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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!"
...but getting to the game.
I've played BF:2 enough to achieve rank of Lance Corporal and on my way to promotion, I have experienced a few minor glitches (weird flag capture behavior, bizarre clipping, etc.); however, nothing that has detracted from my enjoyment of the game while playing.
IMHO, I think BF:2 has improved upon the forumla of its predecessors (including Desert Combat). Class balance issues have been addressed, the squad system is absolutely fantastic, and the "Commander" concept works well (if players know how to do it right).
So, the gameplay is solid, not revolutionary mind you, but solid; however, getting into a game is a completely different issue.
I cannot believe I have to use the atrocious in-game browser to find a game. Honestly, it's a terrible browser and it fails on every level to deliver basic, reliable functionality. Servers register a "0" latency occasionally, so I don't know if I can connect to that server or not. In addition, I attempted to use ASE (all-seeing eye) but BF:2 doesn't seem to want to play nice with it.
Since I don't use x-fire, it makes finding a game with my friends very difficult, which, is a terrible shame, because with the squad system, a co-ordinated group of players can do very well.
A thought off the top of my head is to have a feature where players can form squads out of game using the browser and then having the squad leader choose a server for the squad and everyone automatically connects to the chosen server. That sort of functionality would be innovative and very helpful to groups of players who want to play together.
Respect It.
Ok, I happen to know a bit about this topic so I'm going to answer the question which was asked, namely, "Why does this happen?" The answer is not meant to be specific to this title, developer, publisher or distributor.
1) Publishers buy advertising spots in advance. They cannot, in general, recoup these ad buys if the game misses its launch. You might think they ought to be able to recoup or reuse the spot at a latter date, but this would have the effect of putting game magazines out of business. Publishers spend 20% of all their revenues on advertising; this is twice as much as the average profit margin for a publisher. That 2 to 1 leverage means that a single missed launch can knock out the profits of 2 titles. Note - this may not affect EA which probably makes magazines eat it, but it does affect other major publishers.
2) Big institutional investors like stable quarterly results. Not only equity investors but also, and perhaps more importantly, bond investors. 50-60% of title earnings are in the first 3 months after launch. So missing a launch can cause big swings in quarterly results. And contrary to popular opinion, that can't be hidden in the SEC filing. The cause of the swings they will lie about till the cows come home but the swings themselves are there for all to see. Let's say you are a really big publisher and have 10 titles come out per quarter (that's a very narrow field, btw.) If one title comes out a quarter late, then you go from 10, 10, 10, 10 to 10, 9, 11, 10. Did you catch that, there's another 2:1 leverage going on. A single miss has twice the expected impact. That's a 20% swing in income. Two misses in the same quarter and you've taken a 40% swing and will be having a very, very unpleasant conference call with investors. Or even worse, if you are part of a conglomerate, with your bosses boss and someone may be losing their job.
3) Game development is not fully mature. Games are still being developed up until the last minute before launch and this is essentially software development. This isn't audio engineering or film post production. By the time you need to start buying ad spots a lot can still go wrong.
4) All media is similar, very similar. This is a problem because the individuals at the top of conglomerations tend to think they know more about all the individual parts than they really do. A lot of problems at subsidiary publishers can be traced back to game publishers being treated the same as other media publishers. A book with some typos, we'll fix it in the next addition.
5) Game players are pissy - they hate getting built up about a game for a year and a half and then having their candy pulled away from them just before they were about to have their first taste. Yeah you know its true, don't play ignorant. But guess what no one cares, because you aren't problems #1, #2, #3 or #4. And most of all, because you cannot fire anyone. This brings me to the last reason.
6) Game players cannot fire game publishers. Decisions get made on a CYA basis and game players aren't the first, second or third entity in that feed back loop.