Re: No Unranked Head to Head Games PlayStation 4 Fifa 16
by Darkfog43Original Post
Dear EA, I hope you get to read this humble suggestion from a devoted customer. I have bought your soccer games (namely Fifa) year after year since that glorious day I discovered (almost by accident) the great Fifa 11 ("We are eleven", remember?). By that time, I had a PS3 and I had all possibilities to play online, since I didn't have to pay for any PlayStation Plus Subscription. That day I discovered the only way I would play in subsequent years: The Online Unranked Head to Head match. The best way to play online, ever. PERIOD. I discovered I had no need to play any other games. I have read a lot of people talking about playing shooter games online, but not me. I merely like to play soccer, and that's it.
I continued playing this way in the following years until Fifa 14. That is four years buying the same game, top dollar, on the launch day. I’ve had every single version of Fifa since that Fifa 11, merely to have the pleasure of playing Unranked Head to Head matches. The last version I had (on PlayStation 3), Fifa 14, still had that glorious functionality.
Last year (2014) I sold my old PlayStation 3 thinking about buying another console, since my console was already three years old and I didn't want it to get damaged before selling it, and therefore, wasted. I ended up by not buying any spare console last year, but this month (October 2015) I decided to try a PlayStation 4. I discovered that much has changed. New graphics are awesome! But it came with a price for that definition: Now I have to pay US 49,99 per year in order to play online, a lot of money considering this feature was given for free back in the times of PlayStation 3.
After buying my PlayStation 4, paying my One Year PlayStation Plus Subscription, and buying the game (That's investing nearly USD 460, all at once), I discovered that my favorite online game mode, the glorious Unranked Head to Head match, was removed from the game. Now well, that was the only reason for me to buy a PlayStation 4, that was the only reason for me to buy a One Year PlayStation Plus Subscription, and that was the only reason for me to buy a copy of Fifa 16.
I tried to approach the issue in a positive way, so I decided to try that hideous new way to play Fifa, which is known as "Seasons". I started to play, and I found that, contrary to when I played Unranked Head to Head matches, I had to select my team BEFORE finding a match. That is frustrating, because it doesn't give any chance to little local teams... Everybody has to have a World Class club such as Real Madrid as their default club in order to be competitive. That’s frustrating. But what I consider to be even more frustrating than that, was finding that when I try to find an opponent online, nearly 90% of the time I get the message "No opponent found. Try choosing a club with a different star level, or loosen your Matchmaking and Controller Settings". My hypothesis about this issue would be that maybe (only maybe) a lot of people have the same team with the same uniform, because, like I said, everybody has to have a World Class club to be competitive. Or maybe, there is a problem in your servers. I don’t know why would that be, I would leave that to you and your servers.
Now I would like to give you the whole panorama from my point of view, so you can see it the way a humble customer like me sees it: I want to play again Unranked Head to Head matches, the way I used to do it in Fifa 14 with my PlayStation 3. So I go to buy a PlayStation 4 (USD 349), then I buy a One Year PlayStation Plus Subscription (USD 49), then I buy a copy of Fifa 16 (USD 59), and I spend all that hardly earned money, only to discover that despite I had to pay almost twice the commercial value of the game in order to play online, now it lacks the only feature that impulsed me to buy it in the first place.
Seeing I had no way to play online, I took this issue even further. I decided to buy Fifa 15 (PlayStation 4 AND PlayStation 3) in order to see if it was a problem from my connection, my ports, or whatever other reason I’ve been reading in the posts in this website. Well… to my own surprise, everything runs smooth as butter. I find an opponent ALL the time. Well, I don’t find an opponent in PlayStation4 in a matter of two or three seconds like when I play the same game in PlayStation 3, but the thing is, I find it. So pay attention to this: If I play Fifa 15 in PlayStation 3, I find an opponent in two or three seconds. If I play Fifa 15 in PlayStation 4, I find an opponent in twenty or maybe thirty seconds (Yeah! That’s what I’m getting for USD 49,99 / year, a slower connection to your servers). BUT if I play Fifa 16 in PlayStation 4, hell… No opponent found. It’s just incredible: The latest game developed for the greatest console in the market, the very same that bills me USD 49,99 per year in order to be able to play online, doesn’t work. And when it works, it does it because I try, and try, and try, and after ten minutes, it finds some opponent. That’s why I say that this problem is not in my router, nor my TCP / UDP ports nor anything related to my connection.
After all this debugging of your game, I decided to stick to Fifa 15 until I find that you have already solved the “No opponent found” problem in Fifa 16. But do you know what would really be cool? That you, as developers and creators, brought back the Unranked Head to Head matches to Fifa 16. I don’t know for sure if you can do this through a patch (I pray for this to be possible), but if not, at least consider bringing back this awesome functionality for the next year’s Fifa. Yet, I'm starting to see that maybe my pray is useless since you didn’t bring it back when other users asked for it last year.
Either way, my final suggestion for this nonsense is... Please, EA: Stop cutting functionality from your products. Instead if that, BRING more functionalities to your products. After all… We are already devotedly paying for your games year after year. Consider the iPhone: What would happen if all of a sudden, Apple decided to remove the camera from the iPhone? Well… If you remove functionalities from your products, that’s exactly what you’re doing. I’m sure that if instead of removing functionalities you focus on bringing new ones (Just as Apple does!), all of us as your customers will respect and love that work the same way we have done year after year, buying your games.
I hope this humble suggestion can be somehow useful for you.
