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First Person Shooters (Games)

EA's Advice is to Uninstall Battlefield 2 124

Posted by Zonk from the best-launch-evar dept.
Grym writes "The recently released Battlefield 2 was met with various levels of acclaim by reviewers. Besides the insane hardware requirements, the chief complaint was the amount of bugs in the game. Hoping to address the situation quickly, EA hastily released a patch to address the concerns cited in reviews. Big mistake. The patch turned out to be littered with bugs. One of the biggest was a huge memory leak. Another actually turned teammates' names red--just like enemies. The game became unplayable because of the patch. Tycho at Penny-Arcade discussed the issue in his latest news update. EA has owned up to the buggy patch and has said that there will be a hotfix released soon. In the meantime, gamers have been offically told to uninstall Battlefield 2 and play without the patch; advice that many fans are not happy to hear. Meanwhile, some sites are still offering the 1.01 patch for download on their front pages, only adding to the confusion. When are game companies going to learn? Quality assurance and play-testing should not be an afterthought!"
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EA's Advice is to Uninstall Battlefield 2 More

EA's Advice is to Uninstall Battlefield 2

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  • Good (Score:5, Funny)

    by yotto ( 590067 ) on Monday July 11, 2005 @12:20PM (#13034329) Homepage
    I hope EA gets totally burned by this and the games industry learns a lesson about sacrificing quality to hit a release date.

    I also hope that they make a better tasting pie that isn't fattening.

    • Re:Good (Score:3, Informative)

      by chromaphobic ( 764362 )
      I'd hoped Tomb Raider: Angel Of Darkness would have taught them that already. That piece of crap pretty much killed an entire franchise (the crappy movie they rushed the game out to tie in with certainly didn't help either) but it seems little, if anyhing at all, was learned from that experience.

      Bean counters will be bean counters, regardless.

    • Re:Good (Score:2, Informative)

      by kniLnamiJ-neB ( 754894 )
      Right on. Especially about the pie ;)

      My problem with EA is that they're so concerned with piracy that they're not actually trying to court the gamers who pay their bills. Novalogic's Delta Force: Black Hawk Down has (on their standard installation) a LAN-only version of their executable that you can play without a CD in your drive if you're at a party and want to join the fun. Try that with Battlefield 1942.
    • Since when do big media companies learn from their mistakes?

    • Re:Good (Score:2, Insightful)

      by apoc06 ( 853263 )
      i remember hearing something along the lines of EA hiring the guys who did the desert mod for the original battlefield to create BF2. when initial development for BF2 was over and done, they fired the development team.

      so, of course who was still around to patch the game? some new people i guess, and this is what you get out of it.

      im looking for the exact article i saw on it. i dont recall all of the exact details, but if im right... one word. karma!
    • Not to be a troll or anything, but Bungie tried this, and it didn't work as expected. >_>

      • Holding off the release "until it's done" didn't work out so well for Valve either. Half-Life 2 had tons of bugs when it was released, after numerous delays and years of development. So, it's a slippery slope.

        I'd rather have a game delayed or simply take forever to develop and have the bugs ironed out than rushed out to meet some deadline filled with bugs, but it doesn't always work out either way.

    • Re:Good (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Phisbut ( 761268 )
      I hope EA gets totally burned by this and the games industry learns a lesson about sacrificing quality to hit a release date.

      Maybe some people did already learn that lesson. I mean... Duke Nukem Forever... they totally sacrificed the release date, hopefully to get the quality... Now, just imagine the amount of quality you'll get ;-)

  • I've been on the fence in regards to whether or not I was going to get Battlefield 2. I think I'll skip this one, I'm not interested in the game enough to put up with this kind of crap to play it. Next.
    • Of course gamers first bitch about how patches are never released in a timely fashion. Then one company who actually does a great job getting patches out there releases one bad patch and gets reemed for it. The game is a great one, the company offers better than most support. I don't think a bad patch is a reason to avoid this game or EA in general.

      The great thing about this all is people will go through great lengths to get a buggy pre-release game pirated off of bittorrent or from a friend and never

      • Of course gamers first bitch about how patches are never released in a timely fashion

        Sorry, but that's not what I hear gamers saying, and it's definately not what the submitted said. What I hear gamers bitch about are games that are rushed out and *NEED* to be patched quickly because they are so damn buggy. In this case, they took a game that had been rushed out and needed a patch, then rushed out a patch. They took the game from "buggy but playable" to "nearly unplayable".

