As soon as you start fifa and see Connecting to Ea servers on screen, you ping multiple servers around the world to determine your matchmaking region. The regions are as follow:

Europe (Germany): 18.197.48.114 Hosted by Amazon
Europe (Ireland): 52.18.194.209 Hosted by Amazon
Europe (France) : 52.47.70.141 Hosted by Amazon
Asia (Singapore): 52.220.199.97 Hosted by Amazon
Asia (Hong-Kong): 43.239.136.227 Hosted by Amazon
Asia (India-Mumbai): 13.233.50.52 Hosted by Amazon
Asia (Japan) : 13.230.248.238 Hosted by Amazon
Asia (Dubai): 185.179.203.80 Hosted by I3d
Australia: 13.211.232.151 Hosted by Amazon
USA (oregon) : 54.189.201.217 Hosted by Amazon
USA (virginia) : 18.206.67.50 Hosted by Amazon
South Africa : 185.179.200.226 Hosted by I3d
Mexico: 169.57.76.171 Hosted by SoftLayer Technologies
South America (Brazil): 52.67.114.134 Hosted by Amazon
You think they cover the entire world but there is alot of dead zones forcing people to play on servers located 1000+km away. Like half of Russia, Turkey and countries in this region shown in picture. https://ibb.co/jJ8nCy0 Not to mention africa while most south africans think they play On european servers when they are not. they have delay because they play people in africa that are connecting from 2000+ kms...

In a 1vs1 game the choice of dedicated servers is really bizarre from Ea. They spent a fortune because they are afraid of p2p cheaters. lag switchers and ddosing opponent ip. I believe the choice of dedis was mainly to cover opponent ip and to make people not able to ddos all opponents on WL and finish 30/30 with cheats. But a server between two players creates a huge issue when only one player have a high ping. If player one ping 25ms to the server and player 2 pings 175ms. there will be effectevily 200ms ping for a packet to reach from player 1 to the server then to player 2 and vice vers ca. If both players have a cumilative ping of 300ms then you can imagine how bad the delay is. Even when both have 75ms (4 bars) 150ms is not ideal. So they need to enable p2p for the people playing from places with pings higher than 100ms to the closest server, or at least group them together and let the majority of the players have lag free games. When I say the majority it's because most sales fifa make are in france, germany, UK, netherlands, spain... aka Europe.

The matchmaking at least in rivals as I can't deal with Wl delay anymore is totally random. it doesnt take into account the quality of your opponent internet neither his ping. it doesnt matter if you see 5 bars (sub 50ms ping) or 4 bars (sub 75ms ping). If your opponent have high ping or packet loss/ping jitter you will play a delayed match. Poeple here wonder why late at night or early morning the game feel extremly smooth. it's because at these times there is less chance you or your opponent family members using your internet to stream videos or download/upload anything. If you don't set Qos in your router to give your console/pc the priority in sending/recieving data and you don't let other connected deviced leeches your entire internet bandwidth you will have packet loss and speed up lag/delay problems. Also outside of peak times all isps networks are not overloaded so ping is always less than at 7-12pm.

It's sad how the game instantly match me with someone else in rivals! it's 2019, give us the option to search for optimal connectivity. Don't match me with someone far away or with packet loss then apply lag compensation on my input. I play a delayed game then ping the server I was playing on and see that I have 0% packet loss and stable low ping, this drives me nuts. The system Ea use compensate alot for packet loss. How do I know? they said it themselves. Here is the link to their pitch note from july 2019: https://fifaforums.easports.com/en/discussion/489256/gameplay-responsiveness-efforts-july-2019

They clearly confess using a maximum buffer time higher than what is needed to match the smoothness of an offline match. they say slightly higher but I call bs. The matches online can be delayed by a full second. You can see how much delay is added as soon as the referee call full time, discusting stutter. Why punish us because of my opponent packet loss? Why match me with someone with 150ms ping? Why revert the changes that made us play for 4 days delay free matches?

