Synigma said:
Loonyyy said:
For instance, in Battlefield, during peak, a lot of servers will run close to capacity, and that's good, you'll get some of the best play on there for the larger modes. But getting into them often means queuing. Premium, the season pass, included a queue jump. Premium members go to the front of the queue. When I was playing it around launch, it was incredibly annoying. You could get up the queue, and then the queue gets longer, and people have pushed in in front. And I figured I'd get the premium bonuses, but not the DLC, from having Premium on Battlefield 3. Nope. In fact, Battlefield 3 preorders came with some DLC, that they later shipped as part of Premium, so you got doubly fucked there if you bought it at release. If you want to play all the maps, you need them at their launch too, otherwise, you'll end up buying content that you can't play, because people got sick of it. And you can rely on the average poor taste of the Battlefield community to win out-Operation Locker/Metro 24/7. Everywhere.
This part right here, I never thought about it... but this is some seriously underhanded shit. They skimp on the servers then make people pay for premium to avoid the resulting queue. I can understand an indie game skimping on servers but a huge company like EA with a flagship game? WTF...
The Sales Pitch:
"Does your game not make enough money on it's own merit? Or maybe your CEO's pool of money just isn't big enough to have the whole executive board swim in it at once? Boy do we have the solution for you! And by solution we mean problems, ALL the problems!
Just release your buggy, unfinished game now and sell the consumer all the solutions later! After all they don't want to feel like they wasted their money on a broken product so not only will they buy your fixes but they will THANK YOU for selling them!
That final level not even close to being finished? No problem! Just call it an expansion and sell it seperately!
You don't want to spend money on supporting your game? No problem! Just offer a 'premium' service and let the plebs deal with it!
Did your design team think of a cool new idea but you don't want to fire them for thinking outside the box? No problem! Package their idea as 'Must Have DLC' and watch the cash flow! Don't worry you don't have to include it in the next game and if people complain you can 'fix it' by repackaging it and selling it to them AGAIN!"
Welcome to the future of gaming; where problems are a selling feature!
It's not even the servers man, they're community owned and run, paid for from providers. There's plenty of them, it's just most of them are kind of empty like you'd expect. If you want to play Conquest, you need that 64 player count.
So you hop in a queue. It's a good server, only one with a full population 64/64, got maps in rotation you like, you've got good ping. There's a couple of people in front of you. Oh, one of them's gone. Wait, now there's someone else there. Fuck. Considering how people leave and join, you can be stuck for quite a while like this. It's fucking nuts. You need Premium to just not get dicked around in queue and get to have the place in queue that you took.
So you're sitting there, stuck in the next 15-20 minute queue (Game crashes and failure to connects aside, BF4 was fucking horrible like that. I'd queue up, and then blackscreen, gamecrash, random disconnect, kicked for high latency before connecting because BF4 has to boot itself every fucking connect), just to get into a server with your friends, listening to them on mic. You know they're going to be playing this for a while. You know the first DLC is coming out soon. And you're sick of the fucking queues. And just like that, another person is tricked into paying $150 for a $100 game. And the Battlefront one's worse like that. It's $170. At least I don't think it has premium queuing.
It's a massive dick move by publishers. They just want to charge more, they just don't have the balls to say it. So they say it's content down the line, it's a service, it's premium. They don't show it upfront. They ask for the majority of your money on the initial purchase. I'm not so pissed at a $70 season pass. You know what, ok, I can deal with that. Just don't ask me for that after I've put in $100 and already committed to the game. $100 is far too much for a taste, a trial. If they want to do that, they can either sell the lot for that price and watch their sales die, or they can ask for the small payment first, and then if people lose interest, they're not losing the large one. Of course, then they'd have to justify the price for the content. This one is 4 maps to an update, and 5 pieces of tech, which will probably be of dubious utility.
On a more positive note, my brother got it and he seems fairly happy with the game (Not the pass. He's still humming and haaing about it. He'll buy it). Apparently the game feels as nice as ever, and they've made some much needed tweaks to the vehicle sensitivity etc, and apparently the extra maps are fairly entertaining.
