Dear EA Games,
I recently bought Battlefield 3 for the PC, and while I'm sure the game is excellent, I wouldn't know because you're holding it hostage with an endless parade of terrible fucking executive decisions. I am never giving another cent of my money to your current management so long as I live, and here's why:
Despite driving to the store to buy a physical copy, all I received was a black plastic box containing a passkey and two screen-locking DVDs. After trying to circumvent having autorun.exe blank my screen by going through Origin, my computer inexplicably ignored the DVD sitting in my drive and commenced a trundling download through Origin that took five hours before it even considered installing... and that was that. There was no other way to do it. I don't even know what the fuck, but bear with me, because this is probably the most forgivable part of all this.
Then, the next day, after it was sitting pretty and waiting to be played, I dove into the campaign and jumped back out ten minutes later when I realized it's painfully boring. Hey, no biggie, right? The multiplayer's the only reason anybody would fork over money for this game in the first place, right? So when I tried multiplayer, I discovered that the server list has to be accessed through Firefox (which gets to sit in the background and merrily chew on my CPU alongside the game), and the game has to be cold-booted/exited every time I want to join/leave a server. I was going to include a thorough analysis of this particular feature, but spellcheck insists that I need to insert spaces between the endless string of swears, and frankly, I can't slow the outpouring of eye-boiling hatred enough to do so. Believe it or not, we still haven't gotten to the meat of why I feel so fucked over.
So when your pants-shittingly stupid matchmaking system throws me into a game, I run around for up to about three minutes (current record), getting spawnkilled until it just locks up. The whole goddamn game, that I just paid sixty fuckmothering dollars for... just doesn't work. Don't think I didn't try, EA. I know it's not my job to meet you halfway and try to fix your defective product, but I did. I updated all my drivers, repaired every network utility that your program had perverted on installation, knocked the graphics settings back to the stone age, trawled message boards for hours looking up archaic and worthless solutions in hopes that I'd find the one that makes your special kind of retardation gel with a computer that blows away the recommended specs... and here I am, five hours later, with BF3.exe still clamping its jaws shut before I even get the tip in. I wouldn't have been happy even if I did manage to fix it, because that's like having to go into your DVD player and tool around with the settings and software for hours just to watch a movie you just bought... but since it still doesn't work, I'm beyond pissed.
So, really, the only thing that functions thanks to your anti-piracy extremism is the boring-ass campaign, which I could've pirated for free months ago. I decided to legitimately purchase this product with money that god knows could've gone to better uses, just so I could access the multiplayer, and because you want to whip your paying customers for the money you're "losing" to piracy, I got the exact same gimpy version I would've gotten if I'd fucking pirated it. That's not irony, that's rape.
Your company has wronged me (and according to what google turned up during my diagnostics, at least thousands of others) and I refuse to enable your greedy bullshit with my money ever again. May your genitals be devoured by wolverines.
Sincerely,
-SODAssault
EDIT: Refused to give up on it and found a pretty straightforward fix that none of my first thousand queries even wanted to imply. Now that it's stable and running, I can say that the game itself is the best thing that ever happened to my computer. Still not pleased with the issues I had with getting it to a playable state (nor any of my other grievances), but with that aside, DICE knows how to make a HELL of a shooter. This game is THE SHIT in ways that make me nostalgic for BF2, and I'm sorry it had to be slightly mangled by the publisher before it reached me.
I don't mean to disparage the developer. If you're willing to put up with a lot of stupid on the way to the parts you thought you were paying for, it's really worth the money... it's just a shame that a fair bit of that money goes to a publisher with a lot of really bad ideas.
I recently bought Battlefield 3 for the PC, and while I'm sure the game is excellent, I wouldn't know because you're holding it hostage with an endless parade of terrible fucking executive decisions. I am never giving another cent of my money to your current management so long as I live, and here's why:
Despite driving to the store to buy a physical copy, all I received was a black plastic box containing a passkey and two screen-locking DVDs. After trying to circumvent having autorun.exe blank my screen by going through Origin, my computer inexplicably ignored the DVD sitting in my drive and commenced a trundling download through Origin that took five hours before it even considered installing... and that was that. There was no other way to do it. I don't even know what the fuck, but bear with me, because this is probably the most forgivable part of all this.
Then, the next day, after it was sitting pretty and waiting to be played, I dove into the campaign and jumped back out ten minutes later when I realized it's painfully boring. Hey, no biggie, right? The multiplayer's the only reason anybody would fork over money for this game in the first place, right? So when I tried multiplayer, I discovered that the server list has to be accessed through Firefox (which gets to sit in the background and merrily chew on my CPU alongside the game), and the game has to be cold-booted/exited every time I want to join/leave a server. I was going to include a thorough analysis of this particular feature, but spellcheck insists that I need to insert spaces between the endless string of swears, and frankly, I can't slow the outpouring of eye-boiling hatred enough to do so. Believe it or not, we still haven't gotten to the meat of why I feel so fucked over.
So when your pants-shittingly stupid matchmaking system throws me into a game, I run around for up to about three minutes (current record), getting spawnkilled until it just locks up. The whole goddamn game, that I just paid sixty fuckmothering dollars for... just doesn't work. Don't think I didn't try, EA. I know it's not my job to meet you halfway and try to fix your defective product, but I did. I updated all my drivers, repaired every network utility that your program had perverted on installation, knocked the graphics settings back to the stone age, trawled message boards for hours looking up archaic and worthless solutions in hopes that I'd find the one that makes your special kind of retardation gel with a computer that blows away the recommended specs... and here I am, five hours later, with BF3.exe still clamping its jaws shut before I even get the tip in. I wouldn't have been happy even if I did manage to fix it, because that's like having to go into your DVD player and tool around with the settings and software for hours just to watch a movie you just bought... but since it still doesn't work, I'm beyond pissed.
So, really, the only thing that functions thanks to your anti-piracy extremism is the boring-ass campaign, which I could've pirated for free months ago. I decided to legitimately purchase this product with money that god knows could've gone to better uses, just so I could access the multiplayer, and because you want to whip your paying customers for the money you're "losing" to piracy, I got the exact same gimpy version I would've gotten if I'd fucking pirated it. That's not irony, that's rape.
Sincerely,
-SODAssault
EDIT: Refused to give up on it and found a pretty straightforward fix that none of my first thousand queries even wanted to imply. Now that it's stable and running, I can say that the game itself is the best thing that ever happened to my computer. Still not pleased with the issues I had with getting it to a playable state (nor any of my other grievances), but with that aside, DICE knows how to make a HELL of a shooter. This game is THE SHIT in ways that make me nostalgic for BF2, and I'm sorry it had to be slightly mangled by the publisher before it reached me.
I don't mean to disparage the developer. If you're willing to put up with a lot of stupid on the way to the parts you thought you were paying for, it's really worth the money... it's just a shame that a fair bit of that money goes to a publisher with a lot of really bad ideas.