re: FIFA 16 Official Thread

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they need to get rid of the P2P server. because ironically enough, I've never had significant lag issues playing BF4.

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It's called Dedicated Servers, and at one time, Xbox One was going to make them mandatory for online play before they forced Kinect and mentioned DRM at E3 and got slaughtered. Their initial vision was one very similar to what Steam's done with game sharing with friends, cloud-computing used for additional power, dedicated servers on all titles, etc.

They don't do this simply because of the costs. They'd have to invest in massive server farms (which they already have anyway) in various areas globally, and using P2P simply offsets these costs and can also really improve the experience if proximity-matchmaking is done properly.

Honestly, I don't think it's the P2P aspect of it because that sort of lag behaves differently than this. That's your more traditional stuttering or teleportation type of lag. This is almost like a desync issue, but ironically, I've only experienced it while connected to EA servers. Same goes for 2K, which ironically also uses Prolexic.

What I have documented over the past 3 years of obsessing over this issue shows that the EA servers will inadvertently use European nodes even if you're in America. Other times, it uses the two West Coast nodes. This alone has caused some observable issues, but easily playable for most of the time. However, when things DO act really bad while being routed to the London or Irish nodes, they're absolutely abysmal.

I honestly think that it's partially EA tinkering with values in the matches along with bad networking practice all working together to ruin everyone's lives. I mean, no one ever brings it up, but if you start FIFA on a brand new account, the intro match asks you if you'd like to allow the difficulty to scale up and down during it to dynamically set the difficulty you should play at. There's no way in hell they created such a complex feature just for one intro match for brand new players. It's one thing if they'd just collect data and recommend a difficulty at the end, but this is legit dynamic difficulty modification in real time.

I mean we used to talk about the "Comeback Code" in NCAA 2007 so this nothing new for EA, but that was usually only at the end and not nearly as egregious. I don't even care when I lose. I lost for years and years, and I just loved to play and get better. I just hate feeling like a good run of form is going to lead to several matches of being incapable of doing anything good.