Looks like EA's biggest fan (me) is going up against it's biggest critic.
IHateEA said:
1. EA's customer support is notoriously bad. It reflects how little they care about their customers.
In my own experience, and the experience of a lot of other gamers that I've heard of, EA's customer service is terrible. Before you can contact them at all, you need to fill in a form on their website. This form determines how 'important' your problem is, and then gives you options of how to contact EA. Their phone number isn't openly available - they'll only tell you it if this form deems YOUR problem important enough to require phoning them. Otherwise they'll either send you to live chat or, even worse, only allow you to email them.
Their live chat is abhorrent. The representatives are often very hard to understand due to (and I mean them no offence, but it's true and a valid problem) their lack of English skill, and they generally have little to no knowledge of the games that they're providing support for. They also don't seem to care. On a lot of occasions (you can find examples online) they outright ignore the problem and give an automated message along the lines of "Is there anything else I can help you with?". They often don't give a solution, but since the automated form decides how you can contact EA, you can't get further help.
The forum support is equally bad. There are multiple instance of widespread problems with games, even so much that the game just doesn't work, and the forum support simply stops replying. They offer no fix, no way to give feedback. They just stop replying.
EA also don't offer refunds. Even in the case of SimCity, which is notorious for massive, huge gamebreaking bugs at launch (and for at least a month after, with even some features of the game being turned off to ease server load) such as saving issues which caused rollbacks/deletions and even server problems which stopped people playing, EA refused to give refunds. The only option for a lot of people was to initiate a chargeback with their credit card companies, which would most likely result in a ban from Origin - making people unable to play ANY of their EA games on PC.
To be fair, no "Support Line" ever is very helpful, and at least with Origin you have a chance of speaking to a person. I remember I was using Steam once, I just bought Ghost Recon and had installed it and all that shit, and when I went to go and play it, Steam kept crashing. So I wrote to Steam's support people and asked them if there was anything to do, they told me to go to the developer. 3 months later, after constant emails to both the devs and Steam I FINALLY got a refund for the game along with a very passive aggressive email from Steam saying, "This is the one and only time we will do this, do not try this again".
Now lets look at Sim City, when it was released and didn't work and people were angry and demanded a refund EA offered them 8 games as compensation for their game not working. Games such as Mass Effect 3, Dead Space 3 and Need for Speed (not entirely sure on that one, but it was a racing game of some sort that had only recently been released) were being offered to people for free.
IHateEA said:
2. Day-one DLC
This is a practice becoming more widespread in the industry, and it's terrible. Developers are working on DLC while they work on the game; this generally means that they take away resources from developing the game and put them into developing the DLC. Considering how many games have been released broken or unfinished (consider SimCity as broken, or Mass Effect 3's ending as unfinished), this is a huge problem - instead of finishing or fixing the game for release, they spend their resources on making more content that they can sell on top of the game.
This is a nasty concept. It's effectively taking away a chunk of the game's content - it was ready for release, so it could have been included in the game - and selling it separately, purely to make more money. The gamer pays for the game, with that content missing, and then pays for the content.
There have already been DLCs announced for Battlefield 4. Not one DLC, but two. The console hasn't even been released, let alone the game. How many resources did they use on that DLC?
EA is a large business, they have many people working for them and they can divide teams up without sacrificing the quality of work. Sim City was broken, no excuse there, but Mass Effect 3's ending is completely subjective and quite clearly did wrap up Shepard's story, many did not like it, but that does not mean the ending did not wrap up Shepard's story line, which was the purpose of ME3, ending the story. Also, most DLC is developed after the game is completed, this is because it takes roughly 2-3 months to get screened for rating and then another month or 2 (disc based wise) to send all the games to stores that will be selling their product. So in this 4-5 month period the development team is doing nothing, thus publishers have been taking advantage of this time by getting their employees to make DLC for the game. I'll end this by recommending Extra Credits video on Day one DLC as they point out that after just a couple of weeks of a game being released the amount of people still playing falls dramatically, and the purchasing of DLC drops even further. It makes sense to try and keep as many people play your game for as long as possible, it's good for the publisher's/developer's name and good for the consumer as they get more out of a game they love.
IHateEA said:
3. Greedy micro-transactions
For those who don't know, micro-transactions are in-game items bought for real money. They are commonly used in free-to-play games as a business model, which is fair enough: the developers need to make money somehow. But EA includes them in their games. Charging players for items in a game they've paid full-price for? In my eyes, that's not acceptable.
