EA SPORTS FC™ 26 | October Feedback Update

Intro

We released EA SPORTS FC 26 last month and a lot’s happened since then. On our side, we released 3 title updates driven by your feedback, addressed a number of emergent issues, and we’ve been closely following your feedback through the Feedback Portal, Discord, and social media.

In this article we’re covering your feedback over the past month, what we’ve done about it so far, and what we’re going to do in the future. 

So let’s start with your biggest feedback topic so far, defending.

Table Of Contents

1. Manual Defending Is Getting Stronger
2. Kick-Offs Are Getting Harder To Score From In Competitive Gameplay
3. We Tackled A Number Of Emergent Issues And Feedback You Told Us About
4. FC 26 v1.1 Is Coming Soon
5. Implementing Your Closed Beta Feedback Was Very Important To Us

Manual Defending Is Getting Stronger

What You’ve Told Us

• Defending against dribblers can feel too difficult, especially with their precise movements around the edge of the box, resulting in a potentially increased threat of goal-scoring chances and overly high scorelines.

What We’ve Done So Far

We’ve been following your feedback for weeks on this topic and wanted to make sure that we gave it time to evolve before considering any changes. FC 26 is a new game and it’s important to give you time to get familiar with its mechanics. 

So for the time being, we made one update in this space in FC 26 version 1.0.4:

• Addressed cases of players not being able to perform Physical Tackles, especially instances that occurred when the player had specific PlayStyles (eg. Bruiser).

What We’re Doing Next

• We’re going to be making improvements to Jockeying responsiveness.

You might have seen us briefly mention this on our socials and the EASFC Tracker already, but we’re looking at empowering manual defending in an update that’s being planned for the end of October.

We want to give you an experience that has more of a balance between attacking and manual defending, but without compromising on the responsiveness of dribbling that you’ve told us you enjoy.

While we’re on the topic of defending, let’s take a look at another change we’ll be making.

Kick-Offs Are Getting Harder To Score From In Competitive Gameplay

What You’ve Told Us

• Defenders can give too much room to attackers during kick-offs, causing an increase in potential attacking threats resulting from a kick-off.
  • In practice, this has led to too many goals getting scored from kick-offs.

What We’ve Done So Far

We started updating kick-offs in v1.0.3: 

• The defending team will now position themselves more compactly for a short period of time after a kick off.
  • Updated positions of defending players prior to kick off for all formations.

However, we’ve seen from your feedback that there’s more room for improvement here, as we mentioned on social media previously.

What We’re Doing Next

• We’re going to be making further improvements to AI defensive positioning during kick-offs.

With this update, we're planning on implementing more aggressive man marking that only applies to the defensive side around kick-off. This is in order to reduce the amount of goalscoring threats that can occur due to general kick-off positioning. Like with the Jockeying change, we’re targeting the end of October for this update.

By the way, as you might have seen from FC 26 v.1.0.4, these kick-off changes are intended for Competitive gameplay. We want to ensure that Authentic gameplay continues to provide a different experience that’s more true-to-football with an emphasis on immersion.

We Tackled A Number Of Emergent Issues And Feedback You Told Us About

Our teams are always looking to address emergent issues and give you the best in-game experience possible, and we want to say thank you for helping us recognize and investigate new issues as they happen.

Below are our updates on a number of emergent issues and feedback you’ve told us about.

Matchmaking In Football Ultimate Team Champions

We discovered that the first FUT Champions of the season had a matchmaking issue and we addressed it server-side as fast as we could.

What happened was that the Form aspect of FUT Champs matchmaking wasn’t quite working as intended, so there was more potential skill level variety in the opponents you faced.

While matchmaking is always complex and tries to give you the best available match at any given time, generally speaking we can say that you can expect to be playing with players who are in similar Form as you in FUT Champions matches.

Career Mode Contract And Transfer Negotiations

You’ve told us about several Manager Career issues that were impacting contract negotiations and transfers, with players seemingly communicating to managers in ways that are contradictory to their actual contracts and transfers.

We’ve been addressing instances of these situations occurring across FC 26 v.1.0.3 and v1.0.4, and we’re continuing to look at your feedback for future updates

For now we’ve tackled the following issues:

• After signing a new contract, players could have acted unhappy leading to a notification about a lack of contract offer and eventually leading to a transfer request.
• When a player started discussions around contract extensions, the corresponding messages were not displayed in the Central Hub.
• It was not always possible to interact with transfer offers for players requesting a transfer.

Ultimate Team Content

Over the past month we:

• Updated incorrect Ultimate Team Online Draft rewards.
  • Impacted players will be contacted in-game with correct rewards.
• Addressed Path To Pro Objective issues affecting progression.
  • Impacted players have been contacted in-game with correct rewards.
• Corrected Challengers rewards in-game before the event was live.
• Removed any non-functional Objectives and re-released them where possible.
  • Impacted players have been contacted in-game with correct rewards.
• Addressed incorrect FUT Challengers Objectives progress.