        Frankly, people like you
        • being a big blizzard fan myself I was disappointed with their W3 release as by the time it came out the gameplay and graphics were so outdated the game itself was not that interesting. Whereas had it been released on time with one or two bugs it would have been a great game in its time. I have played BF2 since its release and have thouroughly enjoyed playing it despite the bugs it contained, personally didnt even feel them as playing on a public game server is pretty much a waste of time with the smackta
          • >being a big blizzard fan myself I was
            >disappointed with their W3 release as by the
            >time it came out the gameplay and graphics were
            >so outdated the game itself was not that
            >interesting. Whereas had it been released on
            >time with one or two bugs it would have been a
            >great game in its time.

            Yes, the game was delayed so long that both gameplay and graphics got outdated, and the only thing they fixed in that time was "one or two bugs"....
        • also, you dont have to play a game as soon as it hits the shelves, you just have the option to. Many server admins have been following this practice for years. wait until the general public works all the kinks out then you can buy the software after being thrououghly tested by the public. In the meantime while you are waiting to play the game patiently, the die hards out there can spend their $50 to be a glorified beta tester and get their fix.

      • Of course gamers first bitch about how patches are never released in a timely fashion. Then one company who actually does a great job getting patches out there releases one bad patch and gets reemed for it. The game is a great one, the company offers better than most support. I don't think a bad patch is a reason to avoid this game or EA in general.

        First off, I wasn't "reeming" them for releasing a bad patch. How you got that impression from my post is beyond me. Second, what good is it to get a patch o

      • Guess you never played BF2 then.

        The game was unplayable. Not just bugs...you couldn't PLAY THE GODDAMN THING!

        The issue was lag. Lag in what way I don't know. No one seems to know exactly what it was. It wasn't ping times...peoples ping times were like 15 and 25ish. (which lead some people to speculate that the numbers under the "ping" column are just random numbers that mean nothing). But you talk to 10 different players and you get 10 different answers. From "no lag here" to "it's the server, it can't ha

  • what's with the misleading headlines? (Score:4, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 11, 2005 @12:22PM (#13034357)
    from eagames.com [eagames.com]:

    we recommend that you reinstall the game and NOT the v1.01 update we released earlier this week.

    Reinstalling Battlefield 2 will not affect your in-game medals or ranked server statistics. EA and DICE are committed to getting a fix for v1.01 as soon as we possibly can and will continue to keep you informed through this web space in the coming days.

    Uninstalling and reinstalling are NOT the same thing. Why must Slasshdot editors re-word the headlines and make them misleading?

    • Re:what's with the misleading headlines? (Score:4, Informative)

      by Vermifax ( 3687 ) on Monday July 11, 2005 @01:01PM (#13034769)
      Except of course the only way to get the setup.exe to install is if it doesn't detect bf2 already on your computer. If it detects it it only gives you the option to modify or uninstalling. Modify doesn't 'reinstall' it just lets you remove the optional stuff or add it if you didn't have it before.

      So suggesting a 'reinstall' is exactly the same for BF2 as uninstalling and installing anew.
  • EA is not saying to install the game. They're saying "play without the patch". Way to go /. editors...

    As far as BF2 goes, I guess I'll wait to get this one. I was really looking forward to it, too, 'cause if done right, this game would rock.

  • When? (Score:1, Funny)

    by PreviouslySeen ( 714752 )


    "When are game companies going to learn? Quality assurance and play-testing should not be an afterthought!"

    They blew that budget on executive bonuses, sorry.

    • Re:When? (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I realize you're (sort of) kidding, but it's normally lack of time and not money that cause proper testing to fall by the wayside. Everyone (designers, management, users) wants to stuff in all the cool, whizbang features, but they all scream bloody murder if you try to slip the release date to allow for proper testing.

      I battle against this on a daily basis as a QA engineer. At some point, all you can do is explain the risks of untested or poorly tested features, and if the Powers That Be say "We can li

      • Yeah, I was being facetious-- a bit of a reference to the "infamous" EA management style

        I know exactly where you are coming from---more than I care to think.

