FIFA 16‘s Ultimate Team mode has a nasty habit of routinely disconnecting players from game sessions. This would be annoying in and of itself, but it becomes all the more irritating due to how the game fails to recognize the difference between the disconnection happening as a result of an issue with EA’s servers, and as a result of a player purposely quitting a match.
FIFA 16 punishes players who have dropped out of an Ultimate Team match prior to the final whistle being blown by marking the result down as a loss and, more crucially, reducing their DNF Multiplier. The DNF Multiplier is a system that EA incorporates into its FIFA series which reduces the amount of in-game coins a player can earn after a match each time they quit before it has ended, which is essentially intended to discourage players from rage-quitting. However, players are finding that their DNF Multipliers are being reduced even if they are being disconnected as a result of server issues, which is negatively impacting upon the amount of in-game coins that they can win upon completion of a match.
This is an issue that has plagued the FIFA series for a few years now, but it has never been more prominent than in FIFA 16. There are currently many FIFA players who cannot play more than a couple of matches without being disconnected, and I have spoken to a few people who have seen their DNF Multipliers being reduced to the lowest they can possibly be, less than a week since the game’s launch. I and many other players have also found the game to be blighted by lag throughout the vast majority of its matches, particularly in the Ultimate Team mode.
Online issues have always been a problem that the series has struggled to tackle, but that they are actually proving to be worse in EA’s latest entry is frustrating, especially considering that one of its latest and most widely promoted game modes, the FUT Draft, is reliant upon players maintaining a win streak. The FUT Draft, which tasks players with creating a team out of a selection of the game’s best Ultimate Team trading cards and then embarking upon a winning streak in order to win rare card packs, requires a Token to enter which can either be purchased with in-game coins or 300 FIFA Points, which are purchased using real-life money. Many have therefore bought a Token using actual money, only to then be forced out of a game due to a server issue, have the match count as a loss and find themselves kicked out of the Draft.
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Players have contacted EA to ask them to refund their Draft Tokens, and have been pointed in the direction of the company’s advisors, though no definitive word has been given by the company’s official Twitter accounts. It seems that this could be because the company is refusing to refund those who have faced the problem, as highlighted in a post made on EA’s FIFA forums by a user who claims that EA has denied him/her a new Token/refund after they were disconnected from a Draft match. This effectively means that FIFA 16‘s online issues are actually costing players real money, as at the time of this writing the Draft is essentially FIFA‘s version of a broken arcade machine that takes your money but then doesn’t allow you to play it.
In short, the game’s online component is currently a mess, and these problems are all the more glaring this year considering that Konami’s Pro Evolution Soccer 2016 has taken back its crown as the king of football games. With many finding themselves disenchanted with having to suffer through the same problems in this year’s FIFA, Pro Evo could certainly earn itself some more converts in 2017, and it’s time that EA stepped up its game and fixed the issues that have become so synonymous with their flagship franchise.
