FIFA 21's new Miami server to help improve ping in South and Central America

We are always hearing people blame their failure on anything, but themselves. “FIFA, please fix the servers.” Well, strap in and “git gud” as FIFA has launched a new FIFA Game Data Center (FGDC) to help combat lag issues, connection errors and have an overall better experience while playing online.

New FGDC in Miami, Florida

The Update Article describes that the new Data Center is “aimed at improving the experience for players in Northern South America and Central America, in addition to the Southeastern United States.”

July’s release of the Pitch Notes mentioned that Dallas' FGDC was of much more help to Mexico City than the one in the city itself, probably due to tricky internet routing in the area thus the idea of a new FGDC location benefiting a portion of both continents was born. 

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A FIFAforums user by the name of ExcusableJavier made a very detailed post proposing the idea of a Miami server in early October of this year. With a very thorough and extensive explanation and a compelling case by someone who’s not an employee, we’ll never know for certain if it was the inspiration for the server or just a mere coincidence.

(Photo: ExcusableJavier)

On top of this, EA Sports announced the inclusion of the Connection Monitoring feature, which allows players to keep an eye on the network stability a FGDC provides in real-time during a match.

"Connection Monitoring is intended to enable players to better monitor and understand their connection quality when playing a match of FIFA 21 on an FGDC. While players were previously able to view their ping during the pre-match flow, they were not able to monitor their ping throughout the match, or other potentially impactful connection quality metrics, without using secondary network monitoring tools."

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The options given to the players are:

• Ping Only - This displays your roundtrip ping value, in milliseconds, on the screen at all times during a match that is played on an FGDC. This value will update every second throughout the match.
• Connection Indicators Only - This enables a set of icons that can display during a match, being played on an FGDC, if certain connection quality thresholds are met.
• Ping and Connection Indicators (Default Option) - This will enable both of the settings detailed above.
• Off - This will disable both of the settings detailed above.

(Photo: EA Sports)

It’s good to see there are still moves being made thinking both mid and long-term for the players as we try to smoothly transition between gens. Online gaming is at an all-time high, and we’re glad to see a big company putting the work in for the players while the switch takes its time.