It was stated that micro-transactions are optional: they're there for players that want them, but there's no pressure. That simply isn't true. Players will always take the easiest route to winning a game - that's how games work. So when given the option to pay real money to get in-game benefits, there is pressure to take it. Not taking that option means a disadvantage.
Why should people who have paid for a full game be milked for more money whilst they play? Do you want to spend your time while you play games thinking and worrying about all the extra money you're spending, or the advantage you're missing out on?
Your point here is quite weak, you're basically saying people are too weak willed to play a game without spending money on it, and that is just simply untrue. Look at all the game challenges on the internet, Pokémon has the Nuzlocke challenge where in which a fainted Pokémon is considered dead and you HAVE to release them, you can only catch the very first Pokémon you see in an area, when you "white out" (all Pokémon have fainted in your party) it's game over and you have to start again, you CAN NOT trade Pokémon thus making Golem, Gengar, Machamp etc. impossible to obtain. Those are player self imposed rules to make the game harder. Or take the RE4 Professional challenge, you have to start a new game on the highest difficulty, ONLY use the weapons found in game, and you can't use the merchant. People are far from scared of a challenge.
Micro-transactions are optional, in fact if you're like me they're not an option at all, I can't connect my Xbox to the internet, and I'm not the only one (See Xbox One forums). This isn't greedy, this is business, EA is giving people the option for an easier play through, and it's not as though their recent micro transaction game (Dead Space 3) was focusing on multiplayer competitive battle where you can pay-to-win (See TF2 for that).
IHateEA said:
4. Digital rights management: controlling when and how you play games
Origin was an attempt at enforcing DRM on PC players: they'd always need to be online, running their games through the Origin platform, so that the games could less easily be pirated. It'd save EA money, but it's a massive inconvenience to the players.
Origin had a lot of problems when it was launched. It was beta software, and yet players had no choice but to run their games through it. Some people couldn't play games at all due to Origin problems.
It also meant that players were forced to be permanently online to play any games - even single-player. This is a massive inconvenience to the player. If your internet service provider has problems, you can't play your games. If EA's servers go down, you can't play your games. The sole reason for this is to protect EA's sales, but it takes away consumers' rights to the products they paid for.
Ironically, it's far more convenient to pirate games due to Origin.
Steam had issues when it launched, and for a very long time all games HAD to be run with steam in order to work, that was an inconvenience but people sacked up and just dealt with it because in the end people wanna play their games. Not every game of theirs has DRM, and even so while DRM has yet to work it doesn't mean that they should just give up and let pirates pirate away, that's like saying we should take all security cameras and security check walls and security people out of shopping areas because it can be inconvenient. Also, EA isn't the only company that shut off their servers, so you can't go pointing your finger at just EA and condemn them for something that EVERYONE can do, and the same can be said for their server offline periods, other companies have games that have these periods (see DCUniverse: Online happens quite frequently on that game).
IHateEA said:
5. It's okay you release games unplayable. We can fix them in a few months.
As I mentioned earlier, SimCity literally couldn't be played on release. Even still, 3 months on, it has some major bugs. There was a beta. So why didn't they find these bugs? It's simple: it wasn't really a beta. It was a glorified demo to generate hype. The beta was restricted to one hour of play mostly consisting of a tutorial, with a lot of features blocked. They didn't give people a chance to test the game at all.
Still, they must have known the bugs were there. Some of them were glaringly obvious and very common, so it can be assumed that quality assurance testers would have noticed. The game was released as it was, however. Over the course of months, patches were released, each time fixing some of these problems. The game still isn't completely fixed. And even while the game was broken, EA were still producing DLC: the Nissan Leaf is one of a few examples of product placement DLC. Yes, if you download a Nissan Leaf (advertisement for Nissan, which EA gets paid for) and use it in your game, you get gameplay advantages. No downsides. So it's essential DLC.
The game was ruined for people who bought it at release. Do you really want to buy games in the future, after getting excited about them, to find yourself unable to play them because they were released broken and unfinished?
That is an issue that Maxis should have picked up on, not EA. Yes EA published the game, but they publish a shit ton of games every year, and while they're a large company, they're still human and can only do so much. The team developing the game should have realised that the game had several game breaking bugs. Also, Skyrim initially had some pretty bad game breaking bugs, PS4 players had severe lag, others (like myself) had weapon glitches that would make dual wielding two weapons of different make or enchantments be ineffective (the game would assume that one blade's quality/enchantment would effect both blades). Also, the Nissan DLC isn't an essential DLC because you get advantages, it's DLC that make games easier/even could be called pay-to-win.
If you have a counter argument for any or all of my responses, please feel freely to respond, I would be quite happy to see my points proven wrong.
