An Open Letter To EA/Dice From StrafeRight

[SlavikCC]

Re: An Open Letter To EA/Dice From StrafeRight

Hey, I absolutely love the StrafeRight BF2 servers (before the unholy 1.3 patch which I will get into shortly)! I played as the commander a number of times and getting my team to win almost all of the time.

As for the patch, not only has the patch has caused instability problems (even for my rock solid computer, which caused quite a bit of lag and stuttering) but the vehicle drop is not only unnecessary but is very unbalanced. You can get a vehicle for every 3 minutes! It's UNNECESSARY ON URBAN MAPS! They were fine the way it is but why unbalance them even further with that ability?? Not only for dropping on snipers/spawn campers but they're mobile deathmobiles for helicopters! What is EA/Dice thinking?????

Craig, you are unfortunately correct that EA is basically trying to absolve themselves by releasing that patch and then pretend BF2 never existed. Look what happen to the Command and Conquer franchise and numerous other games. I regretted buying the Euro Force booster pack since Great Wall and Operation Smoke Screen are the only okay maps I cared. Everything else with EF is rushed and feels incomplete. I won't be getting the Armored Fury booster pack since it'll screw up the balance even further by ADDING MORE JETS, making armored vehicles and helicopters mobile coffins! And of course, no additional urban maps. This is just a cynical and feeble attempt to suckered us into getting more BF2 goodness fixes.

Don't mind me ranting about EA's general treatment with fans and third-party developers. I just want to get it out of my chest.

[HowieMandel]

Re: An Open Letter To EA/Dice From StrafeRight

I think DICE should be calling on Franky D............and quickly.

DC maniacs know what im talking about.

[*FMJ*Bird]

Re: An Open Letter To EA/Dice From StrafeRight

I currently operate the sixth ranked bf2 server globally and my thoughts mirror those of straferight.

We are flat fed up with the horrific server stability. They made more empty claims of added 64 player server stability. We crashed 6 times in less than 12 hours.

Get something done before its too late. We know our server will be replaced by another but at this point we flat cannot justify paying into this ranked process any more.

I hope they listen because we are sending our final messages around the community loud and clear. This sentiment seems to be the norm. Heres three of the top ten and I have more standing in line to make their position clear.

As with everyone else we did not purchase nor support euroforce in any respect. Armored Fury will be another pass by our group. Mods offer much more refined content for free. Maybe they could take another look at the math on offering free expansions. The sales of new bf2 vanilla copies would overtake the revenue from direct sales no problem after the number released for euroforces. It was a total flop at 130,000 copies.
All the additional content produced should be free. We are starting to see mass numbers of server regulars disappear for fantasy and other fps games.



Our US Intervention Mod server was as busy as ever today UNTIL IT FINALLY CRASHED WITH 35 people playing. The good old new one where everyone gets connection problems but the map and tickets are still intact.

Great to see everyone enjoying a content filled alternative. Instead of dropping jeeps to cause problems how about a shoulder fired stinger? The modders can do it so could you with a little effort.

[imported_Boots]

Re: An Open Letter To EA/Dice From StrafeRight

Yeah, your city maps server rocks.

[SQUiB]

Re: An Open Letter To EA/Dice From StrafeRight

As an "EA Basher" since buying SF on its release day I copped plenty of crap from other people telling me that my problems didn't exist. I still can't really play SF (well I haven't tried since 1.3 but I highly doubt it fixed anything) and every big patch has given me more stability and performance issues than the previous build of the game.

Over the past few months I've pretty much given up playing BF2 except for giving it another try after every new patch. I've now given 1.3 a chance to impress me, obviously it didn't, and will go back to playing Oblivion and buy Hitman: Blood Money when it's released.

I'm not going to write off BF2142, or any other EA product, yet but I'll certainly be much more cautious in the future. As a single customer EA isn't going to care what I say or do but the fact that this thread is almost completely filled with like minded people should send EA a message.

[Sir. bzb]

Re: An Open Letter To EA/Dice From StrafeRight

Good thread.
What i dont get is the addition of things in the patches and the changes that are made to the gameplay, where as they should have addressed the more fundamental problems, we played the game for quite some time with things like the BH guns killing things and it would be far to assume that given how long it took for them to be nerfed that anyone that was really upset about it would have moved on anyway. Was it really assumed that players would move away from the game if they diddnt have the ability to drop a car on the enemys head?

