The EA Sports team behind FIFA 20 is launching a live testing initiative to gather real-world data on elements of the game that are in need of improvement, particularly some issues surrounding button responsiveness and online connectivity.
The studio dove into what form that initiative will take and its methodology for testing in a recent blog post, explaining how it’ll soon launch an in-game overlay that’ll allow participating players to share data on how connectivity affects their button inputs.
“When we make any online change or update, it affects millions of people, each with unique playing conditions. This is why we’ve started implementing live studies alongside our existing internal testing, whenever we investigate a potential change related to connectivity.”
This time around, the dev team is testing a small backend change that’ll have an impact on button responsiveness, and running a live study to gather data on how that change affects things for players outside of an internal playtesting environment.
Doing so plants an in-game button overlay on the screens of participating players, allowing both players and EA to see real-time data about button inputs as they happen in a match, and how, if at all, those inputs are affected by connection to data centers.
“Once we identify a potential change and have tested it internally, we determine a group of volunteer players who can give us actionable feedback,” writes EA. “These players play the game with the potential change in effect for a period of time, they let us know everything about their experience, and their matches give us valuable real-world data to analyze. Although our internal investigations are able to simulate countless networking scenarios, it’s always helpful to look at real-world data as well.”