Significant FIFA 19 update tackles one of the community's biggest concerns
You only sing when you're lagging.
If you've ever played an online match of FIFA, you'll know it can be a frustratingly unresponsive because of lag.
FIFA Ultimate Team players who invest time and money into building powerful teams before taking them online in the high-stress world of FUT Champions find this particularly frustrating, as it can ruin their chance of getting a crucial victory during the time-limited event.
This has been a long-running issue with FIFA games, and the issue continued with FIFA 19. Now, in a somewhat surprising move, EA Sports has released an update it says is designed to directly tackle the problem.
Title update six, which is out now on PC and coming soon to PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, makes improvements to the responsiveness of gameplay in situations where your opponent's network connection may experience packet loss or high latency. So, if your opponent is proper laggy, you should have a more responsive experience with this update than without.
"We know that gameplay responsiveness and consistency in that responsiveness when playing online is one of the community's biggest concerns," EA said in a blog post.
"Investigating and addressing this feedback has been a major priority for the FIFA team and we have a dedicated group working on improving the experience."
The change only applies to certain modes, but they are important ones: FUT Champions, FUT Division Rivals, FUT Online Draft, FIFA Pro Clubs and FIFA Co-Op Seasons.
EA expanded on the update:
"This week's change should improve the responsiveness of gameplay for many online matches. We identified an issue where overall gameplay responsiveness in online matches could be negatively impacted by one player's poor network connection, which was not intended. So moving forward, gameplay responsiveness should rely on each player's individual connection, and not those they are playing with or against.
"The result should be a much more consistent experience in gameplay responsiveness online, depending on the networking set-up you have."
EA qualified all this by saying a player's online experience has a lot to do with factors outside of its control (wired connections are your friend!), but it's working to sort out factors in its control.
FIFA 19 has had its fair share of problems since launch in September, but it's good to see the development team continue to pump out updates. I'm looking forward to giving this update a test run when it hits the console versions of FIFA 19, as I've had more than my fair share of laggy matches I've been afraid to quit out of for fear of getting a FUT Coins punishment.