635 réponses à ce sujet

[Maverick827]

EpicBoot2daFace wrote...

He neglects to mention the large amount of contempt people have for Origin. The only reason those "satisfied customers" have it installed on their PC's is because they want to play EA games and can't do it without that program installed. It's mandatory. What other options do they have?

I had to install Steam for Skyrim.

Why is Steam better than Origin, anyway?  I use both and I don't see anything that Steam does better.  In fact, I prefer Origin's "home page," which is a grid of all of yoru games.  Steam defaults to their store as your home page; you have to go into the settings to change it.  

I also vastly prefer Origin's DLC store to Steam's.  In Steam, you have to right-click on your game, select "View Downloadable Content" option, and click the  "View available downloadable content for this product" link.  In Origin, I only have to right-click on my game and select the "Show Game Details" option, and then I'm displayed a table of all available DLC with DLC that I've already purchased listed as "Installed."  Steam breaks up installed DLC and available DLC into two different windows.  I don't even know how to re-download DLC in Steam, but in Origin I can just right click on that same table and select "Repair Install."

That's just the pedantic programmer in me, but still.  The application GUI is a huge part of the so-called "User Experiance" (UX); it is literally the interface (hence "Graphical User Interface") with which the user and application communicate.  If we're taking each application at it's own merit's, then I have to give it to Origin hands down.

[MegaSovereign]

@Allan

It's true that Peter Moore's response would have gotten heat no matter what he could have said. But his response is filled with fallacies. He effectively handwaved most of the votes as general homophobic reactions. It's silly.

[TheRealJayDee]

Allan Schumacher wrote...

Of course, not forgeting that all the while these people that hate EA so much end up spending so much time on an EA message board.  Always an interesting observation in my opinion.


Regardless, thread is pissing me off now so it's likely best to take my leave of it, lest I start trying to argue simply to win.

Well, sometimes disliking EA and using stuff that belongs to EA is unavoidable. I hate DRM, and still I used Origin. Mass Effect 3 is the only game I own that uses some form of DRM, and I wouldn't have grudingly accepted it for any other game. I'm here because some aspects of EA are/were dear to me: Bioware game franchises, namely Dragon Age and Mass Effect.To discuss these games with other people I found the BSN to be the best place to come to for, although since ME3 is finished I don't come here as often (and I can't find any motivation to look at the DA:I forum).

Voting EA as the worst company twice in a row on a poll like this is basically nonsense, but it does show that there are severe problems with EA's PR in the last years. Bioware's as well. During the whole year since ME3 release you, Allan, have been one of the few beacons of hope when it came to ME3 PR - and you're neither on the ME team nor a PR guy, so that should be kind of a warning sign.

Modifié par TheRealJayDee, 09 avril 2013 - 11:18 .

[Anacronian Stryx]

Allan Schumacher wrote...

Anacronia Stryx wrote...

I for one would like to congratulate EA with their overwhelming victory.

I don't know.  We could do better

(And with that I'm out)

Well they were under a lot of pressure as the reigning champions, People wanting to change the game plan and a whole lot of armchair quarterbacking going on, But EA sensibly stuck to their tried and true game of good allround douchebaggery that let them clench the title in last year.

Now the hardest trial..taking the title for a third year and by that laying the foundation to a dynasty.

[Pacifien]

Allan Schumacher wrote...
I find this post is more a reflection on the gaming community and the gaming culture, to be perfectly honest.

I wonder if union workers concerns were marginalized as being simply a reflection of their ability to organize all their complaints through a union community and culture, thus giving them a seemingly higher volume to their voices than would ordinarily be heard.

That's just an observation really.

[EpicBoot2daFace]

Allan Schumacher wrote...

Anacronian Stryx wrote...

I for one would like to congratulate EA with their overwhelming victory.

I don't know.  "We could do better" I think

EA said "We can do better" in 2008, and for a while they were. But now they're back to their old tricks again. I don't want to see EA go under, even if I don't like the way the company does business. All I want is to be treated fairly and for EA to not take advantage their customers every chance they get. But the problem is I know that's not going to happen. This acknowledgement from Peter Moore is a wasted effort because I know EA is going to continue to treat their customers unfairly and take advantage where they can.

[Pacifien]

Maverick827 wrote...
Why is Steam better than Origin, anyway?  I use both and I don't see anything that Steam does better.

Customer service.

[Morroian]

Volus Warlord wrote...

So a solid chunk of the competitors were luxury good/service providers/producers.. but EA should be ignored as it is a luxury good producer.. These arguments just get better and better.

That just provides more evidence of the lack of validity of the poll (even leaving aside the fact that self selected polls have no validity anyway) . As for the arguments while people focus on EA cause they won the argument is clearly that any luxury goods producer shouldn't be on the list unless they actually do something to match what companies like Exxon have done.

