Hello again fellow fut addicts. Excuse my english again as it is not my first language. I now have a clearer picture about the delay issue from contacts mainly in Ea bucharest but from other studios too.

While we all blame the devs and the community managers and everyone who dare to post online from the company. these people are sick of getting harrased online for something out of their hands. The whole issue started when Ea as a publisher made multiple public tests about the general quality of potential customers internet connections. these surveys returned that the majority of the audience Ea target are having connections issues. The main issue is teenagers using shared internet (one internet subscription serving multiple devices/persons in the same house hold) another issue is internet providers having routing issues to ea servers location especially in Usa (some isp called cox ) France (Isp called Orange)... Yet another issue is players on unstable wifi signal/congested channels/3g or 4g internet.

This made Ea as a publisher instruct all devs to focus on network smoothing (this is what they internally call lag compensation at EA). This is affecting Apex legends and Battlefield too. they are using low tick rate servers on purpose and as a choice not because they can't afford 60hz servers. This choice was not made by the community manager or anyother EA employee you are flaming on the internet. This was made by the higher ups that only understand money. For them higher potential customers = higher player base = higher income. I will focus on Fifa 20 issues because folks on other games have already done alot of work in investigating the netcode and they already know about the issues.

I think we all noticed how severe the delay this fifa is. It's because Ea have taking network smoothing too far this year. In fifa 20 the netcode is using gvsp protocol instead of traditional Udp packets. This protocol is mainly used by security cameras that stream live over the internet. Why are they using it? because with this protocol it easier to re-sequence packets in case of latency variance or and packet loss. This protocol is also very linient on packet resend. So here I blame Ea employees who lie to us about how they are working and investigating input delay when the publisher is telling them to focus on the exact opposite of this:

The focus is to make the game appear lag free. Key word is appear so the average joe will think nothing is wrong. how? most people will only think there is lag when they actually see it. If nothing seen then everything is ok and he can still play online. This is why Gsvp was chosen. This protocol make it easier for EA to make the Game visually smooth at the cost of delaying input. Visually smooth means as less as possible speed up lag and visual jittery. Packet resequence helps this case but it is also the main cause of the bizarre mauvements you see your players pull up in game. how you pressed B for an interception a second ago but your player skyrocketed the ball after the interception. Why you take extra steps before any command (pass/shoot/cross). That's because your packets are delayed and resequenced so the movement command register before the shooting command.

All in all the game is a complete mess online this year for a huge chunk of us. This post is to educate people about the root cause not because I think EA will do anything. This is for the people who take this game seriously and even think it's competitive. I don't know how you call such a mess competitive where delay is the major factor in deciding whos winning or losing the match.

A simple solution would be to give us the choice of playing with or without network smoothing. This won't hurt the player base or their income and also will let the people with capable internet connection to play with minimal lag. Match people who opt to play with network smoothing together and the people who opt out together! Peace.