No, FIFA Isn't Suddenly Making Your Players Terrible Mid-Game
FIFA players can be quite a jittery bunch. Whether the jitters set in once you've been playing a while or the jittery community find a common home in FIFA is a bit of a chicken-egg situation. Being done in on Ultimate Team by a 12-year-old who's scraped a couple of sweaty last-gasp goals will crumble your faith in justice and fairness quite effectively.
But EA has officially ruled out one thing that had been causing occasional spasms of collywobbles to break out among FIFA players: dynamic difficulty, a feature which would change how hard the game is depending on the player's skill level.
A patent for the feature, which you can read here, was filed a couple of years ago and also mentions changes to skill levels of players in-game, such as "providing extra speed to an in-game character, improving throwing accuracy of an in-game character, improving the distance or height that the in-game character can jump, adjusting the responsiveness of controls, and the like". It also says it can dial down skills, which a lot of players are deeply paranoid about. It couldn't be that they're just not as good as that 12-year-old. It couldn't.
However, Andrew Mears, community forum manager at EA, has hopped onto the forums to tell everyone to just chill out.
"We've heard your concerns around the Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment patent family, and wanted to confirm it’s not used in FIFA," Mears wrote. "We would never use it to advantage or disadvantage any group of players against another in any of our games. The technology was designed to explore how we might help players that are having difficulty in a certain area of a game have an opportunity to advance."
So, conclusively, you can't blame Shane Long's sudden, excruciating lack of composure on an ineffable and cruel twist of the machinery. That's just Shane Long.
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