        However, I had forgotten that if you have anything to say on slashdot you risk the wrath of humorless and/or ignorant moderators who would rather mod down than take issue with what you say.
      • We can live with that

        I wonder if they'd take a different stance if some government group outlawed "we are not responsible" EULAs.
  • ...on the QAF (Quality Assurance Failure) Document I use to note myself such games. See sig for other examples.
  • I am still playing w/ the patch and have had no trouble, there are still servers up, including ranked. The game itself plays fine, and plays perfect on my old generation video card on medium settings at 1024x768 w/ the draw distance at 100. Runs fine, excellent game, lightyears beyond 1942 and Vietnam. The commander and squad system w/ the built in VOIP sounds great and makes the game excellent for being able to coordinate and such. Great game, once all the bugs it will be 100% perfect.
    • I agree - although I did just pick up an x800 xt, so im hankering for some fancy schmancy graphics. my problem is that i cant get the voip to work using my plantronics usb headset. :( The short end - your mileage may vary on this one - I've seen no issues with the patched version.
    • I haven't noticed any problems either. In fact it used to crash with the old version and it never does now. I am not downgrading. I'll wait for the next patch.
  • Even though its just a reinstall and it wont wipe out your data its still a pain the ass.

    It takes forever to reinstall all 3 discs of this game.

  • Learn? Never! (Score:3, Insightful)

    by melikamp ( 631205 ) on Monday July 11, 2005 @12:45PM (#13034593) Homepage Journal

    When are game companies going to learn? Quality assurance and play-testing should not be an afterthought!

    In all probability, not on our life. Because what keeps it sane in other industries are the laws allowing us, consumers, to return a broken products for a full refund. I don't see that happening to sofrware any time soon.

    • As much as I don't like EA in general and battlefield in particular, people whine A LOT when patches are released too late because of q&a.
      Now they whine because they are released too early and didnt get through the whole q&a process, which would have meant that people would have played with the shitty ingame browser for another 2 months until the patch goes out to whine because the patch is late and they now want -insert gameplay/bugfix/feature-.
      And to think that people drop some cash in order to go
  • The "feature" that made your teammates appear to be enemies by appearing as red was actually a bug in the 1.00 and was NOT introduced in the patch. Don't get me wrong though, I'm still mad at EA for releasing a bad patch without enough testing. And, to top it all off, DICE is on vacation after releasing BF2...just messing this whole situation up even more
  • I feel no remorse for EA and their stupidity. And I must smile at this, after they overtook Westwood and bastardized the Command and Conquer Universe. While playablity increased, plot is lacking. It seems with Battle Field 2, EA is getting rid of playability as well.
    • Sorry but what? Have you even played the game? Not only does it play nicely, there are clearly more terrain types than just "desert". Or have you only played the demo?
    • Generals (and the Zero Hour expansion) are probably some of the most fun RTS games that you can play. They've finally taken the C&C platform, updated it to 3D, and placed native (i.e. user) support for TCP/IP.

      My complaint? We can't (3 people) get through any match without a Multiplayer Mismatch. In addition, even if the game does get out of lockstep, they don't provide a way to get back into lockstep once this happens, so you're screwed and have to start a new game.

      They should have taken a page fro
  • Looks like some EA employees won't be seeing sunlight for a few more weeks, time to start another "crunch time" and add in a few more fatigue induced bugs.

  • ...but all software. PHBs have no clue how long it takes to make software correctly. If the screen shots look good, then the product is finished, right Pareto?

    They look at the "testing" tasks in the project plan with dismay at the amount of time allocated. Figuring a simple solution to a complex problem is the best approach, they say, "just make the developers test it," which is a colossal mistake [joelonsoftware.com] that---in a just world---would get a PHB fired, but in the real one, they take it out.

  • Primary Complaint: Not The Game... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Chi Hsuan Men ( 767453 ) on Monday July 11, 2005 @12:59PM (#13034750) Homepage
    ...but getting to the game.

    I've played BF:2 enough to achieve rank of Lance Corporal and on my way to promotion, I have experienced a few minor glitches (weird flag capture behavior, bizarre clipping, etc.); however, nothing that has detracted from my enjoyment of the game while playing.

    IMHO, I think BF:2 has improved upon the forumla of its predecessors (including Desert Combat). Class balance issues have been addressed, the squad system is absolutely fantastic, and the "Commander" concept works well (if players know how to do it right).

    So, the gameplay is solid, not revolutionary mind you, but solid; however, getting into a game is a completely different issue.

