Slashdot Mirror
Battlefield 4 DRM Locking Out Part of North America Until EU Release
An anonymous reader writes "On the whole, Battlefield 4 had a reasonable launch. The have clearly learned from their past experiences with Battlefield 3 and, more notably, SimCity. Still, some customers are unable to access the game (until, presumably, October 30th at 7PM EDT, 39 hours after launch) because they are incorrectly flagged by region-locking. Do regional release dates help diminish all the work EA has been putting into Origin with their refund policy and live technical support? Should they just take our money and deliver the service before we change our minds?"
As an aussie, I have to put up with this nonsense all the time (most recently, Rocksmith 2014.) Maybe now that it's happening to them, they might realise that this region-locking stuff is frustrating and annoying, and get rid of it.
I can dream.
...that doesn't give one solitary shred of a damn about its customers. News at 11.
Is there an official reason for regionally differed releases? I could see a valid one: Spear first-day server load on several periods. Obamacare website has shown it can be important.
Look - are you really going to give up a game you've been anticipating for months because the turn on date was delayed 2 days? Of course not. You're EA's bitch, and you'll like what they give you, when they decide to give it to you. No significant fraction of hard core gamers are going to completely boycott over a couple of days. And, really, EA knows this.
Go ahead - mod this as Troll, but you know damned well it's true.
This seems to be tied to certain ISPs, especially Uverse. They claim they can't verify it is a US IP address, even though I'm in indiana and the IP clearly comes up under a US company's IP block (AT&T). The first EA person actually had the nerve to tell me my ISP programmed the release date wrong. The second one said it would be fixed in an hour. Finally after getting a manager he said they are aware of the problem and can only wait until 7pm tomorrow. I asked why don't they just completely remove the lock outs to let people play the game they paid for, acknowledging that some regions may get early access. That was "impossible". I bet people pirating the game are playing just fine, I feel like a fool for parting with $100 for the deluxe edition. Not buying another EA game. Some have suggested using a VPN service to somewhere else in North America that the Origin virus can verify you to North America properly. Silly...
today is spelling optional day.
I realized i'm talking to the "the source becomes the documentation" (yes, that was an actual slashdot comment) crowd here but it seems like if you wanted to play a computer game enough you bought it at launch for the benefit of having fun and it's really this much time and effort at some point you have to see some diminishing returns on this. I mean more time and effort trying get it and get it to work than it's worth. Keeping in mind I've only purchased one game pre-launch in the past ten years (Skyrim) so maybe I just "don't get it" but seriously... screw EA and their stupid game roll out schedule/DRM. Play something else. The new Rise of the Triad looks cool...
Seems clear EA doesn't really want your money...
"UNIX is very simple, it just needs a genius to understand its simplicity." -Dennis Ritchie
I checked and it's not on Steam, same with Battlefield 3, looks like EA is trying to force that Origin crap down on people, oh well one less sale for them.
Everyone that disagrees with me is a paid shill
"Shut up and take your money" sounds like a reasonable business plan to me.
And I'm not trying to troll or in general be a jerk. I simply do not understand the purpose of region locking software like this. I don't see an upside for the company - even a perceived one - and it only seems to unfairly punish end users that happen to live in some other country. Can someone explain the thinking to me?
when will you all learn they're ruining PC gaming
Serves them right, for giving EA money!
Circumcision is child abuse.
but you think they'd try. The keybinds don't work, "Well play with the WASD set-up" you say,
but some of us play with a left handed mouse.
The graphics are great in some cases (you won't hear many people say that) but causes problems.
You get out of the water and a sheet of water flows off of you (part of the realism) and it stops you in your tracks,
All low settings GTX-570. You never know when lag will hit (other than the water) but it sure gets one killed.
B is a key to open a Map, it opens the console, and you have to press ~ to close it. It's like BF3 all over again,
you couldn't reassign the Q key for one. BF3 the chat was in your face, the middle of the screen was where people
typed back and forth, some helpful most calling others names (normal chats), The BF4 map is now in your face;
it takes up the entire screen which you can change the opacity but you can't view the map no matter how transparent
and the action of the game at the same time. (I do that with BF3 the mini map is alway open taking up the bottom left
corner of my monitor, I only play hardcore so the map is the only way you can see people.
BF3 moved the chat to the side, and allowed one to reassign the Q key, the very things that upset people is how BF4 works now.
I'd change the keybinds and it would hang on me, I'd let it be and sometimes I could continue,
other times I had to turn off the power supply, the secret is not to change the jet keys.
The game profile (a text file) is around 100K, mine was 35,000K and had 678961 lines that had the word jet in them.
Copy an pasting BF3's helicopter and jet config lines to the BF4 profile is how I configured my game.
You don't know when you die oddly enough, going along just fine only to find you were killed, it's not
obvious by any means, I don't know if one gets used to that or not, many times I thought I was still in the game.
I could go on, multiplayer is a real mess right now. as mentioned it looks like everything they did wrong with BF3 and patched out,
is how BF4 was released.
