Is anyone defending EA at this point?

BloatedGuppy

New member
Feb 3, 2010
9,572
0
0
thebobmaster said:
That's true, and EA is responsible for at least some of the disasters (Ultima VIII and IX, for example). But people act like EA is, as I said, Snidely Whiplash, buying up companies they don't like just to screw them over. And yes, EA is a very corporate corporation, and I could see how developers could have conflicts. However, gamers act as if EA is worse than Activision, or Ubisoft, or every corporation ever.
They've left a longer trail of bodies in their wake, and they went through the unfortunate (but well deserved) "EA Widows" scandal over their woeful treatment of their employees. They've done little to nothing to earn anyone's affection. That they're now leading the charge for DRM and microtransactions is just solidifying the community resolve to hate them.

But yes, it's not like they're Monsanto or anything.
 

aelreth

New member
Dec 26, 2012
209
0
0
Fine, I'll play defense.

Are you a bond holder?

No.

Do you own their stock?

If you do, you had a good last 3 months.

So go away.

A customer?

Jokes on you.
 

Adeptus Aspartem

New member
Jul 25, 2011
843
0
0
Do what Jim Sterling said: Just wait 2 weeks or a month and then buy the game.
If their release sale "flops", they'll notice hard. Also the shareholders will notice, and the gaming industry does not want the shareholders to be pissed, now they actually take bigger interest in the industry.
 

Mycroft Holmes

New member
Sep 26, 2011
850
0
0
Bradeck said:
I understand where you are coming from, but please don't say "They did X" as if this is the exact same company that existed in the 90s. It isn't. That EA died a long painful death many years ago.
Who's talking about history? This is the company that routinely releases free multiplayer DLC for Mass Effect 3.

The indi games origin free hosting thing was like a year ago.

The decision to honor games purchased because of their bug was even less time ago.

They are throwing tons of money into the development of Dragon Age 3 and a ton more dev time than DA2. They spend more money than most every other publisher on actual game development. They aren't doing this because they are muahaha evil, they are doing it because they believe that the best way to get money(which is how people vote for what they want in a capitalist system) is by developing higher quality products.

Bradeck said:
When the dreams of the company changed from,

"We need to make games for gamers, by gamers."

to

"...we need to think of a way to charge gamers for reloading in multiplayer." (look it up)

This new EA has done nothing to advance gaming in the last decade, nor have they done anything to advance client relationships. I hate to invooke Sterling here, but why are you defending something that doesn't give two shits about you?
1) No company gives two shits about me, they all want money and have just tried different methods of getting it. I just judge them all without bias. I don't ignore the stupid shit they do, I just don't buy on day one because I'm not an idiot. And I look into products before I buy them, because again, I'm not an idiot.

2) They will not release it for every single game, they will run a test case of one game, like they do with everything. If it's a shitty model people will ***** and it will get changed or the game will just flop and they won't try to do it again.

3) You're not understanding what he is saying. He's talking about f2p full title games that charge you minor amounts of money after significant periods of play. "When you are six hours into playing Battlefield and you run out of ammo in your clip, and we ask you for a dollar to reload, you're really not very price sensitive at that point in time." So if you played 60 hours of his game you would have to spent 10$ on it. For the full fucking game. 10$. If you were super into the game and spent 500 hours playing it then you have to spend about 80$. It's an idea to be able to fund big title games, charge the hardcore games more for getting more out of the product while allowing casual gamers to get into the game very cheaply.
 

Agayek

Ravenous Gormandizer
Oct 23, 2008
5,178
0
0
shrekfan246 said:
I am.

Mostly from the people who fabricate reasons to add more hate to the pile. Or the people who push opinions as facts, such as "All EA games suck!" - Not fact. I've quite enjoyed most of the EA games I've played in the past two years, including Mass Effect 2, Dragon Age II, Crysis 2, Mass Effect 3, Crysis 3, Kingdoms of Amalur (not actually an EA game, but co-published by them, meaning some people probably avoided it just because their name was on the box, even though they had literally zero involvement outside of distribution), Alice: Madness Returns, Bulletstorm, the Dead Space trilogy, Mirror's Edge, etc.

I don't like EA's business practices, and they've given tons of legitimate reasons for people to criticize them, but the hate has quite frankly reached some illogical singularity at this point. People are latching onto any "bad" reports they can to try and bad-mouth EA even further, even when it turns out those reports were completely fake or taken out of context and thus mean nothing like what the people imply. I find it ridiculous.
While I quite agree with pretty much everything you've said here, I feel that I must point out that Dragon Age 2 is objectively terrible. The only thing that stopped it from being a Colonial-Marines-esque catastrophe was Bioware's skill(s) as a developer. It failed, to one degree or another, at practically everything it tried to do.

That doesn't mean one can't enjoy it, but it does mean that it does not meet fairly basic standards of quality (read: coherent plot, game mechanics that aren't inherently broken, more than five maps/layouts/whatever for all forty-odd dungeons in the game, etc, etc).
 

generals3

New member
Mar 25, 2009
1,198
0
0
thebobmaster said:
That's true, and EA is responsible for at least some of the disasters (Ultima VIII and IX, for example). But people act like EA is, as I said, Snidely Whiplash, buying up companies they don't like just to screw them over. And yes, EA is a very corporate corporation, and I could see how developers could have conflicts. However, gamers act as if EA is worse than Activision, or Ubisoft, or every corporation ever.
Neither activision or Ubisoft pulled a C&C4 on me so yeah i'll stick to EA being worse. Now off course i'm totally biased about this because there are no UBisoft or activision series i love so they won't be able to ruin one and make me a mad panda.
 

