FIFA fans demand Battlefront 2-style change with #FixFIFA campaign

Streamers and YouTubers voice their support as players unite against bugs.

Following EA DICE's decision to remove microtransactions from Star Wars Battlefront 2, another EA game community is feeling emboldened to demand change in its game, with the hashtag "#FixFIFA" starting to dominate discussion on the game's busy subreddit and filtering out through YouTube and Twitch content creators.

The #FixFIFA Megathread on the /r/FIFA/ subreddit aims to capture all the key issues FIFA fans have with this year's iteration of the game. As well as a range of gameplay issues, players also feel the current FUT Champs "Weekend League" is much too demanding, and are frustrated by bugs that prevent things like the Football Catalog and Pro Clubs mode working properly.

We've played a lot of FIFA 18 this year and can vouch for a lot of the things mentioned, including the so-called "Kick Off Boost" (where the team kicking off seems to have a temporary buff that makes it easier to carve open the opposition), midfielders swapping places in your formation, and poor player switching.

EA has yet to respond to the campaign, but it has caught the attention of several popular FIFA community figures, including YouTube and Twitch content creators like ITANI and DrJarba. Some are now saying they will protest by not buying FIFA Points on Black Friday, when EA traditionally releases a lot of special pack deals, although others - like mega streamer Castro - have said they will still be doing so despite empathising with the movement.

FixFIFA seems to have legs, then, but - even speaking as die-hard fans of FIFA who would enjoy seeing a lot of these issues resolved - it doesn't feel like a crisis of the same magnitude as the one that derailed the Battlefront 2 launch. Battlefront 2's microtransactions had to be suspended because of the corrosive impact they were having on basic progression, but the FixFIFA issues are more esoteric.

It's also worth remembering that it allegedly took an intervention from Disney CEO Bob Iger himself for EA to make drastic changes to Battlefront 2. It seems unlikely that anyone at embattled world soccer organization FIFA is going to be on the phone to EA, especially while the majority of fans continue to spend small fortunes on FIFA Points.

Still, we'll be following this one to see how it develops. If nothing else, EA certainly needs to improve its communication around these issues, and we would love to see them acknowledge some of the most irritating bugs and talk about whether they can be addressed before attention inevitably shifts to FIFA 19.

Editor-at-Large

Tom is probably best known for the 15 years - FIFTEEN YEARS! - he spent at Eurogamer, one of Europe's biggest independent gaming sites. Now he roams the earth, but will always have a home here at AllGamers. You can try and raise him from his deep, abyssal slumber through tom.bramwell@allgamers.com or he's also on Twitter.

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