Class Action Against Bad Programing.

Peter Storer

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May 30, 2011
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I dont know if its legaly possible, but God I would love to see this happen.
There are a lot of games out there that sell extremely well (4 - 5 million copies) despite having the kind of poor programing or basic errors that must be blindingly obvious during any form of quality control. If these errors waste the average user 10 hours of time, at an average charged rate of $10 an hour, then it wouldnt be unrealistic for a class action to be launched against the releasers of the game for $400 - $500 million dollars.

Get one or two cases like that in the courts, and I bet you would see a sudden leap in the quality of programing and development in games!
 

Smooth Operator

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Oct 5, 2010
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You're right, let's sue the engineers for not getting enough time from publishers to finish their work properly, sound perfectly reasonable.

I predict we can squeeze a whole billion out of the lawsuit if we play this right.
 

Peter Storer

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May 30, 2011
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Firstly, you wouldnt be suing the engineers, you would be suing the company that releases the product, and secondly, the point is not to "squeeze" money out of anything, the point is to hold publishers who deliberatly release a faulty product accountable.
 

Esotera

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May 5, 2011
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This is a really bad idea...how do you objectively determine bad programming? Juries have a hard enough time understanding DNA evidence, I'd love to see them try and get their heads round a few hundred thousand lines of object-oriented programming...

Suing by number of bugs would be a better idea, and if they make the game unplayable.
 

orangeban

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Nov 27, 2009
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You wouldn't have a legal leg to stand on. You can't sue someone for making a poor quality product (provided it isn't so poor it literally endangers your life). That's not how our economic system works.
 

Aeonknight

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Apr 8, 2011
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orangeban said:
You wouldn't have a legal leg to stand on. You can't sue someone for making a poor quality product (provided it isn't so poor it literally endangers your life). That's not how our economic system works.
Especially when more often than not, a good developer will release patches to fix bugs. It's not like they leave you with a broken game and scam you out of 60$ and say "ha ha sucker!"

This is the type of shit that is the cause of the US court system being so far backed up that the country will collapse long before everything gets sorted out.
 
Mar 9, 2010
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If the coding actually made the game completely unplayable then yes, you could sue. That hasn't happened though, you're just bitching about bugs and trying to make it a pointless legal stand off.
 

Radeonx

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Apr 26, 2009
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Or I could make a class action suit against you for being a giant douche towards programmers.
I have just as much legal right as you do.
 

jasoncyrus

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Sep 11, 2008
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Sigh, things like this are pointless and a complete waste of legal system time. Games are a PRODUCT, a privilege (however its spelt) . Not a right. If you don't like it then get a refund and don't use it again. This would be like suing toilet paper manufacturers for only being single ply.
 

Saltyk

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Sep 12, 2010
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Or you could try and be an informed consumer and not BUY the game in the first place. There are some games that I buy on release day, like Arkham City and Uncharted 3. There are others I wait on. If I hear those games that I wait on have terrible game crashing bugs, I don't buy them. Hell, I don't even look at anything made by Sonic Team anymore, because they haven't made a single game that plays well in a long time.
 

alinos

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Nov 18, 2009
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what a moronic idea.

Yes let's make it to the point where a programming bug cost's the company more than the entire development budget.

I could see the logic if they release a game so broken that it's virtually unplayable, and it's the community not the company that fixes it.

But that's not a programming error that you would be suing for it would be a faulty product.

Saltyk said:
Or you could try and be an informed consumer and not BUY the game in the first place.
Sure you could, but i had no day 1 problem's with Rage. unlike the myriad of others who did. The only problem i had with Battlefield 3 so far was the fact that it wouldn't work until the TM was removed from the folder name and the registry key.

yet other's face kicking from Punkbuster.

There is no such thing as an informed customer within the first 2 weeks of launch. Because when there are problem's. The people who have suffered them hit the forum's hard. They scream, they pat each other on the back for having the same problem's. While the people who aren't having issue's are happily playing their games mostly oblivious to any complaint's.

Hell i remember seeing one thread on the steam forums about a games launch problem's. There was 4 pages where 5 guy's continually bitched and moaned about the same thing they had bitched and moaned about at the start of the thread.

Not to mention that with the speed some patches are deployed issues that were bitched about are fixed in a relatively short period.
 

DeadlyYellow

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Jun 18, 2008
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Wait. Wait wait wait wait WAIT.

