I probably have thousands of hours between the past dozen or so FIFA games on a myriad of platforms: PC, Xbox 360, Xbox One, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, Nintendo DS, Nintendo Switch... what can I say? Its gameplay is very polished and it feels great, even when I'm just dominating the AI on the billionth season of a career mode in which I already bought all the best players in the world, the feeling of rolling the ball, having your players do the choreography you invented for them perfectly and deliver brilliant one-touch passes towards spectacular goals... it just never fails being fun to me, and I find myself going back to it year after year. There's been seasons I spent hundreds of hours on one career mode alone, others in which I played 500+ online matches, and so on. For some of its shortcomings (like the predatory Ultimate Team mode), it remains one of the most mechanically satisfying games ever made to me, year after year, up there with the "classics" like Call Of Duty, Tetris or Mario Kart in terms of pure gameplay feeling.
Having said that, there's something that keeps coming up within the community, something very hard to ultimately prove without being able to read into the game's code, but that just about anybody with thousands of hours in the games can at the very least suspect of happening. Some people call it "momentum", others call it "scripting", some simply blame a faulty AI, but there seems to be mechanisms in place inside of the way the FIFA games handle AI and statistics that favour hard-fought, exciting, unpredictable matches, where the stronger player is less likely to dominate the opponent, and the weaker one has a chance to put up a reasonable fight. One could argue this makes the game better: a total newcomer is hardly ever gonna beat a pro FIFA player, but if the skill levels of the players aren't that far apart, it makes for exciting matches where, like in real football(/soccer), the weaker team can occasionally take a shocking win. It's something that is far less likely to happen in a Formula 1 game, a fighter, a competitive twitch-based shooter: unless your opponent plays a lot worse than usual and/or makes some grave mistakes, you don't really have a chance against a significantly better player.
What does happen in FIFA games then? For those not in the know, in a typical match against another human player or AI, you are not really coordinating 11 players at the same time, but you only take control of one at a time, while you also act as a coach, giving generic orders to the others: attack and defense formations, specific tactics, decide who comes in from the bench, decide whether you concentrate more on defense than on offense, and so on. This means that at any given time, you're only controlling one player on the pitch, with the other 10 on your team who are pulled on a virtual string by the AI, trying to adapt to your coach-like orders. Even if you're a very good player with lightning quick strategy changes on the spot that give little room for interpretation to the AI, you are always trusting the game to handle your orders, while you do your best to control the selected player in the best possible way. Since the selected player is almost at all times the ball carrier, you are obviously hoping the game moves your other players ideally to create ideal pass opportunities, or them keeping the opposing defenders busy enough for you to find a way into goal. How you do that? By "injecting" strategy inputs that push the AI towards what you want them to do.
A fair question pops to mind: how does the game know your skill level beforehand? Let's say I am on a buddy's console with a guest account, but I'm actually a pro FIFA player with thousands of hours of gameplay. How does the game know whether I should get "smart" AI teammates or dumb ones? Because when playing against an AI, you can see it very clearly that the lowest difficulty and the highest one has the non-controlled players act in a completely different manner, running at different speeds, thinking at far different passing options, and so on. You can give real time tactical inputs to your players, but you have no control over a non-controlled player's effectiveness over jumping a defender, your goalkeeper's reactivity and so on. And while every player has statistics that determine how precise, powerful, etc. their touches are, how good their positioning is on a general basis and so on, the AI level is a deciding factor, and in fact you will never see the lowest difficulty AI dribble half the team like Maradona and score from 40 meters, even if the player controlled is someone like Messi or Ronaldo with crazy high statistics. This AI level has nothing to do with the team's or the players' stats: Real Madrid with its 5 stars can suddenly have a stupid AI, while Accrington with its half star or so can suddenly have 400 IQ players.
So there lies one of the issues: the game inevitably decides how good your teammates are, and the difference can be staggering. You can do two conseutive matches against the same opponent, using the same teams, the same pitch, the same weather, the same physical shape of players (in career there's fatigue, injuries and such, but in solo matches everybody always starts with 100% fresh and sane players)... and the game can absolutely feel different, and by very much. In one, your teammates may be anticipating your every move, connecting every pass of yours ideally and jumping defenders left and right with no player input whatsoever - next time around, your defenders may be sitting still half the time, with your only option to move forward is to personally dribble the opponents. This inconsistency with AI levels in FIFA takes a lot of the fun away, because it's been noticeable for many games in the franchise now that regardless of how you play or who's your opponent, in some matches the AI works in your favour, in others it almost plays against you.
