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This is a tale of two worlds. Bioware support vs EA Support.
I can connect to EA support and speak to someone in under 3 minutes.
Bioware is invisible here.
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I have a bug with Black Emporium. Reinstalled Origin, clean boot, repaired Inquisition.
My mage went through yesterday no probs. No one can enter today. Crazy.
No change at all. Just freezes. Only way out is Task Manager.
They have wiped their hands of it I think.
Oh well.
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"tale of two worlds"
That's exactly what I was thinking the other day. It seems that Bio's game developement and patch support mechanics were developed independantly from EA's Origins Digital delivery goals and game monitoring. So, not knowing the strengths /weakness of Origins, Bio goes on their merry way and develop products that are somewhat incompatible with origins. It seems that once a patch is ready for prime time, Bio hands it over to EA and washes their hands from it.... reminds me of IT pruduct developer managers. After a long develpment cycle a banking application is officially turned over to the datacentre production schedule. After that "ceremony" datacentre and support staff to deal with the eneevitable bugs...
Here is my story, which to me, explains Bio and Origins... a bit long so feel free to skip it.
At the time I was shifted from Network Manager to the Datacentre Manager for a very large corporation using IBM mainframes. The new corporate goal was to make available all of the customers' data, if requested, for a fee to cover processing and mailing costs. The VPs hired an agency with experience with this sort of thing from an outside jurisdiction. They came in, consulted, designed and I was asked my opinions on batch production, which basically turned to be "don't negatively impact my 12 hour production schedule." Translated, the corporate goal was 12 hours for online services and the remaining for batch production... 7am to 7pm = online. Impossible to run both at the same time. Then while this application was under development, I inherited the Mailing Dept = multi-million dollar budget... paper + stamps + envelopes. It was that small... grin.
To complete the BIO + Origins understanding, one needs to know about mailing machines and envelope limits.
Your bills that come with an envelope start their life from a batch job run at night. This production job runs several application in sequence and there is one that encodes the printed pages with ID codes for the mailing machine. The output is fed to a high speed programmable laser printer... big monsters.. tall as I am. The output consists of one or more pages per customer. from the printer's output stack they go to the mailing machines.
Operation of mail machine
Mailing machines have stations whose functions are to insert paper into envelopes. Smart machines read the bar code from the side of the paper (check your bills). and fold the paper (if necessary) to fit the envelope. Think of the mailing machine like a capital 'L' rotated 90 degrees to the right. The small part is the input hopper containing the ouput from the laser printer while feeding stations are placed on the "horizonal" sections of the "L". Each stations have their own hopper and the 1st station contains the envelopes. The machine inserts as many pages as necessary per customer into the envelope. A customer may get one page, while another gets three. Once the machine hits a new customer the envelope is moved to the next station for possible return envelope insertion, then to the next for an ad insertion... and so on.... last function in this "assembly line" is to seal the envelope and placed output stack for mailing.
Limits
Envelopes have physical "stuffinig" capacity and also have regulatory limits... ie: envelope weight limit for specific mail classes. First class mail has a max of five pieces of paper but can be less if the "weight" of the paper is higher than 20lb stock. Think of paper as fine to cardboard-like stock.. First class mail is expensive and the cheapest is ad mail.
Next limit is the number of insert stations in the mailing machine. For each different marketing material to be inserted in the envelope, you a need a station to contain the material in the hopper.
Back to the application.
Three weeks before production a meeting was held to discuss the number of pages the application could generate per customer. Lo and behold, about 15% of the customers would generate pages outside the limit of my mailing stations. Now, that generated some HEAT!
Basically, the application architects forgot to include the limits of the Mailing Department machines in their design for printing customer data. Basically, they did not talk to me prior to final design approval.
END of Story
Bio is seems doesn't talk to the Origins people as well..... or so it seems. Origins' purpose is digital delivery, DRM verification, game advertising, recording game metrics, game saving/restore to and from the cloud and "sticking its nose where it doesn't belong." Patch delivery and install appears to be missing from its original design concept. Thus the two appear to have a stormy realtionship.
Why on earth Origins can't simply download the patch to the gamers' machine and install it from there is something I don't understand. This avoids duplicate downloading in case of problems. This approach also allows for the gamer to continue playing while the patch downloads in the background.
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