EA SPORTS FC™ 26 | FC Feedback Deep Dive

Hey everyone! As your EA SPORTS FC Community team, we’re excited to share all of the ways that we continuously gather feedback, how it shaped FC 26 and how it will continue to shape future development.

Over the next few weeks, you’ll hear us talk a lot about features that have been inspired by your feedback, like more responsive gameplay, reduced tacklebacks and Zlatan returning to FC as one of the most requested ICONs. In this article, we’ll outline exactly how we do this, and how you can continue playing an important role in our development process.

We’ve launched the new FC Feedback Hub to capture all of the ways you can provide feedback about FC in one space.

Let’s start with some of our more direct lines of feedback.

Player Feedback Portal

The Player Feedback Portal enables you to give our devs direct feedback about the game, which enables us to make updates, changes, and decisions based on what you tell us.

Player Feedback Portal Summary

The Player Feedback Portal is the best way of sending your feedback to our dev teams in a structured format that helps us tie your feedback to in-game data.

We review all your feedback through the different methods outlined in this article, but the main benefit of the structured Portal format is that it enables us to efficiently take your feedback into account when working on the game, including everything from addressing issues to making balance changes.

The structured nature of the Portal makes it easier for us to review your feedback per game area through a recurring process that runs throughout the whole season. And when we group your Portal feedback with the other methods in this article, we’re able to understand what you’re saying at a much deeper level.    **

Don’t forget that your feedback can even influence new features and general design decisions. 

How The Portal Works For You

• You visit the Player Feedback Portal and it asks you to sign in with your EA account. This helps us take a much deeper look into your feedback and general player trends. 
• You select which part of the game you want to give feedback on.
• You answer a few short questions and write down your feedback.
• You submit your feedback and can select another part of the game to give feedback on if you’d like.

How We Use Your Portal Responses

• Our dev, community, and player facing teams meet regularly to review your Portal feedback.
• We analyze data to spot trends, correlations, and validate findings based on a mixture of your feedback and general trends.
• These insights help guide what updates we work on and how we approach them.
• Sometimes, more information is needed and you’ll see us asking you questions in-game or through Discord.
• Going forward, we’ll share more directly and clearly which changes happen to the game as a result of your feedback and this process.

A Real World Example - Failed Tackle Transitions

In FC 25, we made this change in a Title Update thanks to your Portal feedback:

• Failed tackles can now take longer to transition out of, with hard tackles being the most impacted.
  • The intent of this change is to reduce situations where failed tackles instantaneously lead to another tackle attempt.

Our teams already had tackle transitions on their radar, but more info was needed before deciding on what to do next.

You gave us thousands of responses in the Portal, many which went into great detail about the issue. This helped our teams hone in on which systems to investigate, and the data from players giving feedback was used to contextualize the findings.

Once we were confident about understanding the issue and how to approach it in a way that would improve your in-game experience, the update was prepared and released just a few weeks later.

FAQ: Where Do I Go To Give You Portal Feedback?

The Portal for FC 26 will launch alongside the game. We’ll be sharing the link to it across all our socials, the Feedback Hub, EASFC Tracker, in-game, and pretty much everywhere else we can put it.

Design Councils

For more than four years, our EA SPORTS FC Design Councils have worked directly with our development teams, sharing feedback from diverse community perspectives to influence the game across modes. 

What is a Design Council?

• Design Council members usually represent a larger community focused on certain modes or experiences in FC.
• Design Council members can cover a wide range of profiles, including:
  • Content Creators
  • EA SPORTS FC Pro Players
  • Core EA SPORTS FC Players
  • Accessibility Advocates

Their input helps guide short-term and long-term development to deliver on wider community feedback.

How Design Councils Work

• Design Councils speak directly to our development teams to discuss specific FC topics, including:
  • Gameplay
  • Live Content
  • Ultimate Team
  • Career
  • Clubs
  • Women’s Football
  • Accessibility

These feedback sessions exist in many forms, like remote video calls, in-person playtesting, and remote playtesting. 

They are usually smaller groups focused on specific topics to go into as much detail as possible.

This feedback and perspective continues to help our development teams understand what to focus on to deliver on community feedback, but it’s not the only place we’re speaking directly with our players. Let’s jump into Discord next.

Discord

EA SPORTS FC Global Discord

Since its official launch in September 2024, our aim has been to make the EA SPORTS FC Global Discord a central hub for community discussion and real-time feedback. This space is designed to foster a two-way conversation between our Community and the Studio.