Earlier I mentioned player stats, which is a huge factor in FIFA. Unlike something like Rocket League, in which the only deciding factor in how the ball behaves is the exact impact you make with the ball (assuming there's no lag and such of course), in FIFA your input is used as a general guide of what's gonna happen, but it's not a law. Do the same shot from 30 meters towards the corner or the net with Messi and then try again with your goalkeeper: the latter obviously has far lower stats in attack, so even if your input is 100% identical, the result is that with Messi you may be hitting your target, say, 80 times out of 100, while with the goalkeeper it's gonna be like 5 out of 100. Makes sense, of course: if all players on the pitch had the exact same chances to do the same things, why bother with tactics and strategies? All your players are "little Pelés" on the field, allowing you to score screamers with any defender, or use your finest attackers as brilliant defenders. Clearly, such statistics have to exist, and if the game is fair in using them it does make the game more fun. And in theory, having a good player in a certain role gives you near perfect chances at certain things to work out ideally.
That, however, isn't always the case at all, because the game often decides the result of certain scenarios beforehand. Just yesterday, I had a penalty kick with Ronaldo: great stats, I try and do it safe by slightly nudging the stick to the left and doing a slow shot, so that the keeper which I predicted would dive would get an easy-peasy goal. Ronaldo shot the ball at high speed to the left, outside of the goal. It's not what I pressed at all. All the things that I mentioned above should make the games more exciting and unpredictable, but it's the contrary, as there also seem to be very visible and noticeable AI patterns that determine how each game goes. You can "beat the system", mind: seems obvious that if you prevent your opponent from ever attacking, you will not lose. Once you understand how the AI "fails", you can abuse it. But the issue is that the games seem to alter the dice rolls from time to time to create more exciting matches. One very noticeable example that seems to keep happening since around FIFA 13 are the last minute goals. There's nothing more exciting in football than some last second goal that changes what seemed like a given result, and EA Sports' games seem to push this narrative a bit too hard. Out of my last 10 matches or so in FIFA 19, 8 had these goals happen, either in my favour or against me, just as the extra time was kicking in. A coincidence, you may say, but the problem is how these goals actually happen: defenders who were very effective at blocking opponents only seconds earlier, are suddenly stopping in the middle of the opponent's attack, or missing very simple touches that give their adversary a chance to score. And more often than not, in the final minutes the keeper will fail to save even unimpressive shots towards the middle of the goal that even you or I would have saved most certainly in real life. I learned to recognize this: if the clock is at 91 minutes and your opponent's attacker is running with one of my AI defenders suddenly stopping due to no fault of mine, I can already know it will be a goal. And then it is, because your keeper also goes on vacation. And I couldn't really do anything about it, this happens even if I'm on full defense mode trying to save the win. Just the other day I had a match where at the end I was using full defense mode, and yet after an attack of mine literally none of my AI defenders were on my side of the field, so when the opponent took ball he literally had no defenders against him for the last 50% of the pitch.
