player or play-a-friend game in FUT.
• We have optimised the game to make sure the console won’t struggle, or even crash, when paging through a lot of FUT auction pages.
• We have taken care of a crash that would occur if users entered FUT and downloaded the latest update after creating a Virtual Pro.
• We have made a couple of separate enhancements to the FUT pack purchasing system to make sure sudden losses of internet connectivity (such as pulling the network cable) won’t result in console crashes.
• We discovered that if you downloaded a roster update in FUT and, while still on the update confirmation screen, signed out from your Gamer Profile, the game would crash. Not many people would do that but, just in case they do, they’re now safe.

FIFA 12 Clubs

• Changes that Clubs players make to camera settings during a Clubs game will now find those settings saved for subsequent games.
• You will now be able to change your penalty kick taker via Team Management between the penalty kick being awarded and taken.
• Clubs players’ accomplishments are now fully tracked in online matches.
• We asked you, and you told us. Community feedback overwhelmingly suggests that the default AI in Clubs is too powerful, leading to clubs choosing not to field defenders in order to allow the AI to do their work for them. We have therefore dropped the AI difficulty level in Clubs from World Class to Professional, and have made some complimentary minor adjustments to AI goalkeepers.

My Live Season

• Injured or suspended players will now be automatically moved to the reserves, not the subs bench. And there’ll be no more missing subs as a result in subsequent games.

EA SPORTS Football Club

• We have made an optimisation that stops the game making too many calls for Support Your Club information on entering the EAS FC hub.
• Every now and then, when coming back to the main menu from another area of the game, the Back/Select button to go to the EAS FC hub was not always displayed and functional. That won’t happen anymore.
• We have taken care of a rare crash bug that cropped up when entering the EAS FC hub from the main menu.
• We have enhanced the way the game loads the pre-match arena before an EAS FC Challenge.
• All your Career Mode activity will now display correctly in the EAS FC news feed.

FIFA 12 Online

• An occasional problem saw users repeatedly failing to match-up online due to mismatching squad files, despite re-downloading the online squad file. We’ve made sure that won’t bother anyone again.
• A small number of people found their stats not tracking properly for Online Friendlies games. They are now.
  Creation Centre
• We have solved a problem that saw FIFA 12 crash when trying to download PNG images (e.g. a team crest) that were over the maximum file size.
• Particularly keen Creation Centre users who bookmarked a lot of items to download into their game could find that they were not able to enter the Creation Centre gallery. Now they can.
• We have fixed a rare problem where it was possible in specific circumstances to find your Creation Centre team hit the pitch with a man missing.
• We have made sure that swapping and changing kit sponsor images on the web will no longer cause any problems on the console.
• We have improved the way FIFA 12 handles large numbers of Creation Centre downloads to make sure there’s no slow-down in the performance of team-selection screens.
• The game no longer struggles to retrieve Tournament Crest images in the Creation Centre gallery.

EA SPORTS Arena

• We have enabled private sessions within the EA SPORTS Arena.

And some others…

• We have turned on our in-game podcasts. If you want to listen in, you can access our regular five-minute chunks of audio news and information by turning the option on in the Game Settings > Audio menu. [English language only]
• We have made some optimisations to make sure that people with lots of save files on their hard drives don’t suffer long load times or server disconnections.
• [PC only] We have corrected a problem where, after scoring a goal, custom music would stop playing for around two minutes.
• [PC only] We have added an option to the FIFA 12 launcher to disable some Windows settings, improving the framerate for people with lower-spec PCs.

EA SPORTS FIFA Podcast – iTunes

“the first patch for the console will be coming out with in days, like maybe 14 or 21 of them… we’ll be doing this constantly with our thumb in the middle of the community asking what they want for the whole of the season, and that’s a commitment we’re definitely making”

Great news I’m sure you’ll agree, and lets hope the issues causing the most frustration for the most people are mopped up and eradicated at the first time of asking.

You can keep up with how FIFA 12 issue resolution is progressing on the EA FIFA 12 Forums:

Controlling the goalkeeper in head 2 head discussion

FIFA 12 Ultimate Team – Bug Status

FIFA 12 PC Problems

PS3: Available NOW
Xbox 360: Available NOW
Automatic update for connected consoles

As this patch is classed as an “automatic” or “mandatory” update it means you should be prompted to download and install the FIFA 11 patch BEFORE you get in to the main FIFA 11 menu. If you’re in to the main menu, with no patch installation, then your console hasn’t picked it up or it hasn’t been released yet.

I’ll be starting a brand new Virtual Pro Career Mode on Wednesday and I urge you all to do the same to find out just how much work EA have done to fix the rather poor team mate AI.

Get in touch and let us know your thoughts on the effectiveness of the new patch once it’s released.

Anyway what you really want to know is what’s been fixed so here’s a brief summary:

• Firstly, we will be fixing an issue with FIFA 11’s Clubs mode which allows clubs to unfairly end games without a penalty when they are losing: The so-called Trigger Glitch. This involves clubs arranging a disconnection to the game via the Player Ratings screen. To make extra sure that this issue is completely resolved for you, we will be removing this screen from the pause menu of all online modes.

• Secondly, we will be addressing poor teammate AI when playing as a Virtual Pro. Our fix will make sure that, no matter what difficulty you set for your opponent, your team AI will be much improved, making for an altogether better experience when playing the game in this way.
• Finally, we will correct a problem where your Virtual Pro can’t be brought into your Career Mode game.