You want to sue video game companies for wasting your time while you're wasting time?
 

renegade7

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Feb 9, 2011
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You should watch a few episodes of Extra Creditz. Bad games are often the result of more than just poor programming.
 

Canadamus Prime

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Jun 17, 2009
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Aeonknight said:
Oh yes, just what we need. More frivilous lawsuits.
What he said. Yes, let's all go run to our lawyers like spoiled brat 5 year olds running to their parents whenever they don't get their own way. ¬__¬
 

Twilight_guy

Sight, Sound, and Mind
Nov 24, 2008
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As a program my only response is "HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAH *gasp* HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA"
oh boy, you clearly have no idea how computer science works. Now go play with your little toys by yourself and leave this kind of stuff to someone who knows what he's doing.

First of all, bug fixing doesn't work that. Second of all, holding a company accountable for things they are obviously missed isn't going to improve games, its going to publish developers for they can't fix (it's not as if they're suddenly going to get more time to fix bug or suddenly gain super debugging skills because they were sued). Third of all, The definition of a "bug" is nebulous at best. So long as the program compiles the logic is a matter of taste, not correctness. Fourthly, did really sound like a good idea to you? attack companies with lawsuits until they do what you want? Really? Isn't that a bit, I dunno antagonistic?
 

chadachada123

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Jan 17, 2011
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orangeban said:
You wouldn't have a legal leg to stand on. You can't sue someone for making a poor quality product (provided it isn't so poor it literally endangers your life). That's not how our economic system works.
Yes you can. When you buy a product, you expect it to function, and if it does not, you are allowed to get a refund. If you buy a chair, but it breaks after assembly, no matter the return policy of the company, you are allowed a replacement because they falsely advertised a working chair (the "working" part being implied).

How it applies to digital things has not been fully explored, though.
 

chadachada123

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Jan 17, 2011
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alinos said:
what a moronic idea.

Yes let's make it to the point where a programming bug cost's the company more than the entire development budget.

I could see the logic if they release a game so broken that it's virtually unplayable, and it's the community not the company that fixes it.

But that's not a programming error that you would be suing for it would be a faulty product.

Saltyk said:
Or you could try and be an informed consumer and not BUY the game in the first place.
Sure you could, but i had no day 1 problem's with Rage. unlike the myriad of others who did. The only problem i had with Battlefield 3 so far was the fact that it wouldn't work until the TM was removed from the folder name and the registry key.

yet other's face kicking from Punkbuster.

There is no such thing as an informed customer within the first 2 weeks of launch. Because when there are problem's. The people who have suffered them hit the forum's hard. They scream, they pat each other on the back for having the same problem's. While the people who aren't having issue's are happily playing their games mostly oblivious to any complaint's.

Hell i remember seeing one thread on the steam forums about a games launch problem's. There was 4 pages where 5 guy's continually bitched and moaned about the same thing they had bitched and moaned about at the start of the thread.

Not to mention that with the speed some patches are deployed issues that were bitched about are fixed in a relatively short period.
That's fine for some games, but others, like Far Cry 2, still has a GIANT game-breaking glitch that makes it unplayable for a large portion of players.

I'm not contradicting you for large games, but for small games, there's quite possibly a real problem of false advertising depending on what the publishers or developers claim.
 

Phlakes

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Mar 25, 2010
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Oh dear lord...

*Ahem* No.

As everyone's said, programming errors are usually the result of deadlines or being Bethesda/Obsidian.
 

Xanadu84

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Apr 9, 2008
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Peter Storer said:
If these errors waste the average user 10 hours of time, at an average charged rate of $10 an hour, then it wouldnt be unrealistic for a class action to be launched against the releases of the game for $400 - $500 million dollars.

Okay, plenty of other people have things to say about the rest of this, but I have to focus on this.

10 Hours. Seriously?

That is an INSANE estimation.

Not only are you assuming that every last customer who buys the game experiences the errors, you are assuming that they spend an amount of time equal to the entirety of a sizable single player experience on JUST bugs. A realistic estimation would probably be a tenth of a percent of that. Not only that, you are assuming that an individual who has still played said buggy game for long enough to merit 10 hours of unplayability rightfully deserves about twice what they paid for.

I literally cannot come up with an analogy that properly illustrates how blown out of proportion this hypothetical lawsuit would be. I think you are literally making this problem appear millions of times bigger then it is. If you want to encourage better video games, point out specific flaws, return bad games, try demos to make sure a game runs, and don't buy from developers that screw you over. Basic economy at work.