On the contrary, I have my Xbox filled with clips from the various episodes of the game in which no matter what I do, the ball just will not enter the goal, probably to make the game closer instead of me demolishing the opponent. My input is the same as always, but for some reason the player sitting inches away from the net will just shoot it on the bar, or miss the ball altogether, or slightly touch another player and fumble on the ground instead of shooting. Not so coincidentally, this is often followed by the opponent scoring a very simple goal in which my defenders forget to follow the action. Artificial excitement. I can go back to clips from as early as FIFA 14 (up until 13 it was last-gen, and since I was playing on X360 which didn't have native DVR I did not record clips prior to that) and find the most ridiculous stuff. This has to be one of my "favourites":
In a match where I was playing better than my opponent, I was still trailing as most of my attacks ended up just short of goal, while my opponents' few attempts resulted in goals. In the first attack of the clip the following things happen: an opponent defender has a lightning quick reaction time to oppose my first shot, on the rebound I do a good header but the keeper intercepts, on the rebound towards an empty-ish net my player hits the post, on yet another attempt of mine a defender of mine controlled by the AI blocks me from shooting instead of getting out of the way, after which I get yet another good shot which results in yet another post hit, and then my neverending attack finishes on a questionable foul. Remember that statistics play a huge factor in your shots, so while I was always aiming at the goal, my players kept missing it from ridiculously low distances. And then what happens a couple minutes (real time) later? My keeper fails to grab a slow ball going in the middle from a huge distance, effectively allowing a goal in from out of nowhere. The goalie was one of the best ones in the game, and yet he almost got deactivated in a way that gifted my opponent an unlikely goal. And on the contrary, here's one situation from FIFA 15 in which the AI favoured me immensely:
The keeper throws a perfect ball to a player of mine at midfield. The opponent's defenders or midfielders are nowhere to be seen as I run on my own. One quick pass towards my attacker, and I'm already in the goal. Two technically superior defenders are on my player. One literally stops instead of following my player, the other also runs surprisingly slow despite having better speed stats, and gets jumped way too easily as my player scores with ease, delivering a lovely curved header that would have been impossible to save even if the opposing keeper didn't try and get to the ball before my shot. Pulling off such "stunts" feels satisfying, but looking back at the clips it's so damn obvious how divine my middle quality Udinese players were, and how supposedly good players on the opposing side suddenly forgot how to football. It's disappointing when you can't do much against a goal because the AI is failing you, but it's not very satisfying scoring due to obvious opponent AI fallacies either. It sucks so much of the accomplishment away.
If you're still reading after this incredible wall of text, you may obviously wonder: aren't these just coincidences? In thousands of hours of play, shenanigans like in the clips above are bound to happen. The problem is that they are ridiculously frequent, the clips on my profile are just a very small sample of these things happening on a regular basis, since at the very least FIFA 13. You can almost predict every attack's result once you play long enough as soon as you see certain hints. Defenders stopping for no reason in the extra time, none of your attackers supporting you by trying to push through defense but sticking to the midfield instead, a keeper with horrible stats suddenly doing 15 saves per match worthy of Buffon's most glorious moments. The game goes out of its way to guarantee unpredictable and exciting matches, to the detriment of skills. And there's a hint of psychology as well: lose 2-3 consecutive matches, and you are practically guaranteed to have one where suddenly your AI predicts your every move, the opponent's AI is made of butter, and you're scoring with about every attack. You're happy about your result and you play another match because you're on a roll (not unlike how Candy Crush just happens to give you a good series of drops for an easy win after a set of frustrating losses), but if you know the game well enough, you probably know the opponent couldn't do a whole lot when every bad shot of yours somehow ended up in the net anyway and his defenders were unresponsive. I can't even count the amount of matches I have 30 shots while my opponent has like 3, and then it ends on a 2-2 or worse. And after a couple matches like that, suddenly I start scoring on every attack and bam, on the "easy mode" match I somehow score on every attack.
How do you prove such a thing without looking into the game code? You don't. You can't. Until then, this is a conspiracy theory of sorts, and I gladly listen to anybody who thinks I'm just bad at the game and making up excuses (while the clips I posted are old, I'm nowhere near an MLG FIFA player, though I can definitely say I'm well above average looking at my stats). What we know is that EA did indeed patent a tech that allows them to tinker with matchmaking and difficulty on the fly, to make for better player engagement and boost microtransaction sales. There is currently no definitve proof this is in FIFA, but it's an interesting fact. Confirmation bias sure is a thing, but I don't see these patterns in any other game (not these, anyway), even ones involving chance (be that in the weapons' bloom, the attack numbers in an RPG, etc.). By FIFA19, it honestly feels worse than ever: as said, there's been a last-minute ridiculous goal in most of my matches of late, along with the fact the vast majority of goals were followed by a superquick comeback, similarly with defenders sleeping most of the times. And lo and behold, after a couple bad matches in which I played horribly and would be ready to stop playing for the night, I would always play against a seemingly good opponent whose AI was very clearly handicapped, allowing me to make fun of their entire defense and score 3 goals in the first 3rd of the match with no sweat at all. Again, this isn't at all the experience in most online games, albeit some do, in fact, use tricks of their own: on top of my head, I can think of Gears Of War where a dev admitted that a player on the first game has a hidden health boost, or how Call Of Duty games also favour newcomers or comebackers in the first match.
