Cheating and Quitting Still Big Problems for FIFA Games, EA Says

FIFA 12, the newest installment in Electronic Arts' long running soccer simulator, is getting ready to be released soon, but EA does admit that there are still areas where improvements are needed, including the prevention of cheating or when players quit because they're losing in a match.

FIFA 12 has been eagerly awaited by a variety of sports fans from around the world, fact highlighted by the huge number of downloads experienced by the FIFA 12 demo released a couple of weeks ago.

While the game is shaping up to be the best FIFA game so far, its producer, David Rutter, admits that improvements can still be made, and there are areas, like exploiting or cheating, which can pose some serious problems, especially when people play online.

Talking with CVG, Rutter explains how these aspects affect FIFA games.

"One of the things I find most difficult to deal with is the exploiting and the cheating. People have a number of different ways to hack save games to boost their stats. It's not something that's unique to FIFA, pretty much any online team game you play has a similar problem. Would someone in a Quake match quit in a duel? Absolutely. What happens at that point? You grin and go, 'haha, I beat him so bad he quit!' Quite the opposite happens in FIFA, which is, 'why won't you punish that person for backing out?'"

Rutter goes on to explain that the game can figure out when people aren't being fair to their opponents, but it's pretty much an arms race between the developers and cheaters, who find out new ways to trick it.

"For the vast majority of situations we can spot when people are doing that and we award the points and the win. It is almost a cottage industry: trying to find in what order to switch the plug off and pull the router cable and rest your wireless action point so you can fool EA into thinking something odd is going on. It's unbelievable."

FIFA 12 is out today, September 27, in North America, and on September 30, in Europe, for the PC, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, Nintendo Wii, and other sorts of platforms.