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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!"
I hope EA gets totally burned by this and the games industry learns a lesson about sacrificing quality to hit a release date.
I also hope that they make a better tasting pie that isn't fattening.
Pulp Audio Weekly - Geek News and Reviews
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?
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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When are game companies going to learn? Quality assurance and play-testing should not be an afterthought!
In all probability, not on our life. Because what keeps it sane in other industries are the laws allowing us, consumers, to return a broken products for a full refund. I don't see that happening to sofrware any time soon.
...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.
Things like this have led me to be a "late adopter" of new games. Sure, I miss out on getting to brag about having the game the day it's released, but I usually pay less for the game. And I tend not to get hit with the odd patch or two that causes your drive to get formatted if you uninstall it, or causes the game to be near unplayable.
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." -Albert Einstein
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.
I'm waiting patiently for them to fix the bug that happens when you're commanding and you drop artillary. For some reason, when the artillary icon shows up on your team's map, they all instantly run into the artillary fire and then punish you for a team kill. I so hate that bug.
The great thing about this all is people will go through great lengths to get a buggy pre-release game pirated off of bittorrent or from a friend and never complain about the bugs. But the moment it is released and you pay a couple bucks to have a game that is supported well you bitch about it because hey every game is perfect when it is released. I for one am happy to have a game released so I can play it early with support. You can always go the route of Blizzard and postpone a game for 3 years so you can release one good version too late. But I digress...
CS: It is all sink or swim...oh and did I mention there are sharks in that water?
Random question for all of /. to read...
Why don't all new games (that require more than one CD) come out on DVD?
I mean really. If you need a $500 video card, a Gig of RAM, 2 GBs of HD space, and a 2.2 Ghz or faster processor to play the game with a decent framerate... you can afford the extra $10 for the DVD drive.
Maybe I'm wrong.
Deja Vu
n. 1. The sensation that you've read this very article before.
Quality assurance and play-testing should not be an afterthought!
Damn Right! If EA keeps treating us like this, when Battlefield 3 comes out I might wait a whole week before running out and buying 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.
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