Sigh... I've liked you up until this point but now I want to smack you.
You've reminded me that 2K is gone
Ah well... I can always hope the government starts giving a damn about monopolies that don't directly effect them I suppose...
EA honestly doesn't need to focus on either the online or offline experience. They're both VERY broken, with online being harder to fix because the lag online is, by and far, the most consistently disgraceful display of coding I've ever seen. I have NEVER had a game as consistently as laggy as Madden is. I've literally never played a game of Madden that didn't have some amount of lag to a noticeable degree.
The entire game suffers from a lack of physics (which is all they need to work on for 2012 to be honest), but what compounds that is that even the ratings-based A.I. is horrible. Given that the A.I. at any given moment ALWAYS controls more players than the player, when your A.I. is busted, essentially your entire game is broken, no matter what mode. Blessings to those of you who manage to somehow enjoy Madden's online mode. Between lag, idiots, and cheaters, if they hacked my XBox and deleted my online gameplay abilities I wouldn't even notice. And when I did figure it out, I wouldn't care in the slightest.
They havn't even fully implemented BASIC blocking logic. BASIC route running logic. Hell, even the collision detection still fails and they've tweaked that every year in recent memory. Yet here they are attempting to implement more complex motions & situations even though the game is unstable at its core. They're trying to build a skyscraper on a toothpick, and that's just not gonna work.