After much deliberation, hours of watching games and doing our own research we have reached an uncontested decision on how to handle the competitive imbalance created by the ability to have maximum stats at the tallest of heights. We have decided that going forward, our rule, effective immediately and permanently, but to be evaluated going into FIFA 18. Will be to allow NO field players above the height of 6'1. We believe that enforcing this rule will indeed increase the skill gap in the league as we have seen close tremendously due to the imbalance but rather consequentially increase the quality of play we see played in our league. With the new height maximum, those who wish to play tall, will still have the advantages they have found in previous years and in this FIFA while also allowing for counter strategy to this besides playing at a very tallheight as well. Enforcement of this rule will be very simple and straight forward. The punishments for this rule will be very similar to those you will see us announce for other violations but may vary slightly. While many may say we shouldn't take away from an aspect that the game has given us. We see you to be wrong. The game was created to keep in mind the millions of buyers (the 100%) not the minuscule amount that attempts or desires to play the game at a very high/competitive level (the 1%). When we are creating a competitive scene, there are things that must be kept in mind to allow the game to be played at a highly competitive level but also be sought after in terms of viewership. We believe our new rule will help bring these two important aspects together at a very high level. For those of you who don't have much knowledge of competitive eSports besides FIFA/sports related ones, there are many precedents from these games that we used to help base our solution to the problem. The best and easiest one in my mind is that of the 2016 Smite World Championship. For the console version of SWC, a god named "Sol" had been removed from competitive play due to her passive ability proc-ing incorrectly and thus allowing a competitive imbalance if you were able to pick her in the draft. However, while she was removed from SWC play, she was not removed from Console casuals nor Ranked gameplay due to this problem. We see these issues to be rather similar. The difference being that HiRez sought out to fix the problem whereas, we have seen time and time again. EA will not fix the problem.
