Better Madden 08 online performance being seen
by 
While Madden 08 came out of the gates this week with widespread reports of lag and disconnect issues online, the team at EA has been working to improve the experience. It seems that those efforts have paid off.
For myself, the streak of 16 straight disconnects that began on Tuesday was broken on Thursday afternoon. Despite having played online without witnessing a single disconnect prior to release day, I was unable to get past the first play on the second drive of any game on Tuesday and Wednesday. In most cases it was disconnecting at kickoff. However something must've changed on Thursday to address that issue because I have since played three straight games to completion.
In addition, the accounts of lag-inflicted games seems to have dissipated significantly. Not only did my games play very smooth, but the loading times into the team select screen and into the games are noticeably quicker.
From monitoring various message boards it is apparent that many others are seeing the improvements. While there are still comments being made about lag and/or disconnects, they certainly aren't as dominant a part of the discussion as they were previously.
We'll see how the situation continues to develop. Hopefully EA keeps monitoring the situation and takes action to improve the online performance for those on the 360 and PS3 at every possible opportunity.
Previous Madden 08 online reports:
August 17, 2007 at 7:26 am
I have seen a 1000% improvement in the online performance since last weekend. Prior to the game’s official launch date and even through early Wednesday this week, the servers were horrid….slow lobbies, dropped games, slide-show quality connections to players in California and other areas. But last night, following the first roster update and some behind the scenes work at EA, my experience on the 360 was night and day different from any of that.
The 4 games I played were all as smooth as offline play – actually ran the best I have seen in terms of zero noticeable lag. No games dropped and the whole experience was quite good. I don’t know what was done to change this, but I certainly hope the engineers and tech people at EA were taking notes and passing them around the company…
August 18, 2007 at 9:36 am
as of aug 17 the servers r steadily kicking people off.I was wondering if u knew what was going on.
August 18, 2007 at 11:53 am
If you can post up exactly what you’re seeing I can pass it along. The more specific the better.
August 19, 2007 at 6:52 am
I played 2 games…got disconnected 2x’s …sucks…will not play online for a couple of hrs….they need to allow individual xbox’s to act as servers instead of trying to apply a server…too much traffic will boot people…simple as that
August 19, 2007 at 3:38 pm
Thx Pasta, the wierd thing is me and my buddy played 5 unraked games and got diconnected(Right around Kick of)…then we played 3 ranked games and got to play all the way through..then just to make sure we were not tripin’ we played another unranked game and got booted….The only explanation (I Can Think Of) is that they are opporating on two seperate servers?
August 19, 2007 at 10:34 pm
thats curious…when I was having D/C problems we tried doing everything. Ranked, unranked, for trophy, not for trophy, custom teams, normal teams, ect. Nothing worked. So its interesting to hear you can play in one way but not the other.
On Sunday I got disconnected in several consecutive games very early on. One time it froze at a black transition screen before kickoff. The rest of the time it came up with dirty disc message a few plays in. This despite trying two different discs, and then going on to play NCAA online. Not a disc problem or a 360 problem.
A lot of people reporting problems still. So clearly not everything is fixed.