EA SPORTS FIFA Tracker

Hello all.

My name is Joel Doonan, and I am the lead Producer for the Player First Operations team, part of the FIFA Live organization.

Before anything else, just want to say that I hope that everyone is staying safe and healthy right now. These are largely unprecedented times for all of us, and I hope that you and your family are doing ok.

Today, as part of our team’s continued efforts to grow our communication to our players, I am excited to be able to announce the launch of a new communication platform, the EA SPORTS FIFA Tracker, which you can see here.

At a high level, the EASF Tracker is intended to serve as both a primary hub for key FIFA Development Team communication as well as to provide visibility into some of the areas of focus for the FIFA Development Team.

So let’s jump into what this new platform is, why we believe this will help improve our communication with you, and how we intend to use this throughout FIFA 21.

TL/DR:

• The EA SPORTS FIFA (EASF) Tracker is a new communication platform available now.
• It will serve as a one stop information hub to get access to key FIFA Development Team updates.
• We will be providing visibility into some of the community reported issues that the team is investigating.
• We will be aiming to update it once a week, or when new information is available.
• The issues currently in the ‘Investigating’ column were identified during internal pre-release testing.

What Is The EA SPORTS FIFA (EASF) Tracker?

The EASF Tracker is a new player facing platform that will allow us to pull information from the FIFA Development team into a single location.

At its most basic level, you can think of it as a virtual bulletin board, where the FIFA Development Team can create a card whenever there is information we are looking to share with our community.

It’s available for public view and managed by members of the FIFA Development and Community Teams.

Why Launch The EASF Tracker?

Continuing to improve communication with our community is a core goal of ours. We believe that we have been making many improvements over the past few years, with things like the Pitch Notes, EA FIFA Direct social channels, and Developer Q&As.

However, we believe we have some opportunities to improve further, and that the EASF Tracker will help make that possible.

Information Hub

While we do have numerous communications coming directly from the Development Team, they can often be scattered in different places. Pitch Notes is in one spot, Title Update notes are somewhere else, an important Tweet from FIFA Direct in yet another place. While some players are able to follow and consume this information in all these different locations, it can be challenging for others.

Our goal for the EASF Tracker is to bring all this information together into a single location. While the actual post or information itself may still live on its original platform, a card would be created on the EASF Tracker that summarizes the information while providing a direct link to it.

So if you want to keep up to date on information from the Development Team, bookmark the EASF Tracker, check it regularly, and you should be set.

It will also make it much easier to direct players to this single spot from within the game, increasing our ability to get this information to a wider audience within our community to keep more people informed about how things work and what is going on in the game.

Just to note, the EASF Tracker won’t be covering things like content announcements or similar information. Following @EASPORTSFIFA on Twitter is still the best way to keep up to date on those announcements.

Issue Tracker

The EASF Tracker is going to enable us to start highlighting some of the areas of focus for FIFA 21, specifically around community reported issues. One section of the board will be dedicated to issues that the team is currently investigating. If we are able to resolve an issue, we will move it over to the released section of the board, indicating when and how it was resolved for players. There may also be situations where it’s possible for players to avoid being impacted by an issue, often referred to as a workaround, so in situations where something like that is available, we will look to provide that information within that card as well.

The aim here is two-fold. First, we want you to know, that we know, that you are reporting these issues to us. Second, we want to be able to be as transparent as possible about the efforts that we are making towards them.

It’s important to note a couple of key points about the issues section of the EASF Tracker.

First, what is listed on the board is not intended to cover everything that the team is working on.

Second, the issues that we will be adding to the board at this time are focused on clear cut issues rather than things that may be quite subjective. For example, if we have a stability issue that happens after you perform an action, it will be pretty obvious to everyone when that issue has been resolved, leaving not much room for debate. However, when dealing with something that is more subjective, such as the effectiveness of a skill move, whether a change in that area ‘fixed’ something is largely going to be based on your opinion of that skill move before the change was made. While we will, at times, still be making changes or fixes in those subjective areas, we won’t be tracking them within the issue tracker section of the board.

How Will The EASF Tracker Work?

The EASF Tracker will be managed and maintained by members of the FIFA Development and Community teams.

When a major communication to the community has taken place, a card will be created on the site shortly thereafter. This card will direct you to that communication piece.

The issue tracker section of the board will be updated generally once a week, though we may update more or less frequently depending on what new information is available to share.

We strongly believe that the EASF Tracker will be a great companion to our @EAFIFADirect channel on Twitter. EAFIFADirect will continue to post operational updates and the latest news at times, but the EASF Tracker prevents important information from getting buried in people’s timelines.

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That about does it. We are really happy to be able to bring this new communication platform to life, and we hope that the added transparency and information that it brings will be of value to our community going forward.

As always, thank you for the passion you all have for the game. We are looking forward to an exciting FIFA 21 cycle and to seeing you play the game.

Joel Doonan and the FIFA Live Dev and Community teams

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For more deep dives on FIFA from members of the game team, check out the Pitch Notes Page.

Please Note: This article is describing in general terms what the Dev Teams are working on. We are constantly looking to improve the FIFA experience for everyone, so this article may become outdated as we make adjustments to keep our game fun for everyone.

FIFA 21 is available to pre-order* now for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC.

*Conditions and restrictions apply. Click here for details.

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