The pity of such a poll is that it actually allows the valid criticisms of EA to be glossed over cause the result is so OTT.  

Modifié par Morroian, 09 avril 2013 - 11:21 .

[Volus Warlord]

Morroian wrote...

Volus Warlord wrote...

So a solid chunk of the competitors were luxury good/service providers/producers.. but EA should be ignored as it is a luxury good producer.. These arguments just get better and better.

That just provides more evidence of the lack of validity of the poll. As for the arguments while people focus on EA cause they won the argument is clearly that any luxury goods producer shouldn't be on the list unless they actually do something to match what companies like Exxon have done.

The pity of such a poll is that it actually allows the valid criticisms of EA to be glossed over cause the result is so OTT.  

The poll is about current consumer outlook, not about a company's history or impact on society, environment, yadda yadda. This is more evidence of that lack of validity of your argument.

[Anacronian Stryx]

Actually the lessen to take away from the poll is that it's very very fortuitous that EA ain't in the banking business.

[addiction21]

Volus Warlord wrote...


And you could debate that the airlines are luxury because for private purposes while air travel is convenient, you sure don't NEED it.

So a solid chunk of the competitors were luxury good/service providers/producers.. but EA should be ignored as it is a luxury good producer.. These arguments just get better and better.

No one is saying EA should not of been on the list or any of those that provide a luxury service either.

Its a joke that it actually won (and those like you trying to somehow rationalize it) over companies that have and continue to actively ruin peoples lives or the environment.

[Weskerr]

Anacronian Stryx wrote...

Actually the lessen to take away from the poll is that it's very very fortuitous that EA ain't in the banking business.

It's a lesson to game publishers that if you screw over your customers enough, they will retaliate in some way. EA has its notorious reputation for a reason; it did not come out of thin air.

[wolfsite]

Pacifien wrote...

Maverick827 wrote...
Why is Steam better than Origin, anyway?  I use both and I don't see anything that Steam does better.

Customer service.

Your kidding right?

Last few times I used there service I had to wait a week for an auto reply telling me to try things I already did.  Steam is still blocking me from playing 3 or 4 games I purchased off of it but they refuse to even acknowladge that this is happenning.  I had to go straight to the developer and he showed me a way to.... well... see if Steam was the culprit.  Games ran fine after I tried this method but when I e-mailed Steam with the proof they threatened to ban my account meaning I would lose all my games.

[Gatt9]

Allan Schumacher wrote...

Fast Jimmy wrote...
True. If a company that creates products meant to entertain and make people happy needs to even be compared to those that result in injury, harm or even death, then they are doing an incredibly terrible job of managing their brand name and PR.

I find this post is more a reflection on the gaming community and the gaming culture, to be perfectly honest.  (Shill opinion, please feel free to completely disregard at your own convenience to prevent cognitive dissonance)

This gets noteriety the same way a guy filing an FTC complaint for ME3 does (i.e. people laugh at us gamers).  IMO it is a net negative to the perception of the gaming community and industry as a whole.  Though I wouldn't be able to say much.

I agree that Moore shouldn't have bothered responding, since it gives some the idea of legitimacy, something I wouldn't have bothered with.  I don't find the poll particularly meaningful and in fact proclaimed "Defending champs! o/" when I saw it.  It's an online poll, and unless I can have any sort of reasoanble assurances that the population voting cannot be influenced by outside biases and ensures a representative sample of the US population, it is not something that will ever mean anything to me.  Of the people NOT mentioned in Moore's bullet list, it's the same people venting frustration on the BSN (which I have no issue with) effectively voting in multiple places.  I suspect that what I would learn from the motivations of these people voting is not any different than I would read here.  Gamers are organized, typically quite technical, and something like this is going to get additional visibility (which I'd say Moore's blogpost helped to do) to this type of audience.

Lets be honest, in this thread (and numerous others) there's no shortage of allegations that we'll just shut people up and silent dissenting opinion.  Yet this thread has gone on for some time, and you're even talking directly with an EA employee (maybe that's what people wanted).  Some posts that nail us to the wall were even edited for clarity by a moderator.

Of course, not forgeting that all the while these people that hate EA so much end up spending so much time on an EA message board.  Always an interesting observation in my opinion.


Regardless, thread is pissing me off now so it's likely best to take my leave of it, lest I start trying to argue simply to win.

I'll start off with my positive comments first.

I don't think anyone here believes that you're shutting people up.  If they actually believe that,  send them to me,  as if you were doing that I'd be the first one out the door.  I'm living proof that you do not ban people for their opinions,  which makes you a better community than some other big name ones I've witnessed doing many shady things on their message boards.

In response to your comment about why people spend so much time here,  that's an easy one.  We're invested hobby-ists.  Bioware was amongst the top 5 gaming companies ever,  EA has a metric ton of cash and could revolutionize gaming.  People are here because they still care,  even if they're angry.  What you should worry about is when the day comes that they're not here anymore,  because then EA's been completely written off and likely wouldn't have a chance of survival.