Whores get paid. If anything, the users are Johns.
"Should they just take our money and deliver the service before we change our minds?"
'we' who? I'll buy an EA game when hell freezes over. They beat Bank of America for worst company on the planet.
They said, here's money, now tell us where we went wrong before and how we can improve with BF4. I studied BF4 about a year ago, and told them my thoughts. I even went the extra mile and told them to ditch the goddamn DRM or at least tame it. I told them that DLCs bundled with the game is a bad idea, and they said it's something they can't help because gamestop/bestbuy/etc got them by the balls and require it. Their commercials at the time were lackluster, so I don't know what the released version looks like but again, I was being a Gordon Ramsay on their ass and did they listen? No. Well, sorta. They listened on some portions of the game itself but not so much for marketing or removing / taming DRM. I wasn't the only one that offered a harsh review of it, but they need to know their place. The ones at the top are not gamers, they are just businessmen. They spend most of their days in meetings, not in a dev lab. How do you expect a game to appeal to gamers if the ones overseeing the game don't pay much attention to the games itself?
not just any johns, the kind of john that wakes up handcuffed to the bed robbed blind and to add insult to injury with a light bulb stuffed up his ass
Battelfield 4 ohhhhh,
If you give them money, you deserve what happens... besides modern 3d corridor shooters aren't even worth pirating.
you got what you deserved..... when you ignored previous lessons learned and bought stuff from EA anyway. ha ha hahaha.
At least usually the whores get the money. This is more like a fraternity freshman saying "thank you sir, may I have another one?"
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
EA
You're not in the game.
Silence is a state of mime.
I am sure plenty of other people have told you but here it is anyway...
If you goto a shop and put something into your bag, the shop is unable to sell it. You have deprived someone from selling that object. Getting a replacement will cost something - either them, their insurers or the customers. Even if you would have never bought it, you have cost them.
If you copy a file, CD/DVD or .ISO, the original item still exists. They can still sell it to all the people who want it. If you would never have bought it they have not lost a penny. They will still be able to sell just as many copies to just as many people for the same overhead. They may even sell more because someone might hear that you think it is a really good game and decide to buy it for themselves.
Most people have a limited amount of disposable cash and buy as much as they think they can afford to. What they download after that causes no marginal loss whatsoever.
That aside, the only use I have made of BT was to download Linux .ISOs and similar nerdy things.
I'll see your Constitution and raise you a Queen.
Well at least one of the posts here didnt' say "I really can't afford this so I pirate it", it referenced the company's management as justification for the pirating. How does one ethically decide which software to spend the money on and which to 'pirate'? I work for a software company and I guess for my livelihood I have to hope that people spend the money on our product rather than deciding they already spent their funds and instead decided to pirate our product?
Also, with that in mind, what's the purpose of the torrent other than to say "neener neener, we've got BF4"?
I stopped with BF2BC only because EA required their Origin crap installed for BF3. The level of information that spyware collected was insane. Have not purchased any EA games since then. Until they remove the Origin requirement, I will never give them a dime. So far they have lost over $200 from me. Sure that is nothing in the grand scheme, but I am not the only one dissing EA over Origin. It adds up.
If they were smart, which they are not, they would get rid of the Origin install requirement and stop collecting information from people's machines.
...the pirates get a better product than the paying customers
I bought BF3 - it was a decent game. Then they patched it. And patched it. And patched it until it became a worthless game that catered to cry babies about weapons being too strong.
So fuck you EA. I'm not buying your shit ever again.
But hey, I only paid about $20 or something like that for all that content. No way in hell would I pay the $60-80 they are wanting for this new game. I tried the beta and didn't play it more than a couple of times and let it expire without a care. It was nifty and stuff, but it's just more of the same for the most part to me.
The other day I bought a fresh copy of Doom 3 for $2 to add to Steam, and having not played that one for several years, I was pretty impressed with the quality of it. That's a damn-well-made game right there. 1.5GB of disk space.
When will they realize.... As soon as it costs them. All the bitching in the world just means you already spent money.
I spent about 400 hours playing BF2. I spent maybe 100 hours on bad company 2. I spent less than 30 hours on that abortion called origin to play BF3, and now I'm not paying EA any more money until they significantly improve their delivery, DRM and bug fixing. In the meantime I've spent double what I'd normally pay for a game on crowd funding guaranteed no-DRM games and I don't particularly care if they wind up being good or even make release! Fuck you EA. And Ubisoft with U-play and anything that uses games for windows live.
That argument works fine until you consider this scenario:
Someone wants BF4 and can afford to buy it.
They see that they can download it illegally for free.
They download it illegally and use the money they would have spent on it for something else, or just save the money.
In this scenario, the availability of BF4 via illegal means has deprived its publisher of a sale. A lot of people that have disposable income and can afford to buy things are in that position because they're at least moderately intelligent. When you ask a moderately intelligent person if they'd rather pay for something or get it for free with virtually no chance of consequences, I'd be willing to bet a fair portion will choose the latter option.