Desyncs Continue to Plague H2H Games in Madden NFL 15 Online Franchise

You may remember a recent declaration from EA Sports that they had fixed a desync issue in Madden NFL 15’s Online Connected Franchise head-to-head games. Unfortunately that hasn’t turned out to be true at all. They’re still widespread and severely damaging the enjoyment and long-term potential of online leagues.

Suggestions on how to avoid a desync have ranged from making sure the two users have the same visual settings (tackle cone, kicking arc, ect) to locking into a single camera angle. Ultimately there doesn’t seem to be a common thread causing it. Maybe it happens more when the settings aren’t the same between both sides, but desnycs are happening when they are a match and sometimes don’t occur when they aren’t. I’ve played games through to completion with camera toggle on and switching back and forth between the various angles throughout, yet last night with all settings the same experienced a desync with under two minutes remaining.

Almost an hour just wasted, and while CFM has a ton of great features, the lack of an ability to assign a sim win to a specific team makes the situation even worse. That’s a devastating outcome and the type that ruin leagues and turn people away from them. Sadly it’s not an isolated incident. Many have voiced their problems in gaming forums and social media, and our Press Row Podcast league has experienced quite a few – and we’re only up to week four now.

The initial diagnosis from EA was that the desnycs were a result of having the different visual settings. They claimed it would require a patch and then surprised with the note that it had been addressed in a server-side update. The problem with that isn’t only that it’s not fixed, but if EA believes it’s only being caused by visual settings even something they deploy in an upcoming patch may not take care of it.