When the "Madden" team took a look at how fans were playing their game online, they were surprised at how few people were actually playing online franchise. "The majority of our games are head-to-head, and most of the guys playing just want to play against their friends," explains "Madden 12" designer Anthony DiMento. "Then we had leaderboards with hundreds of thousands of people on it, but that rank wasn't important if you weren't in the top 250 people. What you wanted to know was how you did against your friends so you can have the bragging rights against each other."

So that's where the producers took their cue, focusing the "Madden 12" online design efforts on ways to better implement gaming between friends.

Says DiMento: "When we launched 'Madden 11,' we took away ranked invites. When we did that, we had a bunch of guys start e-mailing us about they had a group of 30 players and they play each other every year and how they send ranked invites and use the leaderboards to track their progress against each other. Taking away the ranked invites took away the way to track their progress.

"So we put the ranked invites back in last year, but then we started thinking about what we could do better to solve these guys problems. How can we let them play how they want to play? The answer became communities. And communities really helps solve a lot of online problems, like people quitting out when you start beating them by 30 points, or the guys who want to only run one play all game long, or the group of guys who only want to play straight simulation football on All-Madden and if you ever go for it on fourth down, they think you're a joke and refuse to play against you. So with communities, all of these groups of people can now get together and play together under whatever rules they like best."

EA Sports is giving gamers the opportunity to form these communities with up to 2,000 people, with each gamer being able to be a part of up to five communities at once.

"Everyone in the community can play head-to-head against each other," explains DiMento. "Each of these games is ranked on your own online private leaderboard. We track all of your stats. We give you all the tools to communicate with each other, including message boards and the ability to invite new people to join your community. You can have private, password-protected communities, and we're hoping that word will spread virally when someone has created a great community where people are going to want to join."

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