And for FIFA Ultimate Team you can expect:

• After the release of the new Ultimate Team features it became possible for some users to gain control of an opponent’s team during online play. We will stop this happening.
  
• We will correct an issue that prevents FUT players placing bids in auctions above 1,000,000 coins.
  
• We will fix a problem that causes the scrolling to accelerate uncontrollably when using the D-Pad to select a bid amount on auctions.
  
• Finally, dysfunctional ‘take-me-there’ links within the FUT interface will be working again.

To see the full post from Romily Broad head over the the EA FIFA Forums.

I guess the big question for the community is, does this patch for FIFA 11 go far enough? I know many of you would have been hoping for gameplay tweaks and Career Mode fixes so this patch may leave some disappointed. Get in touch and let us know your thoughts on FIFA 11′s newest and most likely last, patch.

Thanks to Richegroover for the heads up.

The update brings in two new features, Play-A-Friend Challenge and Friends Leaderboards.

Play-A-Friend Challenge allows you to play against your friends Ultimate Team, even if they’re offline. Their team will be controlled by the CPU and the results will be presented to them the next time they log on. Should be useful for a few wind ups.

Friends Leaderboards brings in customisable leaderboards to check your UT progress against your friends. You can compare stats like who has earned the most coins, who has the most trades, who has the best squad and the overall value of yours clubs.

You can read more about the update including the FAQ, here.

Once you’ve got the update applied, you’ll no doubt be as happy as this guy:

We give our critical analysis of EA’s latest patch attempt and predictably the swear filter gets its biggest run out to date.

We’re not angry, just disappointed……..

Confirmed on Twitter by both Romily Broad and EASPORTS_FIFA who posted the exact same message.

A game update for FIFA 11 will go live tomorrow morning. Lots of enhancements. It will now happen on both PS3 and X360 at the same time.

I’m sure everyone has seen the fix list by now, but if not, you can see it here.

Overview of what’s included in the patch below. Here’s hoping we get a detailed fix list in the near future.

GAMEPLAY
You’ll now find that the implementation of the offside rule in the game is more accurate, both in terms of when the infringement is called and in terms of player positions when it happens. Occasional strange player positioning at kick-off have also gone away, while shooting from weak volleys has been improved, too. Importantly, so-called ‘micro-pausing’ during gameplay will also be a thing of the past. Overall, your gameplay experience should now be even better.

CAREER MODE
There are a lot of improvements you’ll notice here, which will all further boost the realism of the mode, but in summary: Your match fixtures during the season for cups and leagues, as well as the time of day they all happen, should now be much more realistic. We’ve also improved how accurately player ratings and growth are displayed, as well as making sure the players get the awards they deserve, when they deserve them. Using an odd exploit to secure a whopping $2 billion budget has now gone away, while the emails you receive as a manager will be more appropriate and players you’ve loaned out will now be easier to see and manage.

ONLINE HEAD TO HEAD
Matchmaking will be enhanced, particularly in terms of initially connecting to an opponent, while we’ve removed a couple of exploits that people were using to gain an unfair advantage over their opponents. Also, players will now no longer be able to use Passing Power Assistance in ranked matches.

ONLINE CLUBS
We’ve already made a lot of server-side improvements to the Clubs experience, particularly in terms of matchmaking, match results and progress in Cups. With the game update we’ll be making a range of improvements to stats and league-table presentation, too, as well as improving the camera motion when your player is a long way from the ball.

PRESENTATION
You’ll now find that cut-scenes are improved during substitutions, along with a range of more subtle improvements around of the game.

AUDIO
Creation Centre teams will now benefit from crowd chants, while we’ve improved the custom chants area as well. We’ve also managed to enhance a few audio triggers during gameplay, meaning you’ll get an even better atmosphere as things happen during a match.

CREATION CENTRE
The general performance of the game when it involves teams and players created via the Creation Centre has been improved. Also, you’ll now find that the formations and attributes you set on the web will now transfer more accurately to the console.

FIFA STORE
We’ve made sure that Live Season will be available for multiple users on the same console. Some people who had switched from an inactive XBL account to a Gold Account were having problems seeing the content of the store – we’ve got that covered, too.

KITS
Lincoln City and Montpellier fans, your teams’ kits should now be right on the money.

As an update for you, we wanted to let you know that we are actively working on fixes for the following:
- Various crashes reported through our automated systems;
- Micro-pausing in offline and online matches;
- OTP Club issues related to searching, lag during peak and stat reporting;
- Gameplay fixes around positioning and advantage rule;
- Career Mode fixes around stat display and growth;
- Online exploits, Pro Passing in ranked matches, and cheaters punishment;
- Custom Chants issues.

This is great news for FIFA 11 and hopefully a patch will be winging its way to us sooner rather than later. To see the post and thread in full follow this link but please play nice.

Well, some good news to report. As you can see in this thread, over on the official EA FIFA next-gen forums, a free DLC commentary patch is on the way. Hurrah!

Cue much rejoicing from FIFA fans apart from a distinct bunch of nerds at the back wearing “when will you fix Manager Mode” t-shirts (now available for £12.99 from FIFASoccerBlog – just kidding, our legal department advises us that it’s not a good idea).