On August 29, the first title update for Madden 23 was released, although things haven’t quite gone to plan for EA. With a new patch hitting every platform, fans were excited to see stability come to the game after a rocky start to the year. But players of Madden Ultimate Team were perplexed to find that they couldn’t even log into the game, and account progress had been reset back to the tutorial.
Players voiced their frustration by turning to social media to try and get some answers. However, the problem became so widespread that EA was forced to shut down the mode temporarily.
Hours later, it would tweet that the issue had been fixed, and players were once again allowed into Ultimate Team. Yet when some users tried to look at objectives, they were given an error screen.
EA has again stated that it is “aware of issues” and that server maintenance will occur in the early morning of August 30. Some players are still reporting issues, and even though the latest EA support update states that issues are resolved, some people are still seeing issues.
Today’s problem is on top of a release window where rewards have been delayed and the only way to get the game to check for those rewards is to restart the game itself. It has been the most unstable release in recent times for Madden, and it seems the community is at a boiling point.
More and more, over the last two generations of consoles, we’ve seen games take to online modes of play that reward engagement. One of the key ways developers reward players is by engaging and spending time in that system, but if that system is disrupted, then those players who don’t have enough time to play are restrained. Madden Ultimate Team, in particular, is a game that expects you to be constantly playing, or at the very least frequently check on the auction house by making deals to get more coins, so that you can always be ready for the next weekly drop.
Madden isn’t having a great year thus far, and the implosion of its most popular mode isn’t helping. We’ll be sure to keep you up to date on any sort of compensation if EA decides to give it out.