And no, this isn't just online, either. In career mode, you better unlock the "restart match" function quick, because it can be an infuriating experience. Play multiple matches in a row against the strongest teams in the world and it can be a cakewalk - you just do your usual strats and style, and you have your usual myriad of scoring opportunities. Then suddenly, despite using the same players, the same tactics that you dominated Barcelona with, you're stuck against an Empoli, without being able to connect two passes, as the opposing defense manages to predict your every move with superhuman senses, blocking all your plays and finding a goal on their first attempt, which probably happens in the final minutes. But fret not: you can see how the game will be in the first minutes already, because you can see it right away that your "personal AI" is trash. So just restart the match and voilà: Empoli is back to being Empoli, and suddenly you're going through their defenses again like through butter. It may not be on the first attempt of a rematch, but maybe on the 2nd or 3rd, but surely enough you'll get there. The game, probably to create excitement and unpredictability, assigns a skill level of sorts that you need to beat. Roll the dice enough times and you're bound to find the easiest ones and the hardest ones alike, which decides between an ugly 0-0 and a spectacular 7-0 in which your playstyle and strategy at no point changed, but in one you had 30 shots while in the other maybe 3.
This is one of the many reasons I don't bother with the Ultimate Team mode. If you're not aware, it's basically FIFA + collectible card games: unlock players by purchasing cards (either by grinding or with real money), use further cards or money to give them long contracts and to improve their stats, then play against other teams' decks in a regular match of FIFA. But whereas in solo matches you just lose 10-20 minutes of your time with a loss, here you are possibly wasting your money on getting results that, based on how the game's AI acts, may be cakewalks or impossible tasks, and there is only so much you can do about it. I don't see the point in investing further money into matches like these, where skills only go so far. I'm perfectly fine playing my dozens, hundreds, possibly thousands of matches per game on the career mode against the AIs and in the online Seasons mode. At least the losses there are far easier to get over with.
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So, this is just my personal experience. What's yours? Do you feel that the game's AI is cheating towards creating more exciting matches? Is it maybe to try and motivate you by giving you easy wins among bad losses to keep you engaged and feel accomplishment? Am I just seeing things that aren't there? If you think these things happen but still play the game (like me), how do you counter it, what do you try to do in order to "beat the system"? For those that play other EA Sports games like Madden or NHL, does this happen there as well? There's been threads about "cheating AI" in the past (see the infamous input reading in Mortal Kombat or shooters where the enemies know your location at all times, regardless of whether they have any info on it), but thousands of hours of FIFA later I figured I'd share my thoughts on FIFA's peculiar case.
Having said that, there's something that keeps coming up within the community, something very hard to ultimately prove without being able to read into the game's code, but that just about anybody with thousands of hours in the games can at the very least suspect of happening. Some people call it "momentum", others call it "scripting", some simply blame a faulty AI, but there seems to be mechanisms in place inside of the way the FIFA games handle AI and statistics that favour hard-fought, exciting, unpredictable matches, where the stronger player is less likely to dominate the opponent, and the weaker one has a chance to put up a reasonable fight. One could argue this makes the game better: a total newcomer is hardly ever gonna beat a pro FIFA player, but if the skill levels of the players aren't that far apart, it makes for exciting matches where, like in real football(/soccer), the weaker team can occasionally take a shocking win. It's something that is far less likely to happen in a Formula 1 game, a fighter, a competitive twitch-based shooter: unless your opponent plays a lot worse than usual and/or makes some grave mistakes, you don't really have a chance against a significantly better player.
What does happen in FIFA games then? For those not in the know, in a typical match against another human player or AI, you are not really coordinating 11 players at the same time, but you only take control of one at a time, while you also act as a coach, giving generic orders to the others: attack and defense formations, specific tactics, decide who comes in from the bench, decide whether you concentrate more on defense than on offense, and so on. This means that at any given time, you're only controlling one player on the pitch, with the other 10 on your team who are pulled on a virtual string by the AI, trying to adapt to your coach-like orders. Even if you're a very good player with lightning quick strategy changes on the spot that give little room for interpretation to the AI, you are always trusting the game to handle your orders, while you do your best to control the selected player in the best possible way. Since the selected player is almost at all times the ball carrier, you are obviously hoping the game moves your other players ideally to create ideal pass opportunities, or them keeping the opposing defenders busy enough for you to find a way into goal. How you do that? By "injecting" strategy inputs that push the AI towards what you want them to do.
