EA Games rant

[User2921]

Hey guys,

First off I'd like to mention how as an aspiring iOS app developer, I have noticed that EA tends to have very buggy games, frequent crashes, but no updates and virtually no visible customer support. I do notice, however, that they release new titles quite frequently and always on time for their sports franchises. Anyway, this is more or less the backstory.

For those of you that don't know, I'm in Afghanistan, deployed. I am a US citizen. Our military exchange service here is basically a big store to shop in that includes items from the USA for us to buy here...sheets, pillows, soap, and the occasional PS3... But I digress.

Anyway, I bought "Battlefield 3 Premium Edition" and the box says internet connection required to activate. That's fine, I have an internet connection: for $160/month I get 7-10kbps down, about 1/2 of that up.

So, I get the game, it costs $60, inside the case are two DVD-Roms. I bring it back and install it on my PC. It does NOT install BF3, but "Origin" - some kind of gaming front-end like steam. Then Origin has trouble connecting to the server for several days. Finally it connects and says it has to install some game data...16.5 gigs of game data. That will take at least 45 days, by my latest calculation. I reached 2% complete in 24 hours.

I emailed EA and opened a trouble ticket and said I don't want to download all that data, is there a way to install game data from the DVD-Rom. They respond to my emails telling me all kinds of goofy garbage (trust me, I'm an IT guy, what they are suggesting is goofy) and not answering the problem at all. None of them have much of a handle on English, which is fine, but it certainly makes things much worse.

They can't answer the simple #$@$#@ question. I've been going in circles with them now for days.

I recommend not supporting EA as they are obviously a company out to make a buck and nothing else - no pride in the products, it's typical conglomerate business practices. They don't deserve our money.

/rant

 

[Zetr0]

Sadly this has been the way with EA for quite some time.

The best way to make a stand against such lack-luster products or products you cannot use because of their DRM internet system is simply not to buy.

Sadly I am unsure of (if any) statutory rights that as an American citizen would have against goods or services that do not provide said good or service (within a given time) as described by the product.

Personally, I simply wont support the log-in to some server and or download an unreasonable amount of data to play -

Thus I am not on Steam's buggy interface nor EA's pathetic system either. It was only until recently that I ONLY bought hard-copies of games, I would not partake of digital downloads and subsequent DRM restrictions on my property.

However I have found some common ground with GOG.com (good old games) and have made several purchases - they are DRM free which is a big selling point for me as well as their price-point for digital downloads is about right =)

 

[User2921]

Agreed on GoG.com games I downloaded all the old Sierra games and run them in ScummVM nowadays.

 

[thecellartroll]

Sadly this seems to be the future of gaming. It seems that the new generation of consoles will all behave like that and the games industry seems to think that killing off the used games market will make them more money. Personally I think that they'll make less money. After all; a £30-45 investment in a game which turns out to be crap is far less of a risk if you know you can just trade it in or ebay it if you got your buying choice wrong.

Situations like yours also show that although online features to some games often enhance them, to force a game that you buy on a disk to be tied to a remote server anyway is stupid.

 

[Ed.D]

Origin is a Steam-like front end, I bought Crysis 2 through it. I can't understand why if you have 2 DVD's you are unable to install the game only. Does it give you the option to choose whether or not to install Origin? ...maybe insert disk 2 first or something?

Origin isn't that big, so what's on the DVD's? Can you select where Origin gets its content from? i.e.the DVD's?

 

[Sardine]

this happened to me with war hammer came on 2 dvd, installed it and it insisted to connect to my steam account, it then said it needed a few gb of updates before i could play it, so whats the point of the dvd's ?? it would not let me play offline or as is from dvd i HAD to update via steam before i could play but luckily for me i had a good 50mbps at the time.

 

[User2921]

Origin is a Steam-like front end, I bought Crysis 2 through it. I can't understand why if you have 2 DVD's you are unable to install the game only. Does it give you the option to choose whether or not to install Origin? ...maybe insert disk 2 first or something?

Origin isn't that big, so what's on the DVD's? Can you select where Origin gets its content from? i.e.the DVD's?

So on DVD 1 there is an 8,103,571kb file: Data.z01
On DVD 2 there is a similar file in size with .zip at the end
I can't open these files. When I try to use 7zip on Data.z01, it doesn't recognize it as a valid archive (maybe password protected?) and on the 2nd DVD, the .zip file gives the message "Insert DVD 1 to continue" and when I swap the DVDs nothing happens.

There is really no other data aside from those two files.

The last email I got from EA was to copy all the contents of DVD 1 onto a folder on the desktop and run the install from there. It has fixed absolutely nothing but it is holding a nice chunk of real estate on my desktop :doubleoh:

 

[r0jaws]

I sympathise with your problem. I took a big pile of games with me to Afghan last year, but spent ages before hand making sure they were installed and had all the necessary updates before going into theatre.
It was a pain the arris, but I knew that I would get little or no connection out there.
It's not on to buy a game with 2 DVDs and to not be able to play the game though. 16GB of updates is ridiculous, I wonder how they can justify that on a new sale.

