FIFA clubs - who is to blame?

I suppose this blog has been a long time coming but it’s come to a point where I suppose I need to get something off of my chest regarding FIFA, the clubs community and EA themselves. What I am referring to is the mess regarding Virtual pro hacking and how all people involved with it are killing clubs off.

In FIFA 11 it was discovered that by using some widely available programs and a USB stick that a file saved on the 360 hard drive could be modified to give the user a modified Virtual Pro. At first it started off with a VP being 70%, then it was 89%, then 98% and finally someone uploaded a 100% VP at which point it seemed the majority of the community were using a 100% VP. Now many argue that this is not a “clubs mode killing issue” but I argue otherwise.

Before I go on let me hold up my hand and say “I downloaded a VP in FIFA 11”, my reasons being that I was playing for a very good club, most of them had already downloaded a VP and I was worried that I’d be dropped from the squad if my VP was so poor that it left me at a disadvantage. Is that a good reason? Upon reflection it is not and I realise that last year I was as much a part of the problem as any other person who downloaded a VP of any sorts.

So, who is to blame? Many of the community argue that it is EA and whilst there is a lot of truth in that there are also others to blame, namely the community of FIFA players itself. Whilst EA have not done enough in the technical aspect of preventing hacking it is the FIFA community who are exploiting that and downloading already completed VP’s. To me it’s like someone using cheat codes to become invincible in a video game and complaining that it’s too easy because the company put cheat codes in when in fact it’s the users choice to use those codes.

I will continue to write who is to blame but I’m going to focus first on EA and then the community. With EA the blame is high, NHL 12 has a “clubs” mode called Hockey League and whilst NHL 12 was made in the same Studio as FIFA 12 with both teams sharing technology and code the two games are miles apart when it comes to their clubs mode, with NHL 12 being a fantastic mode that punishes people who quit early and rewarding those who stick out games and who play good Hockey and FIFA being a mode full of exploits, cheaters and boosters.

Hockey League works on a system of XP awarded based on rank earned by meeting various goals, meaning when you start out you are a Rookie rank 1 and by meeting certain goals like winning 2 games, having an average teamwork rating of D- and a positioning average rating of D+ you will progress to Rookie rank 2 which will give you more XP to use on your VP. What’s so great about this is that you have to meet certain goals in order to progress and these goals can only be met online meaning a player cannot boost himself unless he has other players willing to sacrifice their ratings and possibly lose xp points. In FIFA there is no punishment at all, lose a game and it means nothing other than your team lose points, hack your VP and exploit the game and nothing is done about it by EA and this is the reason the exploits and VP Hacking continue to grow and grow.

In FIFA 13 EA need to make sure that VP’s are split, you have one for offline and one for online and the online one needs to be saved serverside so that it cannot be modified or hacked. This will prevent people from hacking even if they want to and will instantly put everyone back on a level playing ground, something that they have not been for FIFA 11 and look unlikely to be on FIFA 12 now that there are people already working hard on hacking FIFA 12 VP’s.

One major annoyance for myself is that EA FIFA team still continue to do nothing to deter cheaters on the FIFA games, there are no announcements of people being banned, no-one seems to be banned, boosters do so openly and even on the recent results of teams you can see they have played the same team 10-15 times with all games a 3-0 win, VP’s were hacked to be superhuman and still no action is taken on these users. I think it is a fair assumption that if a person is cheated against and feels wronged and the people responsible do nothing about it there is a chance that the wrong person will turn to cheating to “even the playing ground” which in turn means he wrongs someone else resulting in a viral hacking issue as we saw in FIFA 11 which brings me to the community.

I am amazed by how often I read the sentence “It’s EA’s fault that clubs is ruined because they haven’t stopped the hacking of VP’s” and yet it is written by someone who has downloaded a 100% VP or who has “tried” a “128 hacked VP”. The problem with the community is there are a large number of people who are so competitive that they will do whatever it takes to win and so they will download a hacked VP. There seems to be four categories to these hackers:

1) The all out cheater

2) The “moral” cheater

3) The booster

4) The peer pressured cheater

The all out cheater I name so because this person wants to win so bad that they will do anything to win, even if it means playing terrible, unrealistic, abusing football. They will hack their VP to get every statistic up to 128, they will abuse know glitches and bugs, they will pull their Ethernet cable if it’s the 90th minute and they are losing etc

The worst part about this kind of cheater is that they have no interest in winning through being the better team, they just want to win and boast about being on a leader board and so it is safe to say they are not a fan of football or football gaming, but instead they are the kind of gamer who thinks a leader board position makes you better.

Next you have the moral cheater who is the type of person who will download a VP because they feel they have the right to have a 100% VP but they will not cheat in a match. Most often the moral cheater has some morals (hence the name) such as they won’t do a glitch like the throw in glitch and they will not pull the cord when losing. Does this make the moral cheater a lesser part of the issue? No, it really doesn’t as they have still downloaded a hacked VP to get to 100%, they still haven’t earned the advantage they have over the players who are levelling their VP properly and as the game intends you to do so.

They are also a major part of the hacking problem despite how they feel and the reason being is that when lots of people turn up being 88 rated so early into the game their opponents begin to think “how did that person get so highly rated so quickly” and turn to google. A quick google search later and they have discovered the 100% Virtual pro hack, a little longer into their process of learning how it is done and they discover the 128 hack at which point they figure “well they cheated, so will I” and download the 128 VP. It’s essentially a viral hacking issue caused by a few but that spreads to the many.

The booster I name so because these are the type of players who set their VP to play against a terrible team and then go through the accomplishments like a list. With FIFA 12 this has been made easier as even the World Class accomplishments are a walk in the park due to the introduction of the sliders. It seems that many people are knocking the opponents sliders right down so that they are essentially useless whilst putting all of their teams sliders on maximum so that they have a massive advantage meaning they can boost their VP up without any real challenge. These cheaters may not be responsible for VP hacking directly but again many people do the same thing as I mentioned with the moral hackers, “how did his VP get so highly rated so quickly?” and so on it continues to lead to the 128 VP discovery.

Finally you have the peer pressured cheater. In FIFA 11 I fell into this category and this is the type of player who plays with very good players who have hacked or boosted and when the team start up they realise they are nowhere near up to the standard, not because of lacking the ability but because they are using a much weaker, slower VP. Trying to play in a team of 88 rated VP’s when you are rated 71 or 72 is very hard as the pace of the game is dictated by the majority. With FIFA 12 this only looks to get worse as with poor stamina you can be injured more frequently and when you’re playing with a team of very fast and high stamina players you’re going to struggle to keep up with the pace. It is at this point this type of cheater decides to cheat by downloading a VP or boosting in order to keep up with his teammates, hence the term peer pressured.

So looking back up at that list you can see that all of these kinds of cheaters are what is ruining clubs and each are equally as responsible as each other, even if they don’t want to admit it.

The only way I can see FIFA clubs being saved from it’s own destructive community is by EA’s FIFA development team taking control, biting the bullet and implementing serverside VP’s, rewarding honest, good players and punishing those who cheat. If EA do not take this stance for FIFA 13 they may find they don’t have much of a clubs fan base left and being as so many hardcore clubs players only play FIFA for clubs they will not only lose a small base of sales but also give themselves one less advantage over their rival game PES, or even open the door for Konami to take that part of the community by implementing a clubs mode of their own.

So to conclude this blog I think both EA and the clubs community are to blame for the recent deterioration of clubs and unless EA take control of it again they may kill off one of the best footballing modes ever implemented into a football game, the ball is in EA’s court.