A fair question pops to mind: how does the game know your skill level beforehand? Let's say I am on a buddy's console with a guest account, but I'm actually a pro FIFA player with thousands of hours of gameplay. How does the game know whether I should get "smart" AI teammates or dumb ones? Because when playing against an AI, you can see it very clearly that the lowest difficulty and the highest one has the non-controlled players act in a completely different manner, running at different speeds, thinking at far different passing options, and so on. You can give real time tactical inputs to your players, but you have no control over a non-controlled player's effectiveness over jumping a defender, your goalkeeper's reactivity and so on. And while every player has statistics that determine how precise, powerful, etc. their touches are, how good their positioning is on a general basis and so on, the AI level is a deciding factor, and in fact you will never see the lowest difficulty AI dribble half the team like Maradona and score from 40 meters, even if the player controlled is someone like Messi or Ronaldo with crazy high statistics. This AI level has nothing to do with the team's or the players' stats: Real Madrid with its 5 stars can suddenly have a stupid AI, while Accrington with its half star or so can suddenly have 400 IQ players.
So there lies one of the issues: the game inevitably decides how good your teammates are, and the difference can be staggering. You can do two conseutive matches against the same opponent, using the same teams, the same pitch, the same weather, the same physical shape of players (in career there's fatigue, injuries and such, but in solo matches everybody always starts with 100% fresh and sane players)... and the game can absolutely feel different, and by very much. In one, your teammates may be anticipating your every move, connecting every pass of yours ideally and jumping defenders left and right with no player input whatsoever - next time around, your defenders may be sitting still half the time, with your only option to move forward is to personally dribble the opponents. This inconsistency with AI levels in FIFA takes a lot of the fun away, because it's been noticeable for many games in the franchise now that regardless of how you play or who's your opponent, in some matches the AI works in your favour, in others it almost plays against you.
Earlier I mentioned player stats, which is a huge factor in FIFA. Unlike something like Rocket League, in which the only deciding factor in how the ball behaves is the exact impact you make with the ball (assuming there's no lag and such of course), in FIFA your input is used as a general guide of what's gonna happen, but it's not a law. Do the same shot from 30 meters towards the corner or the net with Messi and then try again with your goalkeeper: the latter obviously has far lower stats in attack, so even if your input is 100% identical, the result is that with Messi you may be hitting your target, say, 80 times out of 100, while with the goalkeeper it's gonna be like 5 out of 100. Makes sense, of course: if all players on the pitch had the exact same chances to do the same things, why bother with tactics and strategies? All your players are "little Pelés" on the field, allowing you to score screamers with any defender, or use your finest attackers as brilliant defenders. Clearly, such statistics have to exist, and if the game is fair in using them it does make the game more fun. And in theory, having a good player in a certain role gives you near perfect chances at certain things to work out ideally.
That, however, isn't always the case at all, because the game often decides the result of certain scenarios beforehand. Just yesterday, I had a penalty kick with Ronaldo: great stats, I try and do it safe by slightly nudging the stick to the left and doing a slow shot, so that the keeper which I predicted would dive would get an easy-peasy goal. Ronaldo shot the ball at high speed to the left, outside of the goal. It's not what I pressed at all. All the things that I mentioned above should make the games more exciting and unpredictable, but it's the contrary, as there also seem to be very visible and noticeable AI patterns that determine how each game goes. You can "beat the system", mind: seems obvious that if you prevent your opponent from ever attacking, you will not lose. Once you understand how the AI "fails", you can abuse it. But the issue is that the games seem to alter the dice rolls from time to time to create more exciting matches. One very noticeable example that seems to keep happening since around FIFA 13 are the last minute goals. There's nothing more exciting in football than some last second goal that changes what seemed like a given result, and EA Sports' games seem to push this narrative a bit too hard. Out of my last 10 matches or so in FIFA 19, 8 had these goals happen, either in my favour or against me, just as the extra time was kicking in. A coincidence, you may say, but the problem is how these goals actually happen: defenders who were very effective at blocking opponents only seconds earlier, are suddenly stopping in the middle of the opponent's attack, or missing very simple touches that give their adversary a chance to score. And more often than not, in the final minutes the keeper will fail to save even unimpressive shots towards the middle of the goal that even you or I would have saved most certainly in real life. I learned to recognize this: if the clock is at 91 minutes and your opponent's attacker is running with one of my AI defenders suddenly stopping due to no fault of mine, I can already know it will be a goal. And then it is, because your keeper also goes on vacation. And I couldn't really do anything about it, this happens even if I'm on full defense mode trying to save the win. Just the other day I had a match where at the end I was using full defense mode, and yet after an attack of mine literally none of my AI defenders were on my side of the field, so when the opponent took ball he literally had no defenders against him for the last 50% of the pitch.
