Friday, January 8, 2010

Laggy new year

EA sucks. Really... Not only they didn't pay the overtimes of their workers but their games are very costly and in many cases install DRM software which actually are rootkits for fuck's sake.

I suck too. Why? Among other things because I paid for one of their games: BF2142.


BF2142, or Battlefield 2142 is a really great game that was released three year ago (but still costs 30 euros in Greece). In fact it's one of the best first person shooters I've ever played if not the best one. And being the best FPS is the only reason I haven't thrown my copy out of the window. The Battlefield series was started by DICE which was afterwards acquired by EA. And obviously EA is now guiding DICE's efforts wherever it will create moooaaar money for those chairmen that haven't written a single line of code for they games that made them rich.

For the last three weeks at least, an extremely annoying bug (known as hesitation lag/bug) appeared in BF2142. Every three seconds or so the game pauses for half a second. The bug appears on a per server basis after playing for 10-45 minutes, makes the game unplayable and will not go away unless you restart BF2142. But that is not much of a problem compared to the position of EA on it.

Here is a taste of the bug:




There is a thread (in fact there were much more but they were joined) in their official forums where many angry players, including me, complained about the problem. For the last three fucking weeks the only answer by a forum admin was "we are aware of the problem and we are looking into it". For the love of Khali do they need three weeks to address a simple lag problem? Even if they hired a new programmer, trained him and put him to work on it, it would take less than three weeks to solve it!!!

So the situation now is that a three years old game is completely unplayable for hundreds of players (if not thousands) and EA isn't saying anything on what causes it. Instead, me and a bunch of 10 more players on that thread are speculating on what is causing it like it is our job after paying 30 euros to figure out what is wrong.

So next time you think about buying something from those money-eating lets-mess-a-game-up'ers remember that although the game manual doesn't state it, supports is not actually available after 3 years.

I am going to play some Dystopia now, a free half life mod created by amateurs that has less bugs than most EA games. And it's a complex game to make and to play.


I'm gonna write something about Dystopia soon cause it is really worth it as well as my $10 donation. Until then stay away from scams.

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