As you know, there are currently a number of kinks in the online systems associated with FIFA 10. Game Face functionality on the Web is currently offline, while a fix to Live Season is currently being tested before that’s re-released to PS Store and Xbox Live. We’re also seeing some disconnection issues with EA servers in the game – while this isn’t affecting the vast majority of users, we’re working on it as a very high priority issue. The stability of the EASPORTS.com and EASPORTSFootball.com websites is also something we’re looking into, and while we do some features there (game stats, live friends status updates, for example) have also been disabled.
I’m afraid we’re not able to give you a solid ETA on the resolution to these issues just yet, but we’re making great progress and hope to be able to update you with details soon.
To give you an insight, all these issues are linked. Whether it’s Game Face, your game stats on the Football World website, or in-game disconnects… the root of these issues lies in massive demand during the FIFA 10 launch weekend causing some unexpected behaviour with technologies underpinning all these things. Whether it’s a video upload from the game, a quick match online, a Game Face generation or the delivery of a match result to a website, every individual action from every player runs across the same ‘wires’ and databases and it’s the management of all this activity that’s unexpectedly straining the system somewhat.
Exhaustive testing was conducted over months prior to release of course, but there’s never a completely fail-safe way of modelling the impact of a million real people turning up.
While that’s probably not what you want to hear right now (i.e. “It’s fixed! Enjoy!”), I do hope that gives you a bit of insight into what we’re working on. There are large numbers of people a lot cleverer than me dotted around the globe working on this literally 24 hours a day. Code is being deployed and new hardware being installed as I type. I’m very confident that it won’t be too long before these challenges around launch are behind us and we can look forward to a year of FIFA 10 and all its associated online features!