Responsiveness Fixes
If you’ve been playing EA Sports’ FIFA 19 lately, you may have noticed that there is a responsiveness issue that seems to be plaguing the series online. To remedy this, EA Sports released a Pitch Notes detailing their work on the responsiveness of FIFA 19.
The team at FIFA used an investigation tool that we’ll talk about later in the article to make some changes to the networking infrastructure of FIFA. These changes affected FUT Champions, FUT Division Rivals, FUT Online Draft, FIFA Pro Clubs and FIFA Co_op Session across the Xbox One, PlayStation 4 and PC platforms.
The changes should drastically improve how each mode is played online. Network and data center configuration changes were primarily focused on European servers. These changes should bring efficiency and capacity improves. EA also changed a data center provider for one of their European server locations. These changes should provide more playable European servers.
EA also made multiple hardware changes to various server locations. The team also established more monitoring for gameplay responsiveness.
It seems the team has realized that their European servers were not performing the way they anticipated and made the changes needed to make them stable. Big ups on the FIFA team for caring about the end product and going through these changes.
To do the investigation properly, EA had to use some advanced telemetry tools directly from players reporting issues. This was needed because of the number of factors that EA can’t control like someone’s ISP, location, NAT type and connection.
The telemetry tool allows the FIFA team to investigate and identify issues after a single match. Once they’ve done these investigations and reviewed the findings, the team is able to review the data and correct the changes.
Hopefully this is a step forward for FIFA, one of EA’s largest selling franchises of all time.
Dedicated Tournament Servers
FIFA 19 is introducing a new type of Friendly Seasons called Friendly Competition. You need to be a FUT Champions Verified player to participate in the Friendly Competition.
To participate in the EA Sports FIFA 19 Global Series online qualifier matches, you will need to use the Friendly Competition section to take advanatage of some features FIFA has implemented. These features include:
- Which leg of the match you’re playing
- For the first leg of the match, the game will end after stoppage time without going to extra time or penalty kicks.
- Set the score of the first leg before the second leg.
- The second leg will enter extra time and penalties if the aggregate score is tied.
- The player and their opponent will connect directly to a tournament server allocated to your region. This means there will no peer to peer connections available.
The use of a dedicated server is incredibly important when it comes to tournament play on any game and any system.