    I cannot believe I have to use the atrocious in-game browser to find a game. Honestly, it's a terrible browser and it fails on every level to deliver basic, reliable functionality. Servers register a "0" latency occasionally, so I don't know if I can connect to that server or not. In addition, I attempted to use ASE (all-seeing eye) but BF:2 doesn't seem to want to play nice with it.

    Since I don't use x-fire, it makes finding a game with my friends very difficult, which, is a terrible shame, because with the squad system, a co-ordinated group of players can do very well.

    A thought off the top of my head is to have a feature where players can form squads out of game using the browser and then having the squad leader choose a server for the squad and everyone automatically connects to the chosen server. That sort of functionality would be innovative and very helpful to groups of players who want to play together.

    • "Class balance issues have been addressed"

      I would agree with everything you said except that part.

      For the most part, it's not too bad. But the one class that is GREATLY overpowered is the medic class. Medics are widely considered the "point-whores" of the game, because you now not only get points for healing your team, but you can also revive them with shock paddles. Some people may say this doesn't sound too bad, but if you're in a squad with other people, you can quickly rack up the points by heali
      • Yes but that's only scoring, not gameplay. Never mind that in my experience medics are still a rare sight so anything that makes more people choose medics instead of SF is okay by me. After all, medics are a vital part of the team since they allow you to hold a position longer and reduce your team's ticket consumption.

        I agree that SF deserves quite a few points for taking out enemy support equipment, even with half the team SF none of them ever bothered to take out the enemy artillery in some matches. Had
    • I echo everything already said; the gameplay is pretty solid with the ocassional weird thing happening (crash to desktop, sync issues, etc.). My setup is good, not great, and I have had relatively few problems. The bigger issue, IMHO, is the interface to find and enter a game on a server. Poorly done. It is as though DICE did not learn anything from the BF1942 interface. XFire is a short-term fix to find your friends online, but the fact that the whole game concept pushes people toward cooperative play in
    • Given the premise that Auto Team Balance is a good thing, I do not see how 4+ people could ever join a server together and all get on the same team.
      • Normally I'd agree with you, but it really wreacs havoc with the squad system. I mean, for obvious reasons I'd like to play together with my two friends in a single squad. With all the troubles with finding a server and joining it, we've never managed to get the three of us on the same team on a ranked server.
    • FWIW, the 1.01 patch addresses a lot of the problems with the server browser. Unfortunately it introduces a bunch of new bugs, but finding and joining servers is (slightly) better. Not that it matters much though - 1.01 is fully supported by ASE. Yay for ASE.

  • Late adopter (Score:2, Insightful)

    by faloi ( 738831 )
    Things like this have led me to be a "late adopter" of new games. Sure, I miss out on getting to brag about having the game the day it's released, but I usually pay less for the game. And I tend not to get hit with the odd patch or two that causes your drive to get formatted if you uninstall it, or causes the game to be near unplayable.
    • I'm completely with you there, as far as single-player games go. With multiplayer, it's different - you need people to play against, and you need them to be at your skill level. So if you wait till the game you want hits the bargain bin there won't be many people online, and they'll all know every trick of the game - unless you like losing all the time you won't have fun.
  • Well, with a poor intro, they will fall from favor and sooner than later I'll be able to pick this game up on the cheap.

    After they have resolved the hundreds of bugs, of course. :)
  • In the meantime, gamers have been offically told to uninstall Battlefield 2 and play without the patch

    How would they play the game after the uninstall it? Oh, this sentence (and the title) is wrong. Their official statement says to REINSTALL Battlefield 2, and not to install the patch until they release a new one.
    • *Sigh*... People can be so nitpicky. As if you wouldn't understand what they mean.
      But hey, this is Slashdot. You have to look smarter!
      • Ummm, this is not a nitpick, there is a huge difference in meaning.

        The title of the article implies that you need to UNINSTALL the game. As if it is so fucked up you shouldn't have it on your system.

        This is absolutely not the case. How is that a nitpick?

        • Unless you stop reading before the end of the sentence you quoted, it then says to play without the patch. So you should suppose that you need to reinstall it.
          But then, I just realized that you probably had the news title in mind even though you quoted something else. What I said was based on what you quoted. I understand that for someone how only reads the title, it is absolutly misleading.