On the contrary, I have my Xbox filled with clips from the various episodes of the game in which no matter what I do, the ball just will not enter the goal, probably to make the game closer instead of me demolishing the opponent. My input is the same as always, but for some reason the player sitting inches away from the net will just shoot it on the bar, or miss the ball altogether, or slightly touch another player and fumble on the ground instead of shooting. Not so coincidentally, this is often followed by the opponent scoring a very simple goal in which my defenders forget to follow the action. Artificial excitement. I can go back to clips from as early as FIFA 14 (up until 13 it was last-gen, and since I was playing on X360 which didn't have native DVR I did not record clips prior to that) and find the most ridiculous stuff. This has to be one of my "favourites":
In a match where I was playing better than my opponent, I was still trailing as most of my attacks ended up just short of goal, while my opponents' few attempts resulted in goals. In the first attack of the clip the following things happen: an opponent defender has a lightning quick reaction time to oppose my first shot, on the rebound I do a good header but the keeper intercepts, on the rebound towards an empty-ish net my player hits the post, on yet another attempt of mine a defender of mine controlled by the AI blocks me from shooting instead of getting out of the way, after which I get yet another good shot which results in yet another post hit, and then my neverending attack finishes on a questionable foul. Remember that statistics play a huge factor in your shots, so while I was always aiming at the goal, my players kept missing it from ridiculously low distances. And then what happens a couple minutes (real time) later? My keeper fails to grab a slow ball going in the middle from a huge distance, effectively allowing a goal in from out of nowhere. The goalie was one of the best ones in the game, and yet he almost got deactivated in a way that gifted my opponent an unlikely goal. And on the contrary, here's one situation from FIFA 15 in which the AI favoured me immensely:
The keeper throws a perfect ball to a player of mine at midfield. The opponent's defenders or midfielders are nowhere to be seen as I run on my own. One quick pass towards my attacker, and I'm already in the goal. Two technically superior defenders are on my player. One literally stops instead of following my player, the other also runs surprisingly slow despite having better speed stats, and gets jumped way too easily as my player scores with ease, delivering a lovely curved header that would have been impossible to save even if the opposing keeper didn't try and get to the ball before my shot. Pulling off such "stunts" feels satisfying, but looking back at the clips it's so damn obvious how divine my middle quality Udinese players were, and how supposedly good players on the opposing side suddenly forgot how to football. It's disappointing when you can't do much against a goal because the AI is failing you, but it's not very satisfying scoring due to obvious opponent AI fallacies either. It sucks so much of the accomplishment away.
If you're still reading after this incredible wall of text, you may obviously wonder: aren't these just coincidences? In thousands of hours of play, shenanigans like in the clips above are bound to happen. The problem is that they are ridiculously frequent, the clips on my profile are just a very small sample of these things happening on a regular basis, since at the very least FIFA 13. You can almost predict every attack's result once you play long enough as soon as you see certain hints. Defenders stopping for no reason in the extra time, none of your attackers supporting you by trying to push through defense but sticking to the midfield instead, a keeper with horrible stats suddenly doing 15 saves per match worthy of Buffon's most glorious moments. The game goes out of its way to guarantee unpredictable and exciting matches, to the detriment of skills. And there's a hint of psychology as well: lose 2-3 consecutive matches, and you are practically guaranteed to have one where suddenly your AI predicts your every move, the opponent's AI is made of butter, and you're scoring with about every attack. You're happy about your result and you play another match because you're on a roll (not unlike how Candy Crush just happens to give you a good series of drops for an easy win after a set of frustrating losses), but if you know the game well enough, you probably know the opponent couldn't do a whole lot when every bad shot of yours somehow ended up in the net anyway and his defenders were unresponsive. I can't even count the amount of matches I have 30 shots while my opponent has like 3, and then it ends on a 2-2 or worse. And after a couple matches like that, suddenly I start scoring on every attack and bam, on the "easy mode" match I somehow score on every attack.
