EA Remedies Madden 11 Online Situation

As we saw earlier this month with the strategy pad debacle, the Madden NFL fan base has a great deal of power pushing changes into the video game. Now, after countless public complaints, the community has once again made a difference as Madden 11 has received a number of fixes to the ranked online system.

This morning, after a heads-up last night on Twitter, EA Sports Madden NFL Developer Ian Cummings delivered on his word and published a blog detailing the patches applied to prevent players from exploiting the (former) online system. No longer will you go up 3 scores only to have your opponent quit the game before half time and leave you without a win.

1. Any quitter / disconnecter in a ranked game will automatically be given a loss. The victim will automatically be given a win.

2. We are currently monitoring the leaderboards and planning on zero’ing out the stats of any accounts found to be using quitting tactics (via high DNF / win percentages and game logs). This monitoring will be standard practice moving forward as well, as we have built in notifications to our server team that will automatically zero out any folks caught “boosting”, or using one account to quit immediately and award a win.

3. In a Madden Ultimate Team game, a person quitting will have a game burned off of his contracts for the players in the game to discourage this practice. The victim will always receive coins, prorated based on the percentage complete of the game (i.e. if it’s the 1st quarter, he’ll only get ¼ of the coins he would have gotten if he were to finish, if it’s at the end of the game, he’ll get ~90%, etc). The same note applies as above on anyone caught “boosting” after this fix is rolled out – they will be punished with bans, contract removals, or any other tactics we see fit.

4. We also found an issue where PDLC OTP boosts were being subtracted incorrectly. Anyone that had this happen has had their boost coin purchase refunded.

In addition to these fixes, the blog notes several other nuisances in Madden 11 are being worked on by the EA team. Look for future improvements to playaction blocking, pass defense, tackling, and more. And of course, the strategy pad option should be available soon as well.