Online Communities is "The Hub" of Madden's online world, or at least that's what EA hopes it becomes moving forward. EA wants Communities to be the first thing you check once you sign online, and they want it to be the place where everyone comes together to start most of your games. In an ideal world, you will head online in Madden and have multiple things you want to check out. First and foremost, you might want to see if other members of your Online Community are online to play against. However, sometimes you won't really have time for a game and will instead just see where you rank in certain stats or will want to see if a certain member won or lost his or her most recent game. You might even hop on real quick just to check on the ongoing OTP games to see how various members are doing on the gridiron.

The developers also want this desire to check your Online Communities to go beyond the game. At this point, EA is somewhere around 90 percent sure an Online Communities Web app will be available at launch so folks can check recent games, leaderboards and all that good stuff right from their computer. There will also be an option to stream updates from your Online Communities to your in-game ticker so you're never completely away from the experience.

In the game, the draw beyond having two to 2,000 gamers in each Online Community to scope out are the stats, leaderboards, lobbies and customizable game options to help ease folks into the experience they want to have. Anything you can do offline in terms of customization you should be able to do for head-to-head games in an Online Community. In addition, invites to Online Community games work just like invites to unranked games from the past -- this is a necessary step to keep the process streamlined and make the invites easy enough to accept that you can do it on a whim. What that means is that you can be in your Online Community hub and send an invite to a member of your OC who is playing another video game. At that point, the person can accept that invite, pop Madden in the disc tray and join that game.

Leaderboards

The leaderboards system that goes along with Online Communities is split between Online Team Play (OTP) and head-to-head games. Each leaderboard functions a bit differently so I want to make sure people understand how each one works.

The head-to-head leaderboards are really easy to understand. Within the head-to-head leaderboard, each Online Community member is simply ranked against every other member of that specific Online Community. Your entire Online Community is not ranked against all the other Online Communities out there when it comes to head-to-head games -- you are in your own version of an Online Community Bio-Dome. The bragging rights here are simply earned by trying to be the best member of your own Online Community.

How the head-to-head rankings will break down is based on the classic ELO rating system. This system is not new for Madden, and it's a system that is used by the likes of Call of Duty, Halo and Starcraft. I won't really try to explain the ELO system other than to say it will try to match you up based on your "skill number" if you just try to do a random game inside or outside an Online Community. If you challenge someone who has a much higher "skill number" than you, and you win, your "skill number" will shoot up. If you simply want to pick on folks with a low "skill number" to go for easy wins, your own number will not go up very quickly. For this year, the ELO system was just tweaked so it only judges you based on Skill Points rather than your individual Skill Level. The level that you see next to your name (starts at one and goes up from there like always) is now more like your badge of honor that will signify how many games you've played.

Now, the OTP leaderboards break down into two separate leaderboards. Since OTP games are one Online Community vs. another -- unlike head-to-head games, which are all within your own tight-knit group -- there is an Online Community leaderboard where your OC is ranked against every other OC out there, as well as a Squad Stats leaderboard that ranks you on a more individual level.

If you want your Community to climb the online rankings, EA has told me it would be better to probably focus on amassing 50 or so really good OTP members rather than simply trying to overwhelm everyone by having 2,000 members just playing a ton of games against all the other Communities out there.

The Squad Stats leaderboard is all about how you play. You will be ranked individually on this leaderboard based on your wins and losses per squad and per position. So you can be 0-25 as a running back and have one ranking, but be 27-1 as a quarterback and have another spot on the leaderboard.

You can't play ranked OTP games against your own Online Community -- or challenge other specific Online Communities to ranked games. This was a decision made by EA so guys would not set up "shell communities" so to speak to get easy wins. The developers also wanted to avoid situations where someone in an Online Community shoots up the Squad Stats leaderboard by going 100-0 at one position by only playing members of one OC. However, one other shortcoming is that you can't even send an unranked invite to another Online Community to play an OTP game. So in order to play specific people, you will have to set up a game outside the Online Community and basically do what you did in Madden 11 to organize OTP games.

One other caveat is that custom sliders/game options do not exist in OTP games. In head-to-head games, you can treat it essentially like a single-player game against the CPU where you can change quarter length, game speed, game sliders and all that. But EA will be setting all of those options for the OTP ranked games.

Game Enjoyment

Football is a tricky sport when it comes to online games. The ranked games are relatively long when compared to most other sports games -- baseball gives it a run for its money -- and so the extended length of time does result in lots of quitting, grieving and a whole host of other things. When you're playing within your own cushy OC, the idea is that there is a certain level of respect and removal of a layer of anonymity, which should cause people to act more like humans; everyone should know by now that the anonymous nature of most online experiences causes people to act in ways they wouldn't normally act if there were certain checks and balances in place (see: you getting punched in the face for acting like a douche).

Looking beyond the Communities themselves, certain things have been changed under the hood this year. Last year if you quit in the first half of a ranked game, it never seemed like a result would register for games. This gave every person who was getting crushed a chance to quit without punishment. The game also never communicated a specific reason why the game ended.

This year if you quit at any time (outside of the "friendly quit" option), you will lose Skill Points, and the other player will gain Skill Points and the win. There is also a deeper and more-detailed system in place to explain why a game ended early this year. So if someone pulls the plug this year, the game will tell you the other player disconnected. If someone quits early, the game will tell you the player quit early. If a player just drops the controller and stops playing for an extended period, the game will kick him for "grieving" and award you with the win.

The grieving is especially important for OTP games. If you encroach three times in a row, or five times in a game, you are immediately booted from the game. Again, you can also be kicked for simply walking away from the game to go eat a sandwich. Finally, OTP games will continue until no one is left on the other squad -- much like last year. But if the entire squad leaves, the squad who stuck around gets Skill Points and the win. This tweaked system tied in with the removal of player boosts should help to make OTP games more enjoyable in Madden 12.

Final Thoughts

I realize the online features in Madden 12 are the most controversial aspect to the game this year. It's clear what the hardest of hardcore want, and it's not necessarily Online Communities. Folks can choose to lambast what was done or not done -- I encourage you all to let your voices be heard regardless of how you feel like always -- but the idea for Online Communities seems worthwhile. In a way, these Online Communities really make me think of certain ways you can build your empire in a game like Civilization. The Communities seem to be there to almost split off the entirety of the Madden online world, yet at the same time make it a tighter knit bunch that continues to grow larger via small city states rather than one mega "East Lobby" empire.