Little Gray

New member
Sep 18, 2012
499
0
0
Agayek said:
That doesn't mean one can't enjoy it, but it does mean that it does not meet fairly basic standards of quality (read: coherent plot, game mechanics that aren't inherently broken, more than five maps/layouts/whatever for all forty-odd dungeons in the game, etc, etc).
Strange because Dragon Age 2 passed all of those standards.
 

TheWritenator

New member
Oct 5, 2008
21
0
0
I think that EA's problem is that they don't really get their customers and try to implement systems that don't really work.
For example in the Sims 3 there is the memory system. Unlike the Sims 2 where your sims only remember big events like marriges, in TS3 yours sims remember really stupid thing like going to the store, eating out, ect. Further more the story progression feature means the every sim in the neigbourhood has these memories which after a while starts to slow down the game.
Because there is a share feature I think that it was meant to be a social feature like in Farmvile, but Farmville is a social game run off a social network so it works while TS3 is download off Orgin or a CD so it dosn't.
So in short form, I don't think EA is evil just not that well run.
 

pilouuuu

New member
Aug 18, 2009
701
0
0
On their defense I can say that they release fun, but never perfect games like Dragon Age, Mass Effect and The Sims 3.

Against them is the fact that they want to destroy gaming as we know it, forcing crap like DLC and always on-line DRM. Also I must say that they are liars! They said SimCity needs on-line. That's not true. The game could be played off-line if they wanted. And it's not a multiplayer game. The only reason they made it online is because of DRM. And it even makes the game worse because I am quite sure that the reason we can't have big cities is thanks to the servers being slow. If it was a completely off-line game the CPU would be the only limit to the size of the cities.
 
Mar 12, 2013
96
0
0
Not saying EA is right, but sometime I dislike people who blindly hates EA more than EA. Gamers can be such a drama queen sometime. Until the day we the gamers decide enough is enough and start voting with our wallet. They're just going to keep pushing for the boundary.

Can you really blame a business trying to make a buck in this tough economic? It's a business, not a charity case. That's why I always promote the idea of vote with your wallet. Let's use the case of Dead Space 3 micro-transactions, if they can't see a return on their investment, guess what? they won't put it in the game again.

Can you really blame the content creators trying to get paid and protect their products with DRM? It's like when you decide not to have lock on your front door in a rough neighbourhood, because if people is going to break in and rob you, they are going to break in regardless if you have a lock or not.

We gamers needs to take a little responsibility in this matters too. As we are partially responsible for the creation of this DRM.
 

Don Incognito

New member
Feb 6, 2013
281
0
0
Tom Waits said:
Can you really blame a business trying to make a buck in this tough economic?
Can you really blame the content creators trying to get paid and protect their products with DRM? It's like when you decide not to have lock on your front door in a rough neighbourhood, because if people is going to break in and rob you, they are going to break in regardless if you have a lock or not.

We gamers needs to take a little responsibility in this matters too. As we are partially responsible for the creation of this DRM.
I agree with you totally regarding DRM. The gaming community brought this on itself with its tacit approval of piracy.

HOWEVER, can I really blame a business trying to make a buck in this tough economy? It depends. If they do it by outright lying, as is becoming apparent (see http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/03/12/simcity-server-not-necessary ), then yes, I can blame the everloving fuck out of them.

(editing for spelling)
 

Twilight_guy

Sight, Sound, and Mind
Nov 24, 2008
7,131
0
0
Depends on what we are talking about. They might be dicks but that doesn't mean you can be a dick in response. Also, forums for games are usually full of 90% people who say they hate the game. Complain, threaten to quit, say the company sucks, insult the developers, then continue to play the game because you secretly love it.
 

Sonic Doctor

Time Lord / Whack-A-Newbie!
Jan 9, 2010
3,042
0
0
<-----This guy.

I've written plenty of rants defending EA in the past few days in other threads that I feel I don't need to go into full detail.

I'm probably now seen as the crazy guy who puts large signs out on his front lawn with comments raging against the government and talking about conspiracy theories.

And you know what...


Solo-Wing said:
jebara said:
Actually, I visited Destructoid today to find one guy in the comments section that said DRM is great because of anti piracy,which is killing the industry,were whiners and pirates, think of the publishers,your not entitled to anything,ect...
But only that guy.
$5 says he is a sell-out and/or PR guy.


Seiously EA can go jump in a pool of lava. And they can invite Activision to join them as well.
I defend EA. And I'm neither of those things.

I approve of fighting pirates by any means. I'm also sick of people that think the banner of consumer rights is a golden ticket for them to be oblivious to what they buy, to ignore the common knowledge about types of products and common developing problems that can't be avoided at this time. I am sick of such people because they think they are right to complain about everything even if plenty of facts were given and known, which means their requests for things they want or wanted are invalid. They are people that will still go on complaining while plenty of knowledgeable and understanding consumers are now playing the game with no problems, because they were civil and patient while the kinks were being worked out.
 

Don Incognito

New member
Feb 6, 2013
281
0
0
Again. I agree with defending EA on DRM--I have zero tolerance for piracy. Their implimentation of DRM in the case of SimCity was... suboptimal, at best, but on principle, I support them.

But can you defend them on the outright lies about the game requiring the servers to run a single player mode? Because that is where I am at a complete loss.
 

Sonic Doctor

Time Lord / Whack-A-Newbie!
Jan 9, 2010
3,042
0
0
Carter Rosen said:
No. any who do defend EA do not exist.
Hi, I'm Sonic Doctor.

I'm defending EA in these matters.

And I'm doing a jig because I exist.



Some one needs to because the whole situation has been blown way out of proportion.