The one addition to the game that was appreciated and liked was Wake and the lack of maps is the only thing that will lead to boredom and players leaving, not the addition of pointless 'features'. We need stable servers to play on and a stable client for us to use, a user friendly server browser has yet to be made but instead we have lost the ability to chuck c4- how was that job deemed a good use of time? Things that do work shouldnt have priority on any fix list over things that dont work.

Its as if BF2 has a fatal cancer and EA are trying to break the news to us gently that whilst they have a cure it'll cost you the price of a new game and wont quite look the same

I doubt EA will loose money over 2142 but i dont see why id want to buy it after having had the pleasure of following the bizarre treatment of BF2.

[maranello]

Re: An Open Letter To EA/Dice From StrafeRight

I wasn't going to say anything, but as one of the server owners myself, I must admit the fact that we are suffering several crashes a day with this new patch.

This is our server:

http://www.game-monitor.com/GameServer/66.199.253.236:16567/247_Karkand_Total-Clan_-Ranked-.html

It was full 24/7 for the past month, even 4 am in the morning, or even 6 am on a Monday morning, it was always full. We DID have crashes, once or twice a day or even once or twice a week sometimes, but after 1.3 patch, it has been horrible.

I can tell you right now that the server IS crashing every hour at least once. And no its not "improperly patched server" problem either. I talked to our server provider, and he told me there are a NUMBER of people having same problem. In fact, you can go here:

http://www.game-monitor.com/search.php?game=bf2&order=grank

And see that the there are a lot of top 100 servers that are empty. If you look at their daily and monthly stats, you will see the amazing amount of increase in number of crashes per day (sharp corners in the graph).

I know people are shocked with the new squad system and the vehicle drop and most people haven't realized what's really going on server-side, but give it a few more days, if EA doesn't fix this, we WILL have serious problems. I can barely get people to stay in the server.

Btw, I must inform the people here that I have had NO problems with BF2 since June 22nd when it was released. I have been playing since day 1 and I never complained about any feature of the game nor I had any hardware/software problems (one of the lucky ones i guess), but this one is just plain terrible and needs to be fixed immediately.

The reason I posted this here instead of Server Owners' Forum was because most of the people who get "Connection to Server has been Lost" or "Crash to Desktop" or "There is a connection with your problem" errors are actually having those problems because the entire server is crashing. They think its their computer, however I can clearly say if you were not having these problems pre-patch 1.3 and you are having these problems very frequently, its definetly the entire server crashing.

I m neither complaining nor whining about the patch. I am just very angry as a server owner since it's very very HARD to get regulars into your server (takes weeks, even months) and loose them in a few hours for good because of a game patch. It takes effort, money, time, and resources to build a nice server in the community and it's just not fair to loose it because of this patch.

[Saureco]

Re: An Open Letter To EA/Dice From StrafeRight

You guys realize that right now there is some poor sucker at EA who mumbled something about "this won't be sufficient" or "this won't be ready in time", and he was right. However, he won't ever tell his we-have-to-implement-jeep-drops-instead-of-fixing-the-nametag-bug boss because to expose your retarded superiors is the fastest way to get fired... publicly.

Isn't this always the case? Someone with his head on straight working among a sea of spineless lemmings and anti-customer-satisfaction trolls? You know there is a handful of devs, even testers, that knew BF2 was destined for the scrapheap the moment they knew certain project leaders were on board. I wish we could get this insider information before BF2142 comes out.

[HowieMandel]

Re: An Open Letter To EA/Dice From StrafeRight

I dont think we should be knocking DICE, to be honest. DICE has shown they can make great games. WIth the exception of DICE CANADA.....(sorry dice canada) DICE can, and does make great games, in the BF series. I mean..lets face facts. The BF series friggen OWNS all games, hands down.

Really, to me, it seems that once EA got its paws into the mix, and I know it was good for DICE, so im not knocking them either....but once EA got into the mix.......... things have gotten a bit ugly.
On that note......i still love BF2. Its a great game.

[Saureco]

Re: An Open Letter To EA/Dice From StrafeRight

EA is to the gaming industry what Dell became to the computer industry -- the larger you get, the further you are out of touch with the customer.

This is why mod teams are successful in terms of scale and praise from the community. BF1942 would have fallen off the map had it not been for Desert Combat. Why is it mod teams can achieve so much more than the original developers? Is it because they have more resources? Hardly. Is it because they care more about fixing/improving the content of an existing product than hammering out the next overhyped product before it's polished? Quite possibly.

EA made the right move to acquire DICE to make BF2, but they totally botched it up when they totally overrode DICE's decision-making abilities. Lesson: the next time you acquire talent, let them write their own tickets.

[HowieMandel]

Re: An Open Letter To EA/Dice From StrafeRight

Amen brother.