  • No, no, no, no... (Score:5, Informative)

    by Zathrus ( 232140 ) on Monday July 11, 2005 @01:27PM (#13035054) Homepage
    Sigh. Grym got it wrong on several levels -- as others have pointed out, the official advice from EA is to reinstall -- which does involve uninstalling and installing again. I agree, this is silly -- EA should've come out with a de-patcher.

    But that's hardly the only thing wrong with this story.

    Another actually turned teammates' names red--just like enemies.

    This bug exists in the 1.0 release and is not due to the patch. I've seen it myself prior to the patch being released. It appears to be random and isn't persistant -- once you die (or the teammate dies) their name may be back to normal.

    The game became unplayable because of the patch.

    And yet it plays just fine on my PC (Ath64 3000, 1 GB, GF6800 GT). I slightly prefer the 1.01 patch to 1.0 because the server browser is slightly better. The other issues it alleged to resolve were never problems for me, and the memory leak hasn't been a huge issue either (close the game and the client side leak is gone; the servers still suffer, but I haven't had severe problems except for the first day of the patch).

    Tycho at Penny-Arcade discussed the issue in his latest news update.

    Actually last Friday's news update, no longer the latest one. And most of what he wrote he got wrong too. Excepting the memory leak every issue he listed was in the 1.0 release -- medic revive issues (which are mostly user error and/or a misunderstanding of how things work), the server browser problems (were much, much worse for me in 1.0 than 1.01), etc.

    Hopefully this won't get /.'d, but BattleWiki [shackbattles.com] has a lot of good info, not only on how to play but also on known bugs.

    Meanwhile, some sites are still offering the 1.01 patch for download on their front pages, only adding to the confusion.

    Which isn't really EA/Dice's fault, but those sites.

    When are game companies going to learn? Quality assurance and play-testing should not be an afterthought!

    Agreed here, but come on. What did you expect? BF1942 and BF:V were buggy as hell when they were released too. The demo was buggy (although perhaps less buggy with respect to netcode at least) too. That the release was going to be buggy was hardly a surprise to anyone who'd been following the game.

    • I apologize. I realized after submitting that I needed to put "reboot" and "reinstall" after the uninstall part. As far as the headline--you don't really think Slashdot is above just a little sensationalism, do you?

      Regardless, this is unprecedented, in my opinion. I've never seen a game company force every single user to reinstall a game. It's something that the /. community needed to hear about.

      -Grym

      • I believe Tribes2 had a similar history of bad patches, rollbacks, and so forth. Certainly it's a Bad Thing though.

        I suspect I'll end up having to reinstall once the new patch comes out, but as long as there are still ranked servers running 1.01 then I will be as well. The server browser simply isn't quite as flaky as the 1.0 one is, and I just haven't had any real problems playing on 1.01 servers (no more than on the 1.0 ones IMO).

        As of last night there were still >400 ranked servers that met my filte
        • As much as I love Tribes 2, it was not a AAA title in the same category like EA Games is making Battlefield 2 out to be. As such, buggy patches really are inexcusable. Compare it instead to a game like GTA: San Andreas or Half-Life 2 on a similar budget with a big brand name. When you do that, it falls on its face in terms of quality and stability. P.S. Not every gamer has an Athlon 64 and a GeForce 6600 under the hood either.
    • This seems to me to be par for the course. BF2 was EXACTLY the same, except I found it to have more crash inducing bugs. They finally got it pretty stable around 1.5. Its annoying as hell but I love this game so much I'll put up with it. I think saying that this might doom the game is...unlikely.
  • Battlefield 2 is a great game. The problem I have is not that its very buggy -- its just that the bugs are illustrative of severely poor quality testing prior to manufacturing. It's beyond my understanding how they could sign the OK on a game with flaws so apparent that EA had to have known they would be discovered within five minutes of playing the game.

    And let's not get into the issue of closing their Ranked servers to paying customers based on a ridiculously unfounded excuse.

