Why is this forums relationship with DICE/EA damaged?

[Cigar_Man]

Re: Why is this forums relationship with DICE/EA damaged?

One other thing about the wow forums is that they will delete posts very quickly whereas here the posts are generally not deleted so others get to see the useless posts.

[imported_El_m_ent]

Re: Why is this forums relationship with DICE/EA damaged?

I personally don't see this at all. I've been beta testing BF2142 since the begining.

Could you explain this a bit more?

What I mean to say is, for example, that instead of fixing the red/blue tag bug properly, they wasted time, money and energy implementing vehicle drops, which NOBODY asked for. And not only would 15 minutes of playing reveal to ANYONE this is a bad idea, but it brought us cartillery as well. I mean seriously, the first thing my 9 year old said after I told him about the new feature was "can you kill somebody with it? Lets try!" The fact that it occured to him and not to the test team apalls me.

[Repent]

Re: Why is this forums relationship with DICE/EA damaged?

What I mean to say is, for example, that instead of fixing the red/blue tag bug properly, they wasted time, money and energy implementing vehicle drops, which NOBODY asked for. And not only would 15 minutes of playing reveal to ANYONE this is a bad idea, but it brought us cartillery as well. I mean seriously, the first thing my 9 year old said after I told him about the new feature was "can you kill somebody with it? Lets try!" The fact that it occured to him and not to the test team apalls me.

I'll totally agree with that!

Vehicle drops was a horrid addition, and I don't remeber 1.0-1.1 having the red/blue tag bug (correct me if im wrong)

It does seem that with each patch there are more and more bugs/glitches exploitable things.

[imported_Donkey]

Re: Why is this forums relationship with DICE/EA damaged?

1. They have an awesome reputation for this.
2. Their community is, on the whole, more mature than most I've seen.
3. The players of this game pay each month for the priviledge so they have a vested interest in improving the situation and maintaining civility.

MMORPG communities are just better, in general.

I don't know what WoW community you are looking at, but the WoW community is the most immature MMORPG community ever. Look at there official forums, all they do is whine nerf and flame each other. Take a look at any other MMORPG community and you will see a difference...


I give you Blizzard being really good at what they do. They develope excelent games!

[sassback]

Re: Why is this forums relationship with DICE/EA damaged?

simple, dice pays little attention to what the community wants. they go down their own road and simply add unwanted elements and bugs to a once great game with each patch that was designed to do the opposite. if satisfying the BF2 community was a top priority to them im pretty we wouldnt even be having this discussion.

**imo there more problems with the community then with EA/DICE and the game itself.

[stilla-killa]

Re: Why is this forums relationship with DICE/EA damaged?

like if said before if u dont like it u dont have to play it and obvioulsy coming here to complain aint gonna help u no ways so why do it

[imported_El_m_ent]

Re: Why is this forums relationship with DICE/EA damaged?

like if said before if u dont like it u dont have to play it and obvioulsy coming here to complain aint gonna help u no ways so why do it

Wow.... C'mon dude. Way to knock a good thread into the dust. Bring it to the debate or stay away.

[LBC|Jester]

Re: Why is this forums relationship with DICE/EA damaged?

I would say that the tension you perceive stems from the undelying feeling of disappointment that many BF1942/Desert Combat players felt after realising that BF2 did not live up to the hype. I for one eagerly awaited what EA/DICE lead me to think was going to be Desert Combat 2. I mean, they even bought Trauma Studios, the guys that made the original Desert Combat mod for BF 1942. Why wouldn't anyone think that BF2 was not going to be DC2?

QFT!!!!!!

[MachineGunDave]

Re: Why is this forums relationship with DICE/EA damaged?

Why are you guys comparing a MMORPG against this FPS? The folks who run WoW have a vested interest in maintaining solid communications with their users, those users pay up every month to continue to play the game.

When BF2 first came out there was a bit more communication, but once the dust settles after the initial release it probably becomes hard to justify the cost of maintaining a high level of customer contact in the same way a MMORPG does. Going through hundreds if not thousands of customer posts per day on every fan site out there that happens to be dedicated to your game costs huge amounts of money.

People who want more input or contact with EA/Dice really should wake up and realize that for the price of admission (retail BF2 vanilla) you won't get it. If we payed 10 bucks a month to play this game you might have a leg to stand on expecting it.