[The Soup Nazi]

Re: An Open Letter To EA/Dice From StrafeRight

Thank you for creating this thread. It needed to be created and I'm glad to see that people are contributing to it intelligently rather than starting an outright flame festival against EA.

I help out at MoonGamers as an admin and as a financial contributor. Since the release of patch 1.3, I can personally attest to the fact that the MoonGamers Mostly Oman server (which is a 60 slot server that is nearly always full - server monitor link) has crashed many times. Yesterday afternoon (around 1PM EST), the server crashed not once, but 6 times within an hour. Before the patch, the server would routinely reboot twice a day but normally fill right back up. But when it crashed over and over again, we had trouble getting people to come back and stay to fill it back up.

I know that I am not alone when I say that I'm starting to become fed up with the lack of "real" support that Battlefield 2 has been getting. Rather than fixing bugs that have existed in the game since its inception or bugs that are brought in by faulty patches, EA has decided to either implement new functionality that was never asked for or adjust game mechanics that they felt needed adjusting. I believe that these adjustments were done as a way to mask the real problems that many players have been encountering.

Here's an analogy of what I think EA has been doing to the Battlefield 2 community...

If you owned a sports car and it had a flat tire, what would you do? Fix the flat tire. EA, on the other hand, might sooner decide to install aftermarket parts that could potentially make the car go faster- but the car still has a flat tire rendering the car, as a whole, completely useless.

And now that EA has been promoting BF2142 with such fervor yet seemingly ignoring the pleas of the BF2 community to fix long-standing bugs, I cannot see myself buying into this new product. There are going to be many games released in the near future that are going to cater to the Sci-Fi market that I think EA is going to have a very difficult time persuading the BF2 crowd to buy in. And, assuming that the alternative products offer better customer support, I believe that many loyal supporters of the BF series will simply move to those alternatives instead.

I'm personally very sad to see the BF name be tainted in this fashion. I was an avid supporter of the BF series since BF1942 and have had many great experiences in BF2. But the game has changed so much since June 2005 that it is merely a shadow of its former self- it seems to have become watered down for the masses of people who found it to have too steep of a learning curve.

And, if EA does not fix issues that have arisen with the advent of v1.3, I can personally say that I will no longer be financially supporting the Battlefield series or a server that runs BF2. I would sooner give my money to id Software in hopes that they continue their tradition of actually listening to their customers.

And, for those that have never read this before- I suggest you read it. It sheds light on what working for EA is really like.

EA Spouse: The Human Story - http://ea-spouse.livejournal.com/274.html

[Maxor127]

Re: An Open Letter To EA/Dice From StrafeRight

It was a good letter. Squad hopping is an exploit that should've been fixed a long time ago. Now people are used to it and don't want to see it go. I'm glad it's gone finally though.

[MrBrown]

Re: An Open Letter To EA/Dice From StrafeRight

Well I'm glad about that too, but the server crashing about every 30 minutes is a very, very bad joke.

[The Soup Nazi]

Re: An Open Letter To EA/Dice From StrafeRight

It was a good letter. Squad hopping is an exploit that should've been fixed a long time ago. Now people are used to it and don't want to see it go. I'm glad it's gone finally though.

If by "exploit" you mean something that was not intended for its original use, you may be right. But then again, do you think EA/Dice meant for the AT rockets to be used as sniper rifles at range? Did they mean for people to use DPV's and FAV's as "Jihad Jeeps"? Did they mean for commanders to be able to earn badges and other awards by killing enemies with artillery while sitting in AA or Ground Defense emplacements? Did they intend for their punish/forgive system to allow a choice for those who stand in front of friendly aircraft that is taking off?

The game is what it is because of the creativity and adaptability of the players. Sure, EA/Dice might not have intended the Blackhawk to be used as a means to run people over on runways, but it is funny when it happens.

Personally, I never had a problem with squad hoppers. If they chose to use the system to get to a remote spawn point quickly, who cares. The truth of the matter is that it was able to be used by anybody since the demo came out and now people are peeved since they can't play that way anymore. I never used it to "teleport" an entire team to another area of the map, nor did that ever happen to me while I was attempting to defend a flag. I just wish that they would concentrate on the problems at hand before changing game mechanics around.

Wouldn't you be peeved if they decided that you could no longer "Jihad Jeep"? They could make it so that as soon as you exit the vehicle, you can't detonate the C4. Or, if you choose to ram another vehicle while having C4 on your DPV, it wouldn't detonate- just make you suicide. It would suck, wouldn't it?