Here is a list of Ea servers that host rivals matches for everyone to test,You can use pingplotter. they are stable, they are amazon AWS, some of the best in the industry: - 35.181.31.5 France - 15.188.58.59 France - 34.248.118.84 Ireland - 18.185.22.123 Germany - 3.120.87.86 Germany.

End of edit

I joined reddit to post this, I worked in game development before and my field is networking. Im a fut addict like most of you. English is not my first language and this is gonna be a long read.

I started playing Fut 3 years ago and ever since I did all I could to find a solution on my end for the input delay. But nothing worked, some games are smooth, some are slightly delayed and most are unplayable.

I started digging last year but on this post I'm gonna focus on this years Ea servers and netcode. This season they added new servers in my region (europe) they are located in france and hosted by amazon. there is also amazon servers they are usin in germany and I3d servers in holland. Few servers in Ireland run by bioware.

In my tests the amazon servers in France have very bad routing for all connections going through Italy, once they reach amazon backbone in palermo, the packets go all around europe up till Ireland then back to france. which adds multiple unnessecary hops and ping. very bizarrre routing from amazon.

In my country The netherland servers hosted by I3d are the best, extremly short route (8 hops) and consistent ping. Actually all the servers have no jitter in all the testings I did in different times and days.

Making sure I only play on I3d servers I still have variance in gameplay smoothness while my ping is always the same. So this led to me asking, wtf?

There is two issues with the current system EA using. The first one is the matchmaking parameters: they never take in to account both players pings to the server. They use geo filter to match people together and even that filter is soft and ignored 99% of the time. this brings one huge issue: one player with sub 20ms ping to the server can play with another with 200 ms ping. And this leads to another greater issue. The person with lowest ping will have an artificial ping added to him of 180ms to make the match in sync with his opponent. this leads to huge input delay for player 1 and smooth game for player 2. The lag comoensation imaximum buffer is too high for a smooth 1vs1 game online.

Another finding is that the game not only compensate for latency but also for bad connectivity, the maximum buffer time allowed in the game to resend data is case of an error is too high in an effort to make people with unstable internet don't suffer alot of speed up lag.

I have read the pitch notes From Ea about this issue from july in fifa 19, they actually lowered the maximum buffer time allowed to resend data in case of an error last summer for 4 days, but they were hammered by pwople complaining about speed up lag and finally reverted the changes. In this case they saw the problem from potential profits point of view. Less people able to play online is less profits from them. More people able to play eveb if with delayed gameplay is much better economically for them.

Why Im posting this? from the contacts of my friends who still work in game dev industry. Ea has stopped looking at this issue, they want more players to be able to play this game and they dont care about the responsivness. The networking departement already found the solution last year but higher ups ruled against it. their job is done, nothing more will be done about it. and the policy they are following is to be completly silent about he issue and never answer or react to anything about it. Never!

There is 2 possible solutions for this issue and I have no idea why Ea is not looking at implementing one of the both.

Obvious solution one is to revert the maximum buffer time allowed to resend data in case of error to the same amount to match the smoothness of an offline game and punish people with unfit connection to play online. Implement an in game logo to display in case the player connection is having packet drop issues and high jitter. Like the system they use in battlefield games.

Solution 2 is to group players with bad internet together. let them play together, let the people playing on long distance wifi, unstable 3g/4g hotspots and overcrowded routers play against each other, so when there is lag compensation applied, they both suffer from the same effects instead of punishig people playing on proper connections. Pes have done this this year, allowing players to search for optimal connection and smooth gameplay, gave players the option to opt out of playing against wifi and 4g players... the technology is there and not really hard to implement, I have no idea why ea not looking in to this.

The community needs to stand together and demand a solution, the servers are fine, they even cut contracts with many old providers that had bad setups and connectiviry issues. the real problem is lag compensation, its need to abondonned (toned down) or give people the option to wait longer while searhing for games to play a smooth game! Lag compensation make the entire team a bunch of amateures with zero reaction and awarness, make the game engine stutters like hell in replays and post game cutscenes. It needs to stop!