EA/Dice may or may not care about the community but I wouldn't expect any company to throw their profits out the window on a year old commodity in the video game market to keep the squeaky wheels happy.

When broad gameplay issues come up, it will filter back to developers but they simply don't have the time or manpower to respond to every complaint out there. Simply put the mentality of the average gamer who posts on boards and forums with complaints correlates to a boyfriends relationship with a high maintence girlfriend. Why should EA/Dice put more value on the complaints of some users when there are thousands happily playing? Great they "fix" what you complain about which causes xyz player to complain about that "fix". Wake up, never ending cycle, its impossible to please this many people. If there are other games with what seems like less complaints, you are probably seeing a game with a much smaller playerbase.

Its far too easy for every Joe Shmo who wants to create a forum account and let the complaints fly here even when there are still thousands upon thousands of people playing the game and enjoying themselves. Do you guys really want EA/Dice to sit here (And every other fansite) and pick apart every complaint and reply to each one?

All that said, no matter what happens, no matter what patches comes out or what EA/Dice make in the future a certain percentage of people will be pissed off about something. If you can come up with a way to keep a few hundred thousand people, who all have various/different opinions on what the game should be like, happy with a static product then you should be running your own game company.

[Turnip]

Re: Why is this forums relationship with DICE/EA damaged?

What was so wrong with 1.12 that could be important enough to add lag, bugs, disconnects, non working server browser, and even more imbalance?

Why do they take the quickest approach to fixing everything.

Why dont they hire people who actually play the game instead of people who are just coding for money, like the guy said above anyone could have predicted vehicle drop abuse.

All these answers are the reason EA is the worst company ever.

[Kurt]

Re: Why is this forums relationship with DICE/EA damaged?

What I mean to say is, for example, that instead of fixing the red/blue tag bug properly, they wasted time, money and energy implementing vehicle drops, which NOBODY asked for. And not only would 15 minutes of playing reveal to ANYONE this is a bad idea, but it brought us cartillery as well. I mean seriously, the first thing my 9 year old said after I told him about the new feature was "can you kill somebody with it? Lets try!" The fact that it occured to him and not to the test team apalls me.

I think there are a number of reasons for this but I think here you've nailed one of them, the fact that we're simply not listened to. Regarding BF2 in general, all we've ever wanted is a reliable, consistant game and it's taken a hell of a long time to get there. I really don't understand why we get new features like vehicle drops and co-op mode when there are fundamental bugs in the game that we all want fixed, it simply does not make any sense.

We all tend to ***** and moan a lot but I think that's because we WANT a good, stable BF2, fundamentally we really like the game but we just want it to work properly.

IMHO, we're pretty well there with 1,4 but there are still plenty of annoyances like the way snipers can still deploy claymores almost as if they were grenades and the way people can still do the drop and roll and still shoot with perfect accuracy. I'm annoyed by these things but if that's the way it is then I can put up with it.

I think also an issue is the age of the players. BF2 seems to attract a lot of younger players and this tends to drag down the boards into minor squabbles rahter than reasoned posts. I'm not saying all younger players are like that but some definitely are.

Also, like you say, the ranking system makes a lot of people play for points rather than playing for fun and that can completely destroy gameplay.

Those points aside though, the main factor is that we're just not listened to and thats very frustrating. EA have done the damage and have made very little effort to repair it. 1.4 has gone part of the way but the way they are behaving with 2142 shows that they put themselves first and us second. Paying for unlocks and rank-ups? In-game advertising? "Selling" the beta through Fileplanet? It's not a very nice way to behave and it's basically a kick in the teeth to us, a VERY long-suffering community.

The basic relationship between publisher and gamer is very simple. They write games, we buy them. If they're good lots of us buy them. We tell them about bugs, they fix them. This is so simple yet EA just don't work this way and this is where all the problems start. We expect things to work this way as pretty well any game we've bought does work this way and when it doesn't work like this it is very disappointing, hence all the ranting on the boards and hence the bad relationship.

Of course these boards are a million miles away from the official boards and the Planetfortress boards, I can hardly bare to visit them and discovering these boards was like a breath of fresh air but, at the end of the day, if BF2 worked well from the start and bugs were quickly found and squashed we'd have nothing to complain about except balance issues and liek a previous poster has said these are subjective so there is no right on wrong.

