EA Confirms It Does Not Secretly “Fix” FIFA Matches

A group of California gamers have dropped a class action lawsuit accusing Electronic Arts of secretly using “dynamic difficulty adjustment” (DDA) to covertly affect the outcome of FIFA: Ultimate Team matches. The group did so after EA proved that the controversial and patented system was not used in the game.

We first discussed EA’s dynamic difficulty adjustment system in early 2018, after an academic article from late 2017 introduced the basic framework. This research found that automatically adjusting the difficulty of a match-three game based on the player’s demonstrated skill level resulted in a “player engagement improvement” of 9% (i.e. say that the players wanted to play a little more). On the other hand, it had a “neutral impact on monetization” (ie it didn’t lead to gamers spending more money). EA filed a patent on the same basic idea in 2016, and the patent was granted in 2018. Some FIFA gamers have long suspected that patented technology was at work in at least some of their “Ultimate Team” games. To hear these players say it, the game secretly uses a hidden, scripted “swing” system to adjust the results of specific moves or hits based on the current state of the game. It’s all part of an effort to manipulate players to spend more money on better Ultimate Team player cards, as this DDA patent points out. Or so the theory goes.

EA has repeatedly stated that it does not use DDA in FIFA and that Ultimate Team results are a matter of player skill and sometimes the vagaries of random number generation. But those statements didn’t stop three California players from filing a class action lawsuit last November over their suspicions that EA was lying, alleging in part:

EA’s undisclosed use of the difficulty setting mechanics deprives players who buy player packs of the benefit of their bargains because EA’s difficulty setting mechanics, rather than the stated ranking of Ultimate players The team of players and the relative skills of the players dictate, or at least strongly influence the outcome of the match.

This is a self-sustaining cycle that benefits EA at the expense of EA Sports players, as the difficulty adjustment mechanics trick players into believing their teams are less skilled than they are currently. reality, which leads them to buy additional player packs in the hope of receiving better players and being more competitive.

That brings us to today, when EA announced that the lawsuit had been dropped. The move comes after EA said it provided complainants with “detailed technical information and access to speak to our engineers, which confirmed (again) that there was no DDA or script in it. Ultimate Team modes. That’s the right result. ”

EA then reconfirmed that DDA technology “has never been FIFA, Madden, or NHL, and never will be. We would not use DDA technology to give players an advantage or a disadvantage in online multiplayer modes in any of our games and we absolutely do not have it in FIFA, Madden or NHL. “

It’s nice to have that additional confirmation from EA, especially with the additional commitment that it applies to other sports games in the company and in the future as well. And now these statements are also accompanied by sufficient additional verification from EA’s own engineers and documents to seemingly satisfy a set of litigation actors (and / or their lawyers).

On the other hand, the next time one of your pictures FIFA wide sails, you won’t have a creepy secret algorithm to blame.