The biggest addition to Madden NFL 12 online is certainly the new "Communities" feature that will affect both Online Team Play and head-to-head games.
Anthony DiMento, a designer working on Madden 12, has written a blog at EA.com explaining the new feature in quite some depth.
I’ve been waiting for this day for months now, and it’s finally here, the debut of Madden NFL 12’s newest online feature: Communities. Around this time each year, the design team starts getting together, kicking around ideas and looking at priorities for what we want to add to next year’s game. We started Madden NFL 12 by looking at the core online experience and Ranked Head-to-Head, in particular. For years now, we have been hearing complaints about how hard it is to find a good matchup online. Opponents quitting games, cheesing or running the same play again and again, and gamers looking for creative ways to cheat their way up the leaderboard have really been plaguing the online space. We listened to our fans and found a very large group of gamers who only play against their friends and use our Ranked Invites and Leaderboards to track their progress against each other. We talked to our hardcore fans and found a lot of sim-football players who only want to play against guys who play sim-football and we talked to even more who just wanted to find an opponent who would finish a game. Finally, we asked ourselves, what is the correct solution to these problems? How can we let our gamers play ranked games against their friends, play the way they want to play it, and create a safe environment where you don’t have to worry about cheaters, quitters, or grievers? The answer became Communities.
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