On to my negative comments...

I think you take this far,  far too lightly.  People are upset enough with EA and it's business practices that they took the time to vote,  and voted in significant quantities.  This means that there's a sustained and significant portion of the video game market so upset with EA that they made a concerted effort to send EA a message.  This is the second year in a row,  and it bodes very ill for the sales potential of future titles.  You're also treading dangerously close to the same mistake the Dragon Age 2 team made,  "There's nothing wrong with our game,  it's 4chan trying to make it look like there is".  Much like the eventual outcome of DA2,  this isn't a small group of people,  and the sales figures of EA's titles are generally demonstrating that from what I've seen.

As far as Moore goes,  he had it in his power to diffuse the situation.  With the CEO resigned,  he could have publicly walked back the revenue initiatives he put in place that has been alienating consumers,  he could have walked back the Origin EULA even further to assure those who are still concerned about EA's intentions.

He could have easily reassured Gamers that they were going to change.  Instead,  he just made it clear that EA doesn't understand what we're telling them.

He handwaved off concerns by trying to blame some nebulous "Bad protestors" as if they are motivated by hate or childishness.  He reinforced EA's intent to pursue revenue initiatives,  and continued to treat a technically skilled group of people as if they didn't understand what DRM is.

So from a Gamer's perspective,  EA's not getting the message.

Modifié par Gatt9, 09 avril 2013 - 11:50 .

[Pacifien]

wolfsite wrote...

Pacifien wrote...

Maverick827 wrote...
Why is Steam better than Origin, anyway?  I use both and I don't see anything that Steam does better.

Customer service.

Your kidding right?

Last few times I used there service I had to wait a week for an auto reply telling me to try things I already did.  Steam is still blocking me from playing 3 or 4 games I purchased off of it but they refuse to even acknowladge that this is happenning.  I had to go straight to the developer and he showed me a way to.... well... see if Steam was the culprit.  Games ran fine after I tried this method but when I e-mailed Steam with the proof they threatened to ban my account meaning I would lose all my games.

Guess you have a bright future with Origin then.

[wolfsite]

Neofelis Nebulosa wrote...

wolfsite wrote...

Pacifien wrote...

Maverick827 wrote...
Why is Steam better than Origin, anyway?  I use both and I don't see anything that Steam does better.

Customer service.

Your kidding right?

Last few times I used there service I had to wait a week for an auto reply telling me to try things I already did.  Steam is still blocking me from playing 3 or 4 games I purchased off of it but they refuse to even acknowladge that this is happenning.  I had to go straight to the developer and he showed me a way to.... well... see if Steam was the culprit.  Games ran fine after I tried this method but when I e-mailed Steam with the proof they threatened to ban my account meaning I would lose all my games.

I would save previous interactions, then tell them exactly what I think of that, meaning if they ever try to threaten me again with account termination for talking to them about a problem they caused, I'd make the case public and sue them for fraud.
And if they did just that, threatening me again, I'd do just that.

I did try to go higher but they stated they are within there right to terminate my account claiming that the method I used to prove Steam was preventing me from playing the games broke the TOS contract you agree to for using Steam.

[wolfsite]

Pacifien wrote...

wolfsite wrote...

Pacifien wrote...

Maverick827 wrote...
Why is Steam better than Origin, anyway?  I use both and I don't see anything that Steam does better.

Customer service.

Your kidding right?

Last few times I used there service I had to wait a week for an auto reply telling me to try things I already did.  Steam is still blocking me from playing 3 or 4 games I purchased off of it but they refuse to even acknowladge that this is happenning.  I had to go straight to the developer and he showed me a way to.... well... see if Steam was the culprit.  Games ran fine after I tried this method but when I e-mailed Steam with the proof they threatened to ban my account meaning I would lose all my games.

Guess you have a bright future with Origin then.

In Truth my future has been sliding over to GOG

[Allan Schumacher]

MegaSovereign wrote...

@Allan

It's true that Peter Moore's response would have gotten heat no matter what he could have said. But his response is filled with fallacies. He effectively handwaved most of the votes as general homophobic reactions. It's silly.

I don't think they do.  Giving it a quick read again:

Are we really the “Worst Company in America?”  I’ll be the first to
admit that we’ve made plenty of mistakes. These include server shut
downs too early, games that didn’t meet expectations, missteps on new
pricing models and most recently, severely fumbling the launch of SimCity.  We owe gamers better performance than this.



Some of these complaints are 100 percent legitimate

What he said was, the people that are voting for EA because they make LGBT games (and these people do exist.  I have seen forum posts of people linking to the poll as protest to EA and our gay agenda) are going to be disappointed.  We don't care what those people think.

