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EA's Advice is to Uninstall Battlefield 2
Grym writes "The recently released Battlefield 2 was met with various levels of acclaim by reviewers. Besides the insane hardware requirements, the chief complaint was the amount of bugs in the game. Hoping to address the situation quickly, EA hastily released a patch to address the concerns cited in reviews. Big mistake. The patch turned out to be littered with bugs. One of the biggest was a huge memory leak. Another actually turned teammates' names red--just like enemies. The game became unplayable because of the patch. Tycho at Penny-Arcade discussed the issue in his latest news update. EA has owned up to the buggy patch and has said that there will be a hotfix released soon. In the meantime, gamers have been offically told to uninstall Battlefield 2 and play without the patch; advice that many fans are not happy to hear. Meanwhile, some sites are still offering the 1.01 patch for download on their front pages, only adding to the confusion. When are game companies going to learn? Quality assurance and play-testing should not be an afterthought!"
from eagames.com:
we recommend that you reinstall the game and NOT the v1.01 update we released earlier this week.
Reinstalling Battlefield 2 will not affect your in-game medals or ranked server statistics. EA and DICE are committed to getting a fix for v1.01 as soon as we possibly can and will continue to keep you informed through this web space in the coming days.
Uninstalling and reinstalling are NOT the same thing. Why must Slasshdot editors re-word the headlines and make them misleading?
I'd hoped Tomb Raider: Angel Of Darkness would have taught them that already. That piece of crap pretty much killed an entire franchise (the crappy movie they rushed the game out to tie in with certainly didn't help either) but it seems little, if anyhing at all, was learned from that experience.
Bean counters will be bean counters, regardless.
The only way to play without the patch is to reinstall if you've already updated which most people have as the Official servers updated and then rolled back.
Vermifax
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Right on. Especially about the pie ;)
My problem with EA is that they're so concerned with piracy that they're not actually trying to court the gamers who pay their bills. Novalogic's Delta Force: Black Hawk Down has (on their standard installation) a LAN-only version of their executable that you can play without a CD in your drive if you're at a party and want to join the fun. Try that with Battlefield 1942.
Windows isn't the answer... it's the question. NO is the answer!
oops sorry, not 100% correct [maybe 80-85%], but interesting nonetheless... read on... http://www.evilavatar.com/forums/showthread.php?t= 2663&
Sigh. Grym got it wrong on several levels -- as others have pointed out, the official advice from EA is to reinstall -- which does involve uninstalling and installing again. I agree, this is silly -- EA should've come out with a de-patcher.
/.'d, but BattleWiki has a lot of good info, not only on how to play but also on known bugs.
But that's hardly the only thing wrong with this story.
Another actually turned teammates' names red--just like enemies.
This bug exists in the 1.0 release and is not due to the patch. I've seen it myself prior to the patch being released. It appears to be random and isn't persistant -- once you die (or the teammate dies) their name may be back to normal.
The game became unplayable because of the patch.
And yet it plays just fine on my PC (Ath64 3000, 1 GB, GF6800 GT). I slightly prefer the 1.01 patch to 1.0 because the server browser is slightly better. The other issues it alleged to resolve were never problems for me, and the memory leak hasn't been a huge issue either (close the game and the client side leak is gone; the servers still suffer, but I haven't had severe problems except for the first day of the patch).
Tycho at Penny-Arcade discussed the issue in his latest news update.
Actually last Friday's news update, no longer the latest one. And most of what he wrote he got wrong too. Excepting the memory leak every issue he listed was in the 1.0 release -- medic revive issues (which are mostly user error and/or a misunderstanding of how things work), the server browser problems (were much, much worse for me in 1.0 than 1.01), etc.
Hopefully this won't get
Meanwhile, some sites are still offering the 1.01 patch for download on their front pages, only adding to the confusion.
Which isn't really EA/Dice's fault, but those sites.
When are game companies going to learn? Quality assurance and play-testing should not be an afterthought!
Agreed here, but come on. What did you expect? BF1942 and BF:V were buggy as hell when they were released too. The demo was buggy (although perhaps less buggy with respect to netcode at least) too. That the release was going to be buggy was hardly a surprise to anyone who'd been following the game.
The escape buffer doesn't go into the input video, only letter and symbol keys. Plus, anybody who isn't smart enough to rename the intro videos so they autoskip, or login by double clicking the account name deserves having to write out their password.
A helicopter mapped key will only affect other helicopter keys... if it won't let you map anything, it's because there is something ON THAT PAGE that is mapped the same thing. I find Bf2's system much better than Half Life 2's, where it just unmaps your other key, and suddenly you can't jump.
The server list is interruptible with the new hotfix.
When you click the pre selected radio command, IT DOESN'T FIRE YOUR GUN! As long as you are holding down the Battle Commo Rose Button, your gun is on safety.
I never had the zero-ping problem, and, for those that did, it was patched in the hotfix.
Battlefield 2 is the greatest game to ever be made, and I doubt that will change until Battlefield 3 is released.
[MoD] E. Grey