[Turnip]

Re: Why is this forums relationship with DICE/EA damaged?

And what about how they always lie, like with the beta testing and crap. I highly doubt the only thing people reported was CTD's, yet it was the only thing fixed...

[Astralman]

Re: Why is this forums relationship with DICE/EA damaged?

EA - corporation. Earnings last year? $6 billion - with a B. Battlefield 2? Not Madden's Football. What you're watching is the playing out of the nature of the corporate mentality. (A panel of psychiatrists recently did a psychological profile of a corporate body - a legal entity that's a person, but isn't, and found it met all the symptoms of sociopathy.) Their only concern is the shareholder.

Developers - artists (if you will), creative and inventive people. They're the first to go under a corporate structure. Time is money. I've communicated with technical people with Dice/EA, and many changes have been made there that didn't used to be in game development. Schedules are increased to the point of health-threatening stress, no bonuses are forthcoming. They, as are most employees of corporations, are overworked and underpaid. Where's the incentive to go any extra mile under such conditions?

In a market world, you've paid your money and gotten your CD. What more do you want, a free lunch? All these demands for freebies. Geez. Why give away maps when you can sell them? Why provide charity when there's money to be made? Pride of craftsmanship? You're not paying those rates for these games. On-going development? You've got to be kidding. How much are you willing to pay?

All things good have fallen prey to the corporate mentality. The corporations insulate themselves from the general public. So, go to EA's "support" section and see if you can realistically make a comment that has a chance of being seen by anyone who can do anything about it.

Personally, I believe in the integrity of the creative people who design and attempt to develop games. However, EA has soaked up the market like a sponge, as all good corporations must. They dictate the terms from a board room, and believe me, you the player's concerns are not discussed at those meetings. Profit margin, yes. You? Get real.

Jump back! You think it's bad now? Just wait. It gets better. How much are you paying for gas?
Remember where you live.

[redrider]

Re: Why is this forums relationship with DICE/EA damaged?

Ok. . . . .Lets get back to the main topic here.
I really dont know much about EA/Dice. What I do know is that in June of 2005 I was looking for a FPS game to help me tweak my computer. One day one of my sons friends brought BF2 over and they were playing it. They said dad you gotta see this. So I went in and watched for a while. BF2 reminded me of the army games I used to play when I was little. Lots of good times there. So I downloaded the demo version. After playing for about an hour I decided the game was to hard and quit but the next day I just had to do it again. After about a week of this I went out and bought 2 copies of BF2, one for each computer at home. The game was still hard (skill wise) to play but so addictive that I couldnt stop.
Now, 800 dollars and a year later I sometimes find it hard to believe whats been done to the game. I still play almost every day hopeing it will change and become what it was in the begining. Thats probably not gonna happen. All I can say now is that because of this, what BF2 has become, I wont by another product made by this company. So who's to blame? I dont know but if it was a dog Id have to take it to the Vet. and put to sleep. . . . . . . .Red

[imported_El_m_ent]

Re: Why is this forums relationship with DICE/EA damaged?

In a market world, you've paid your money and gotten your CD. What more do you want, a free lunch? All these demands for freebies. Geez. Why give away maps when you can sell them? Why provide charity when there's money to be made? Pride of craftsmanship? You're not paying those rates for these games. On-going development? You've got to be kidding. How much are you willing to pay?

I don't want anything for free. I don't want new maps, and I certainly don't want new content. I am well satisfied with the product, and play every chance I get, and certainly feel that I have gotten my moneys worth for the most part. My point was that there WERE resources available to fix obvious bugs, which are allocated by every software developer post production to render support for the code.

Here is a little BF2 theater to illustrate my point:

It's kind of like I went out and bought a Lamborghini (HAha not in this lifetime lol) I take it in for 10,000 mile service, and they return it to me with bicycle tires on it. I say
"hey, what's the deal?" and they reply
"well, you will use much less gas now, we think you will love it!"
"Umm, I don't want to use less gas, I want to go fast, and why didn't you change the oil????"
"Well, we only have one mechanic, and he spent all the time we had for your car putting those bicycle wheels on"

Cue applause

I want my friggin pirellis back.....