How the Feedback Loop Works

• The Discord server is monitored daily by members of our EA SPORTS FC teams, ensuring that game feedback is reviewed, acknowledged, and, when relevant, shared across internal development teams.
• This isn’t a one-way street. In addition to collecting insights, we regularly engage with members directly to clarify points, ask follow-up questions, and close the loop on conversations.

How We Collect Feedback on Discord

We’ve built a structured system to capture community feedback from Discord discussions. Here are some of the ways we do that:

• #game-feedback threads: Our teams are regularly monitoring and collecting feedback in the game-feedback channel. This works in two ways.
  • EA SPORTS FC threads - When updates go live in FC, our team will start feedback threads to gather feedback about a certain topic. Anyone can jump in to join the discussion.
  • Community threads - These are threads started by our players. Our server members can start their own threads to drive new feedback discussions with other players. We’re monitoring these channels too.
• #polls: This is a quick way to understand how our players are feeling about certain things in FC.
  • For certain topics, our team may post polls to ask specific questions for any server member to answer. We use this data to take back to our teams to better understand how certain features or updates are landing with players.

If you haven’t already, join the conversation in our official EA SPORTS FC Discord and help shape the future of FC.

EA SPORTS FC Pro Discord

We also have our FC Pro Discord server which involves the highest level of players who have earned their spots at our top level events including the FC Pro Open, eChampions League, and FC Pro World Championship. 

How FC Pro Discord Feedback Works

• When a competitor qualifies for one of our live events, we invite them to join the FC Pro Discord community.
• Competitors are able to give their feedback directly on both the FC Pro ecosystem as well as the game.
• Competitors submit gameplay clips showcasing parts of the game that they feel could be improved to help identify what does and doesn’t work at the highest levels of play.
• Gameplay producers use this information both to help balance the game in a way that works for all levels of play, and to understand what mechanics are potentially misunderstood or underused. 

Social Listening

Beyond direct feedback sources, social listening tools play a major role in helping us keep up with what players are saying across the community. 

Social listening tools help us spot trends, understand player sentiment, and bring that insight back into the development process.

How Social Listening Works

• Using social listening tools, we’re able to gather and analyze FC discussions across Reddit, Discord, YouTube, X, Instagram, Facebook, and Steam.
• This gives us a way to quantify what players are feeling and talking about at scale, so we’re not just relying on isolated opinions or the loudest voices. Social listening tools help us identify key issues, validate what we might already suspect, or uncover things we might have missed.
• But data alone isn’t enough, that’s where the community team comes in. We’re continuously monitoring social channels manually, cross-referencing what we’re seeing with what our tools surface, and integrating them alongside all our other feedback pillars to get the fullest picture possible.
• This helps us bring forward the most important community topics to the teams who can take action on them. It’s a way of making sure that the conversations happening across the community are informing how the game evolves.

Whether it’s praise or criticism, social listening tools play a major role in tracking your feedback. Every bit of feedback helps us better understand what matters most to you, so please keep sharing your thoughts.

EA Forums

The EA Forums are an official, EA-moderated space where players can discuss the game, report issues, request troubleshooting support, and share feedback on the game.

How The EA Forums Work

• You’ll often see the EA Forum Moderation team posting in this space and behind the scenes we also have a dedicated team actively monitoring the forums and capturing actionable feedback shared by the community.
• We use the EA Forums as a key source to keep our Feedback Items up to date and aligned with current player sentiment, while also supporting the creation of new Feedback items based on community input.
• New examples, videos, suggestions, and discussion points are regularly sourced directly from the forums.
• In collaboration with the EA Community Moderators, we ensure the EA Forums remain a vital channel for making sure your voice is heard.

You can check out the EA SPORTS FC Forums Here.

What’s Next

Be sure to keep an eye out for more details on FC 26 across our upcoming Deep Dives.

Feedback Updates

All of these feedback sources continue to work together to paint an overall picture of community feedback for our teams. 

As part of FC Feedback, we’ll be keeping you close to the development process by providing regular updates about what we’re working on to address your feedback. 

Join our Discord to get notified when we post these updates, or keep checking in at ea.com/fcfeedback. 

You can also find a link to FC Feedback through our social channel Linktree. 

Thanks for helping us improve the future of FC together. Talk soon!

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