    The problem isn't the pr

  • One bug that needs fixing (Score:4, Funny)

    by gothzilla ( 676407 ) on Monday July 11, 2005 @01:46PM (#13035256)
    I'm waiting patiently for them to fix the bug that happens when you're commanding and you drop artillary. For some reason, when the artillary icon shows up on your team's map, they all instantly run into the artillary fire and then punish you for a team kill. I so hate that bug.
  • I applied the NOCD crack to it so I didn't have to work in the Nazi demands that my disk risk being ruined and my dvdrom get unnecessary use. When it came time to patch it couldn't find the install directory. Whats this? YOU CAN'T FIND THE DEFAULT DIRECTORY?! Apparently using the patch and disabling the crap for intro movies is "modifying" it to their dislike. As a plus the uninstaller couldn't remove it so I got to remove all files manually and do some registry editing. The problem now is with PunkBuster.

  • Personally, I love the fact that pressing the Escape key to skip the intro movie will save it into the input buffer, thus applying it to the password field of your "auto login" screen. So even if you have the correct account password saved, you have to edit it to get rid of the escape character.

    I think its awesome that in order to change your keymappings that you have to un-map them one by one first, and then pray that they are not mapped to helicopter strafe-right or some other thing that happens to b

    • The escape buffer doesn't go into the input video, only letter and symbol keys. Plus, anybody who isn't smart enough to rename the intro videos so they autoskip, or login by double clicking the account name deserves having to write out their password.

      A helicopter mapped key will only affect other helicopter keys... if it won't let you map anything, it's because there is something ON THAT PAGE that is mapped the same thing. I find Bf2's system much better than Half Life 2's, where it just unmaps your o
    • You are a god sir, a hilarious god. I bow before your prose.
  • I would like to point out that the bug concerningthe friendlies as red enemy, has been in there since the demo and 1.0
  • I confess I don't know much about these things but would it kill them to release a 1.01 to 1.0 "fix"? I really can't be bothered going through this uninstall -> reinstall rigmarole. I'd much rather they wasted their own time and got this done than waste mine.

  • YEAH!!!!!! (Score:4, Insightful)

    by jayhawk88 ( 160512 ) <jayhawk88@gmail.com> on Monday July 11, 2005 @03:37PM (#13036434)
    Quality assurance and play-testing should not be an afterthought!

    Damn Right! If EA keeps treating us like this, when Battlefield 3 comes out I might wait a whole week before running out and buying it!

  • Why this happens. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by trixillion ( 66374 ) on Monday July 11, 2005 @04:21PM (#13036831)
    Ok, I happen to know a bit about this topic so I'm going to answer the question which was asked, namely, "Why does this happen?" The answer is not meant to be specific to this title, developer, publisher or distributor.

    1) Publishers buy advertising spots in advance. They cannot, in general, recoup these ad buys if the game misses its launch. You might think they ought to be able to recoup or reuse the spot at a latter date, but this would have the effect of putting game magazines out of business. Publishers spend 20% of all their revenues on advertising; this is twice as much as the average profit margin for a publisher. That 2 to 1 leverage means that a single missed launch can knock out the profits of 2 titles. Note - this may not affect EA which probably makes magazines eat it, but it does affect other major publishers.

    2) Big institutional investors like stable quarterly results. Not only equity investors but also, and perhaps more importantly, bond investors. 50-60% of title earnings are in the first 3 months after launch. So missing a launch can cause big swings in quarterly results. And contrary to popular opinion, that can't be hidden in the SEC filing. The cause of the swings they will lie about till the cows come home but the swings themselves are there for all to see. Let's say you are a really big publisher and have 10 titles come out per quarter (that's a very narrow field, btw.) If one title comes out a quarter late, then you go from 10, 10, 10, 10 to 10, 9, 11, 10. Did you catch that, there's another 2:1 leverage going on. A single miss has twice the expected impact. That's a 20% swing in income. Two misses in the same quarter and you've taken a 40% swing and will be having a very, very unpleasant conference call with investors. Or even worse, if you are part of a conglomerate, with your bosses boss and someone may be losing their job.

    3) Game development is not fully mature. Games are still being developed up until the last minute before launch and this is essentially software development. This isn't audio engineering or film post production. By the time you need to start buying ad spots a lot can still go wrong.

    4) All media is similar, very similar. This is a problem because the individuals at the top of conglomerations tend to think they know more about all the individual parts than they really do. A lot of problems at subsidiary publishers can be traced back to game publishers being treated the same as other media publishers. A book with some typos, we'll fix it in the next addition.

    5) Game players are pissy - they hate getting built up about a game for a year and a half and then having their candy pulled away from them just before they were about to have their first taste. Yeah you know its true, don't play ignorant. But guess what no one cares, because you aren't problems #1, #2, #3 or #4. And most of all, because you cannot fire anyone. This brings me to the last reason.