We also continue to see your feedback around Evolutions and Transfer Market volatility. We’ll share updates with you around this feedback and what we’re doing next week when we can go into more detail for you.

PC Optimization And Dropped Controller Inputs

We’ve seen your feedback around technical performance on PC and controllers dropping inputs.

As we’ve shared in past updates, we’ve been addressing instances of these issues with just about every new version of the game. In FC 26 v1.0.3, we addressed an issue with your graphics settings being incorrectly saved, which may have impacted your overall experience at times. We continue to listen to your feedback in this space and are planning to address another batch of issues later this month.

To help mitigate some of the issues on PC, we want to share more details about how your experience can be impacted. Playing FC 26 offline and online is a bit of a different experience for your PC, which is why some players only experience issues in online matches. 

If your PC is running the game offline close to its performance limits with no issues, but you run into online issues, this can happen because online play needs consistent performance in order for your game to stay in sync with others. The combination of online play with PC hardware that is pushing itself can result in issues occurring that you might not see otherwise.

We know that on PC you want to play the game as maxed out as possible, and we see the need to create in-game indicators for when your PC is struggling to achieve your desired settings.

We’ll continue to work on PC optimization with upcoming updates, and we’ll be looking to reach out to players more directly to better understand the issues you’re facing since the variety of hardware that runs our game is quite significant. 

In the meantime, if you’re experiencing optimization or controller issues, lowering your graphics settings a little bit can eliminate some cases of that happening. Again, we know that’s not exactly what you want to hear at this time, but it is a workaround for a number of players, and we’ll keep working on improving optimization in general.

General Connectivity And General Matchmaking

While the period around FC 26 launch has been fairly smooth overall, we know that there have been several situations where players were affected by connectivity and matchmaking issues.

For example, there was an issue getting into the game as it launched that we addressed as fast as possible, and there was a day where many players were not able to matchmake properly. There’s even been a case of players in certain regions being affected by their ISPs preventing them from accessing the game. 

We’ll continue to address these emergent issues as they pop up and provide updates on them as they happen on our X and WhatsApp channels.

FC 26 v1.1 Is Coming Soon

We’re looking to release FC 26 v1.1 before the end of the month and include the changes we’ve mentioned throughout this article.

We’ll be sharing many more details on v1.1 next week as we finish making it, but here’s a quick preview of what you can expect around the time it releases:

• A brand new Season, Season Pass, and more Evolutions.
• Improvements to manual defending and kick-offs.
• Ultimate Team Objective Tracking, Consumable Evolution Previews, and new SBC sorting filters.
• Manager Market improvements, including addressing managers switching to teams that don’t seem like a great fit.
• An increase to the Clubs Archetype max level.
• Additional PC optimizations.
• And much more.

Implementing Your Closed Beta Feedback Was Very Important To Us

Though the FC 26 Closed Beta might feel like ancient history at this point, we want to take a moment to say thank you for all the great feedback you gave us during this period.

As you’ve probably noticed, much of what was included in the 3 updates we published over the past month was driven by your feedback. From tweaks to low driven shots to Be A Goalkeeper improvements, your feedback continues to help shape the game.

Here are some of the improvements we made to FC 26 based on your Closed Beta feedback:

• [Gameplay] Low Driven Shot Effectiveness
  • Tuned Low Driven Shots based on your feedback in the Closed Beta to be less accurate when shooting with an extreme amount of power.
• [Gameplay] Attacking AI Positioning
  • Increased frequency of wingers making attacking runs into the box.
  • Wing Backs will no longer drop too deep in their own half when their team is in possession.
  • Improved teammate offside awareness.
  • Addressed instances of players not making runs into open space when it could be beneficial.
• [Gameplay] Heavy Dribble Touches
  • Improved cases of unexpected heavy touches when sprinting in wet weather Authentic gameplay based on your feedback.
• [Gameplay] AI Defender Speed
  • Addressed some ball trapping animations were slowing down the ball carrier more than intended, making the defender chasing them feel overly quick.
• [Gameplay] Be A Goalkeeper Save Delay
  • Increased responsiveness of saves.
  • Addressed instances of the goalkeeper not facing the ball when getting up from a save.
  • Improved timing window for requesting a save.
  • Increased auto positioning assistance when trying to claim a cross.

Outro

The FC 26 launch has been massive for us, thank you so much for playing our game and continuing to give us your feedback. We’ll keep tuning into what you’re saying, and we’ll do another one of these Feedback Updates in November.

The Club is Yours in EA SPORTS FC™ 26, available now on PlayStation®5, PlayStation®4, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch™, Nintendo Switch™ 2, PC, Amazon Luna as well as through EA Play.

Thanks to those who’ve provided and continue to provide feedback. Throughout the course of the EA SPORTS FC 26 season, we'll provide you with more information and updates if and when they become available. Be sure to follow @‌EASFCDIRECT on X and to check out the EA SPORTS FC Tracker for the latest news and updates. Stay in the conversation on all things EA SPORTS FC™ by joining our official Discord, following us on our official X, Instagram, and YouTube, and participating in the official EA SPORTS FC Forums.