FIFA matchmaking explained

Your FIFA opponent

This isn’t as straight forward as you might have thought and has changed in FIFA 13 compared to previous versions. You are matched up based on certain criteria. (edit 11th Oct 2014)same in FIFA14 and FIFA15.

1. Location

To try to make FIFA online less laggy and a better experience FIFA 13 tries to make your opponent within a certain distance. The number of times we have seen the opponent be from the same town is very high. Unfotunately we come from a town of very good FIFA players. Also our connections haven’t been better in FIFA 13 on UT or H2H. They were good up to January when TOTY came out and lots of problems with the EASFC service and trade piles. Doesn’t help that ISPs throttle connections at peak times and people choose to download or are on shared connections when playing FIFA. Interestingly on Virgin Gaming we experience much smoother gameplay with no erratic ball physics etc. As people on Virgin Gaming are located anywhere in the world we believe there is a fault with how FIFA 13 works out the quality of connection and there are issues somewhere with the connection quality rating when locally matched.

2. FIFA ELO system

What the **** is ELO? Well to quote wikipedia “The Elo rating system is a method for calculating the relative skill levels of players in two-player games such as chess. It is named after its creator Arpad Elo, a Hungarian-born American physics professor.”

Each player has a numerical rating. A higher number indicates a better player, based on results against other rated players. The winner of a contest between two players gains a certain number of points in his or her rating and the losing player loses the same amount. The number of points won or lost in a contest depends on the difference in the ratings of the players, so a player will gain more points by beating a higher-rated player than by beating a lower-rated player. In chess, for instance, if player A is rated 100 points higher than player B, it is expected that player A will win about five out of eight games played. Over a series of games if either player does better than expected his or her rating will go up.”

The way FIFA 13 decides the ELO is from various stats. Not just your record of wins to losses so you can’t just loose lots offline to suddenly find easier opponents online. Depends who you win and lose against and their ELO rating. We aren’t fully sure if ELO is used in every mode in FIFA 13. We know it is used in divisions but is it used in the tournaments too? So hard to attempt to work out how good an opponent is and how you are matched up when 80% of the players we meet are desperate to win so do the counter attack long through ball to pace on the counter. These people gain the same ELO as us which is a shame really. Imagine if the system worked so all those players played against each other and the rest of us who want to pass and skill and score creative goals were matched against each other. Really don’t have a problem losing to someone who has learned the better side of the game. Its called enjoyment.

3. The rating of your team

Usually in H2H you have filters set for this but the rating is more for Ultimate Team. In FIFA 13 this is more strict than previous. We used to play against 86 and higher rated teams and beat them with 80 rated teams. Which was fun. Now that doesn’t happen we are nearly always matched to an equally rated team. You will hear the term Bronze bench where a gold team or In forms has bronze players on the bench to bring the team rating down. A little tip for you here. Better players usually don’t have high rated teams. People like us don’t see in Form players being worth the coins even when we can afford them don’t bother buying them. The better FIFA players generally prefer to use lower rated players or silver teams where they have more control of the ball and player. So because of the ELO system and locality the lower rated your team the harder your opponent is likely to be. If you have informs and high rated players but a low rated bench try adding better players to it see if you win a few more.

So in a nutshell EA are removing the fun from FIFA. First less 5* skill players, then no single matches, an ELO system, what next?

4. Playing people in different division to you?

Because of the ELO system the game doesn’t always find people available to play in your division. In H2H divisions you can actually see if you look at the results which one they were in. You will notice lots of games are a different division as people of different ELO levels are in different divisions for various reasons. In Ulitmate team you can’t see what level your opponent was in but it could be up to three divisions different! Usually within two though. Just how it is won’t affect you that much if you don’t know about it (oops now you do). #mindset.

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