 

[bazzaq]

some solutions on here > http://www.abc.net.au/technology/articles/2011/10/28/3350832.htm

 

[commodorejohn]

This kind of thing is why I don't own any current-gen consoles and don't buy triple-A titles anymore. They just keep piling more and more abuse on the customer in exchange for more and more mediocre, risk-averse, tepid crap, and expect people to continue forking over the money as if this kind of thing is somehow reasonable...there's too much good stuff in the back catalogs of older systems and on the Internet for me to waste time and money on that crap.

 

[User2921]

I would love to try those workarounds. In fact, it would be great if this useless tech support could suggest such a thing. They gave me a new code to use for CD installation and disabled the code that came with the game when I bought it, but...get this...they don't know how to install from the dvd! They told me to copy all the files from the dvd to my desktop and run the setup again. lolololol :double

Like I said, thanks for the help with the workarounds, I'd love to try them, but every time I launch Origin it says that the server is overloaded and I can't get on it. It's been this way for >36 hours. FAIL FAIL FAIL.

 

[bazzaq]

Doesn't one of the workaround say to switch to offline mode in origin.. and another says to uninstall origin and sun setup.exe from the dvd.. There are a few to try.

 

[User2921]

Yeah, but you have to switch to offline mode once it starts installing the download version, because of DRM. You can't install it without giving your product code and having Origin respond to the installer that it is valid.

---------- Post added at 12:55 ---------- Previous post was at 12:54 ----------

I just want to mention that I never condone software piracy but it's simply easier to install games illegally. The reason the music industry didn't crash and burn is because iTunes made it easier to get music legitimately. This does the opposite.

 

[r0jaws]

It's a fair point, and one that the distributors would do well to listen too. I know that it has been brought up many times, but this sort of thing really harms any credibility they have. I have no problem with them attempting to ensure the legitimacy of a purchase so that users can play their game, but to actually obstruct legitimate purchases in order to do so is unacceptable.

 

[bazzaq]

I have never used origin.. don't want to.. But i use steam and have done for years.. no problems..

 

[r0jaws]

Same here, I have used Steam for the last couple of years smoothly and without incident.
Occasionally they have some good deals which are handy to have and personally I don't mind using their service, especially as I have seamlessly transferred my account, games, saves and scores from a couple of systems with no problems.
I know this is not the case with everyone, and also that it has not always been this way in the past, but it seems to work for me.

 

[AmiNeo]

Cant stand EA. I've avoided buying Mass Effect 3 on PC because of the inconvenience I've had to go through every time I install ME2.

I've also given up on a few older games I own that are EA like Battlefield 2142 because of the pain in the rear end accounts they insist on maintaining which I just cant be bothered with or can afford to spend time sorting out every time I decide to go back to the game. icard

Even my PS3 I decided to sell after GT5 took 5 hours to update on a 6Mbps connection when I wanted to get online and have a game with some of the guys on here. I started the update 2 hours before. For any sane level of updates this would have been plenty of time.


If things keep heading this way, I'm going to give up on mainstream gaming altogether soon. Sega would have never done this to us... Ninty don't...

 

[Harrison]

It definitely is mad to buy a physical copy of a game, only to find the installer wants to download the lot from the server instead.

One point I need to raise though is that Battlefield 3 is mostly an online multiplayer game, also including a single player campaign that was a bit of an after thought and doesn't play like the rest of the game. To actually play the game online your connection speed would not realistically support it and your have such bad lag it would be unplayable.

I hate Origin as much as everyone else, but sadly if you want to play a new game from EA on the PC you have to use it. Luckily older games like BF:Bad Company 2 do not use Origin and do have a standalone installer (although when it actually loads the game it tests for updates and still refuses to run until they have downloaded).

I also hate what EA have been doing with the second-hand gaming market and would love to know if it is legal. If you buy a second-hand game from the Xbox you can't go online with it unless you pay EA an "online" fee to upgrade your game so you can access its online functionality. A complete ripoff. The 360 version of Mass Effect 3 demanded this from me in order to install updates or access DLC. Not on.

Regarding console games in general. It is definitely also amusing that many games refuse to work when the system finds an update. Why can't I just select play the existing game offline and not update it? Regarding GT5. If you play it often the updates are small each time and are hardly noticed. It is only if you haven't played it for a very long time, or are just coming to the game for the first time that you are hit with all of the updates at once, which can be very frustrating.

In reality it is the phone companies not delivering fibre broadband connections to our homes that is the issue for most people. The games developers want to go digital, but we are all left stuck on 6Mbit connections having to wait between 30 mins and a few hours for a game to update before it can be played.

 

[AmiNeo]

And as a footnote to that. Many parts of the world where there are plenty of gamers are still on dial up or have similar extremely poor connection technologies in comparison to even standard ADSL here in the UK.

There shouldnt be that many necessary changes on a finalised published game. Especially something like GT5 that only needs online for multiplayer. Anything that big should be released as an optional expansion.

It's way too early to be pushing these changes, sort your out before we stop buying altogether, publishers! icard

 

[Harrison]

The changes can be quite different from an original game, or in the case of GT5 extra tracks, cars, colours, music etc.. playing a game like this constantly and being drip fed updated content is really cool. Like I said before, it's only when someone hasn't played a game for some time that large downloads and issues arise.