How do you prove such a thing without looking into the game code? You don't. You can't. Until then, this is a conspiracy theory of sorts, and I gladly listen to anybody who thinks I'm just bad at the game and making up excuses (while the clips I posted are old, I'm nowhere near an MLG FIFA player, though I can definitely say I'm well above average looking at my stats). What we know is that EA did indeed patent a tech that allows them to tinker with matchmaking and difficulty on the fly, to make for better player engagement and boost microtransaction sales. There is currently no definitve proof this is in FIFA, but it's an interesting fact. Confirmation bias sure is a thing, but I don't see these patterns in any other game (not these, anyway), even ones involving chance (be that in the weapons' bloom, the attack numbers in an RPG, etc.). By FIFA19, it honestly feels worse than ever: as said, there's been a last-minute ridiculous goal in most of my matches of late, along with the fact the vast majority of goals were followed by a superquick comeback, similarly with defenders sleeping most of the times. And lo and behold, after a couple bad matches in which I played horribly and would be ready to stop playing for the night, I would always play against a seemingly good opponent whose AI was very clearly handicapped, allowing me to make fun of their entire defense and score 3 goals in the first 3rd of the match with no sweat at all. Again, this isn't at all the experience in most online games, albeit some do, in fact, use tricks of their own: on top of my head, I can think of Gears Of War where a dev admitted that a player on the first game has a hidden health boost, or how Call Of Duty games also favour newcomers or comebackers in the first match.
And no, this isn't just online, either. In career mode, you better unlock the "restart match" function quick, because it can be an infuriating experience. Play multiple matches in a row against the strongest teams in the world and it can be a cakewalk - you just do your usual strats and style, and you have your usual myriad of scoring opportunities. Then suddenly, despite using the same players, the same tactics that you dominated Barcelona with, you're stuck against an Empoli, without being able to connect two passes, as the opposing defense manages to predict your every move with superhuman senses, blocking all your plays and finding a goal on their first attempt, which probably happens in the final minutes. But fret not: you can see how the game will be in the first minutes already, because you can see it right away that your "personal AI" is trash. So just restart the match and voilà: Empoli is back to being Empoli, and suddenly you're going through their defenses again like through butter. It may not be on the first attempt of a rematch, but maybe on the 2nd or 3rd, but surely enough you'll get there. The game, probably to create excitement and unpredictability, assigns a skill level of sorts that you need to beat. Roll the dice enough times and you're bound to find the easiest ones and the hardest ones alike, which decides between an ugly 0-0 and a spectacular 7-0 in which your playstyle and strategy at no point changed, but in one you had 30 shots while in the other maybe 3.
This is one of the many reasons I don't bother with the Ultimate Team mode. If you're not aware, it's basically FIFA + collectible card games: unlock players by purchasing cards (either by grinding or with real money), use further cards or money to give them long contracts and to improve their stats, then play against other teams' decks in a regular match of FIFA. But whereas in solo matches you just lose 10-20 minutes of your time with a loss, here you are possibly wasting your money on getting results that, based on how the game's AI acts, may be cakewalks or impossible tasks, and there is only so much you can do about it. I don't see the point in investing further money into matches like these, where skills only go so far. I'm perfectly fine playing my dozens, hundreds, possibly thousands of matches per game on the career mode against the AIs and in the online Seasons mode. At least the losses there are far easier to get over with.
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So, this is just my personal experience. What's yours? Do you feel that the game's AI is cheating towards creating more exciting matches? Is it maybe to try and motivate you by giving you easy wins among bad losses to keep you engaged and feel accomplishment? Am I just seeing things that aren't there? If you think these things happen but still play the game (like me), how do you counter it, what do you try to do in order to "beat the system"? For those that play other EA Sports games like Madden or NHL, does this happen there as well? There's been threads about "cheating AI" in the past (see the infamous input reading in Mortal Kombat or shooters where the enemies know your location at all times, regardless of whether they have any info on it), but thousands of hours of FIFA later I figured I'd share my thoughts on FIFA's peculiar case.
