Official Madden 12 Online Communities Blog

[jpdavis82]

The biggest addition to Madden NFL 12 online is certainly the new "Communities" feature that will affect both Online Team Play and head-to-head games.

Anthony DiMento, a designer working on Madden 12, has written a blog at EA.com explaining the new feature in quite some depth.

Quote:

I’ve been waiting for this day for months now, and it’s finally here, the debut of Madden NFL 12’s newest online feature: Communities. Around this time each year, the design team starts getting together, kicking around ideas and looking at priorities for what we want to add to next year’s game. We started Madden NFL 12 by looking at the core online experience and Ranked Head-to-Head, in particular. For years now, we have been hearing complaints about how hard it is to find a good matchup online. Opponents quitting games, cheesing or running the same play again and again, and gamers looking for creative ways to cheat their way up the leaderboard have really been plaguing the online space. We listened to our fans and found a very large group of gamers who only play against their friends and use our Ranked Invites and Leaderboards to track their progress against each other. We talked to our hardcore fans and found a lot of sim-football players who only want to play against guys who play sim-football and we talked to even more who just wanted to find an opponent who would finish a game. Finally, we asked ourselves, what is the correct solution to these problems? How can we let our gamers play ranked games against their friends, play the way they want to play it, and create a safe environment where you don’t have to worry about cheaters, quitters, or grievers? The answer became Communities.

You can read the rest of the blog by heading over to EA.com. Also be sure to check back here throughout the day as we will have more details about Online Communities.

[SIMstyle]

not bad, Tiburon. not bad. All we want is the ability to choose our style game. FairPlay is OFFICIALLY back in my community! halleleuejah!

[Smoke6]

Quote: Originally Posted by SIMstyle

not bad, Tiburon. not bad. All we want is the ability to choose our style game. FairPlay is OFFICIALLY back in my community! halleleuejah!

Agreed, now we dont have to filter our opponents anymore and have a nice sustainable community of ballers who all see eye to eye!

[P21J]

Awesome! Most definitely looking forward to joining some OS communities come August 30th. This has been a gripe of mine for almost every sports title that I've played and I even stayed away from online in previous Madden titles due to the horror stories that I heard about cheesers and glitchers. All I need now is the demo to make my final decision on purchasing this game (I most likely will, unless it plays worse than NCAA). Can't wait for the demo footage today (Gamespot) and tomorrow (via the live stream)!

[CRMosier_LM]

I was sooooooo pumped for this announcement!!!! I'm glad everyone seems to like it thus far. There was somuch misinformation floating around.

[warrior7807]

looks very cool. if anything this will get aloooooot of new people to try out the online play. im sure that is exactly what they want

[ezio]

I really thought it was going to be 11 vs 11 OTP but communities is not a bad idea at all.

[Yeah...THAT Guy]

Wow, I'm not usually much of an Online guy, but I gotta say, I really think I'm going to give this a shot assuming OS will set up a good community.

[jlandryst]

Im sorry i might be in the minority. But this what is suppose to make us forget about the lack of work in the online franchise mode?

[jpdavis82]

Quote: Originally Posted by jlandryst

Im sorry i might be in the minority. But this what is suppose to make us forget about the lack of work in the online franchise mode?

No, the League Manager tool they worked on with EA is supposed to alleviate some of that loss. This is a revolutionizing way of playing sports games online. I'm sure next year they are going to add a lot in Online Franchise, but they added so much this year already and I'm sorry if you're an Online Franchise or bust guy but there's only so much they can add in one year. I honestly can't think of any sports game that has made more additions in just one year than Madden 12 has.