So unless you were voting for EA because of our LGBT agenda, he is not handwaving your votes (or even "most" of the votes) that were done for a more genuine reason.

You can argue that it's a PR piece (it is; he's proud of the company, and that we're big makes us a target, we still have some very successful products, etc. etc.) and that diminishes the blog's effectiveness (which is fine), but the perspective that he's just handwaving away the criticism to mostly homophobes is not correct.  Something extra has to be read in to conclude that.  Maybe he could have used the term "most" of these complaints, as the word "some" doesn't convey much of a sense of quantity.  Put up next to "most" some (lol no pun intended) people could assign a minimal perspective of it.  This was the motivation for my "I can understand your perspective" comment I made earlier.


The danger being, if you're feeling jaded/cynical, you're going to have a predisposition to make assumptions that fuel that.  And yes, I have my own biases.  Though they aren't through a fear of Moore or for any concern for my job security.  I am openly dismissive of the entire poll having any significant relevancy (I am openly dismissive of pretty much any online poll having any sort of relevancy.  I remember Zynga pushing up the brackets on an Escapist best game company contest).  So my bias is that I'm going to read into Moore's comments from the perspective of not really granting much legitimacy to the entire contest.

Moore still openly stated that the 900,000 SimCity people that claimed their free game on Origin were fully deserving of that, and that EA owed it to them.  This number is easily most of the SimCity owners.


That's the way I read into it though, for all of my biases.  Take that for what it is worth.

[AllThatJazz]

Volus Warlord wrote...

AllThatJazz wrote...

Utterly stupid. People forced out of their homes is, apparently, of less importance than the launch problems of SimCity and the dubious business practices of a luxury product manufacturer. Sigh, practically the definition of 'first world problems'.

Standard misdirection. Other people being bad does not automatically make you good. 

Not sure  where you got that I said EA are 'good' from that. Just not worse than the Bank of America, which is after all who they were up against in the final.  Had the competition been purely between luxury product providers, and had the award been named 'worst luxury product provider in America' then EA could well have emerged a worthy winner. But an  award named 'worst company' where one of the finalists is directly responsible for ruining lives? Yeah I still think EA winning that is utterly stupid.

[Dave of Canada]

My biggest problem with the whole "homophobe" thing is that we're starting to see a pattern, we've seen it countless times before but whenever Electronic Arts suffers any controversey, they immediately have an article or post which explains how they support gay rights and how that's the reason they're getting flak.

Now, I'm not going to dismiss that some of this is legitimate, I've seen threads and discussions from people who wanted to destroy Electronic Arts because they're "****-lovers" and such. They're terrible people and they're certainly a voice present in the shouting against Electronic Arts.

My problem stems from the fact that whenever there's a problem, be it last year's worst company award / Mass Effect 3 / SimCity / Dante's Inferno / etc, Electronic Arts will always fall upon the claim that they support gay rights and always announce it immediately when they get hate. They're creating a moral argument, hiding behind it like a wall.

It's not only starting to peeve me but a lot of online communities--gay or not--are starting to notice this trend, some gay communities are downright offended because they feel trivialized for PR. The marketing has to stop associating their support of gay rights with controversey, doing it once or twice is fine but we're on a trend now.

Modifié par Dave of Canada, 10 avril 2013 - 12:18 .

[Cainhurst Crow]

The ultimate example of first world problems.

Move over exploited people of africa, enslaved people of asia, the chinese company who supplies many mexican cartels with the chemicals they use in meth, and corrupt american oligarchies, your all small frys to this entertainment company making me need to use the internet to play my game.

Oh the horrors, oh the humanity, surely people will look back on EA and use it's atrocities to make the next schindler's list.

Modifié par Darth Brotarian, 10 avril 2013 - 12:21 .

[Overdosing]

bmwcrazy wrote...

MingWolf wrote...

EA Worst Company... again!?! Well, I'll bet SimCity had a lot to do with this one.

You think they'll win it again next year with Dragon Age 3? 

Oh God, no. I swear EA would just be obliterated if that happens.

[Seifer006]

LOL!

hilarious. Steam all the way. I don't have any problems with them except for the minor ones but Origin POS.

My past posts shows it. Plus ME1,2 were on Steam and yet I have to HAVE ORIGIN to run a game that I payed $80 just to play.

Gabe Newell FTW

[Allan Schumacher]

EpicBoot2daFace wrote...

Allan Schumacher wrote...

I don't know.  "We could do better" I think

EA said "We can do better" in 2008, and for a while they were. But now they're back to their old tricks again. I don't want to see EA go under, even if I don't like the way the company does business. All I want is to be treated fairly and for EA to not take advantage their customers every chance they get. But the problem is I know that's not going to happen. This acknowledgement from Peter Moore is a wasted effort because I know EA is going to continue to treat their customers unfairly and take advantage where they can.

I think you missed the joke.