    6) Game players cannot fire game publishers. Decisions get made on a CYA basis and game players aren't the first, second or third entity in that feed back loop.

    • 6) Game players cannot fire game publishers. Decisions get made on a CYA basis and game players aren't the first, second or third entity in that feed back loop.

      I disagree entirely. They dont reach into my wallet and take my money. It is offered up freely by the consumer in exchange for a product or service. I was an avid Q1 and Q2 player. I did NOT buy Q3.

      I am an avid BF1 and BFV player. But I'm not buying a new video card just to play bf2. Sure, someone thought it was good for EA to get in bed s

      • What I should have said, and clearly intended, is that players cannot fire decision makers within game publishers. The analogy you describe seperates cause from effect too distantly to affect the actual decision making.
  • But from a gamer's standpoint, the patch is really really good. Er, let me add a disclaimer in that this isn't a flame. Right. Anyway, the original version of BF2 is much harder to play from the bug perspective. Okay, yeah, the new patch introduced a memory leak, which is needless to say horrible. In general, however, the UI and number of (noticable) bugs decreased dramatically. This story is quite a bit biased; I'm sure that gamers are mostly sad to hear this news, since not only must they go back to the b
    • Yeah, I must admit that I've generally had positive experiences from the patch.

      The server browser is still horrible, but I've been using All Seeing Eye [yahoo.com] to connect to games anyhow.

      The big problem that I find is that corpses have this weird floating effect that is REALLY annoying. Some people may just ignore it, but as I often play as a medic, I'm finding it nigh on impossible to revive my team mates!

      Someone clearly needs to take a defibrilator to the QA team.
  • But that's all they have in common.

    I'm sorry, I couldn't resist!
  • I can't get microphone chatting to work in-game. In Counterstrike, I simply selected which button was the "Push to Talk" button (my button on the side of the mouse - very convenient). In BF2, there is an option of selecting which button is the "Push to Talk" button, but when I push it, I see the little microphone icon onscreen, but no one else can hear me. Weird. And yes, the mic works, cuz when i play CS right after, everything works fine.

    Anyone else have this problem?

    • You have to be in a squad, only your squad members and commander can hear you.
    • Have you tested it in the options screen? Enable the microphone volume boost if it's quiet, which it seems always to be by default.

      Also, the voice chat only lets you chat to certain people. Holding B allows you to chat to your squad mates (only). Holding V, iff you are a squad leader or commander, allows you to chat among other leaders and the commander.

      One can't voice chat to people out of these ranges, which I'm pretty thankful for after hearing game-wide VOIP in Xbox Live and the likes. A 64 play game
  • "When are game companies going to learn? Quality assurance and play-testing should not be an afterthought!" When people stop buying into hype. How else can you explain the popularity of WoW or the pet rock?
  • "When are game companies going to learn? Quality assurance and play-testing should not be an afterthought!"

    They'll learn as soon as their players and customers stop paying for the privelege of being that "quality assurance and play-testing." Why pay for these concepts when you can get others to pay you?
  • When are game companies going to learn?

    What is the only form of communication that we have to companies like EA? Hint: it isn't the Contact Us form on their webpage.

    It's your wallet. Companies will start learning that they can't publish this when you refuse to buy another EA product because of your experience with Battlefield 2. Dollar amounts are the only language they understand, and right now most PC gamers are saying, "Wooo! Give us more!"

    I would also suggest that companies have learned. Most o
  • What do you expect from these people. They screwed up UO, they melt any game series they touch into useless fluids...
    Ok, instead of a tyraid of info, Ill just post the best example to date.

    They Had a good game once...it was a MMO Battletech game, with money and levels and cools mechs. It was going awesome, feedback was high, the game didnt suck... But then they shut it down - didnt even let people try out the cool mechs before they were gone forever.

    Why? Because they thought Majestic would sell better. An
  • My biggest annoyance is the ranked server stragety. They are closing access to parts of the game unless you play on server they essentially control. They significantly overprice the servers and allow very little variation in how they work.

    This is killing the user base at a lot of the smaller non-profit sites that have high traffic and aren't able to afford the massive bandwith requirements and the pricetag of a ranked server.

    I suspect that once people get off the 'new release' high and can't afford to kee

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