67 réponses à ce sujet

[Bryan Johnson]

This explains a lot more than any info given by other devs in this thread. Thanks a lot.

It is certainly possible that I am mistaken, but my understanding of things is what I said was accurate. 

[Bryan Johnson]

Bummer. Sounds like its about time to get DAI included as the free game in a bundle package. 

You potentially missed my early comment, about (unless it changed) publishers have to pay for bandwidth on sony

[Conal Pierse]

Since Billy and others are being incredibly sensitive over this entire topic, going as far to send PMs to me threatening bans its not like its far fetched. People, like myself, are understandably upset, yet we cant speak out because otherwise we will be banned.

 

We have people like scene_cachet being given warning points for posting an image, myself for 'incorrectly using the quote function', yet Drasca can insult and verbally abuse users for months without reprimand.

You have every right to be upset. If that's how you feel, then that is how you feel, and we respect that. You also have every right to voice displeasure with a decision, piece of content, or what have you. If you do so in a way that goes against our boards TOS, you may receive moderator action, which comes in a variety of forms, including the occasional sarcasm in response to sarcasm.

 

You are also responsible for your own actions on these boards. If you see someone else violating the terms of service, that does not give you free reign to do so yourself. If you see someone else trolling or insulting other users, then please report them, and our moderators will take action.

 

You're also more likely to see productive change through clear communication of what particular points you are upset with. Saying you hate EA is less valuable feedback than giving specific examples of what you may disagree with, or sticking with pertinent information. For instance, "I hate EA and they are evil" isn't really necessary to a complaint about the dropping of gen3 support. "I am upset with this loss of support and you have let me down as a customer" is the relevant info. Shaking your fist at a corporate entity doesn't really do either of us much service here.

 

When I pass on information to our team, being able to say "people are upset about x, y, z" is feedback we can consider, address, and work on for the future. Telling them, "People hate EA," isn't of much use.

[Bryan Johnson]

Every time someone criticizes bioware in a manner which is emotionally charged then they either get warning points, or a ban. We saw this in voldemort thread that happened while the key bug was still present and we are seeing it here now. 

 

I do report comments that clearly abuse other users. Nothing is done. Dig through Drascas post history. You will find plenty of abusive comments that nobody bats an eye to, because its not BWE that are being abused, its other users.

 

What I am upset by is the fact that you over at edmonton completely ignored your fanbase for several months when the game was released, went on holiday when a patch you brought out broke the entire game for the entire christmas period. Permanently banned and made a public example of the user who has contributed more user guides and tutorials than any other person, runs and manages 3 off site forums for bioware games and probably cares more about this game than its own developers. Judging by the comments that I saw on reddit and youtube at the time, he was not the only one banned for speaking out.

 

I am upset that the connectivity in this game is utter garbage. I have problems every single time I log on, be in connecting to friend or pugs. Crashes, disconnects and loss of progress are an every day occurance. Not to mention that whenever I dont host I have a noticable amount of latency to the host, again, something which is not present in any other game I play.

 

Bugs. My god, the bugs. Key bug. XP bug and enemies spawning outside the map. Game breaking bugs that are introduced after patches are issued. There has been so many bugs its unreal. At launch the game was near unplayable. See the huge PC thread in the SP forums for that. Lots of these issues have still not been addressed.  

 

I have lots of personal issues with things like RNG and spawn systems, though they aren't game breaking and I can live with them, but I still dont like them. 

 

Dropping support for xbox and ps3 after 8 months is a huge slap in the face for those players who bought the game on those platforms. The bottom line is money. EA loves money. Thats a fact. They will screw over any amount of users, for any reason if it means more money for them and its legal to do so. That means cutting story content (seriously, the DAI SP story was made with DLC in mind to actually finish the story) in order to push DLC sales. Smart business models, but at the expense of having your customers hate you (which they do by the way, thats why EA was voted the most hated company in the US two years running). 

 

Not to mention the unprofessionalism of some of the staff you have on your team. I meant, sarcastic responses when grilled about things like the game breaking bug that was introduced is one thing, but indirectly threatening to ban users via the PM system here because they said something that hurt your feelings? Of course this is normal human response, but seriously, hire a PR rep to do the talking on the forums. My company does it, and guess what? We don't have our web forums set ablaze every time we make a difficult choice which will disappoint users.

 

As for productive change? That only happens when there is monetary incentive with EA. You and I both know that. None of these comments will go anywhere, since there has been thousands of comments like this prior to me making it. And EA still remains potentially the most hated company in the entire industry for completely justified reasons. One of them being dropping patch support for 2 platforms after just 8 months and what, 8 patches when it was explicitly promised that 'we will support dragon age multiplayer far beyond mass effect 3'. 

 

So these are some of the reasons I am upset. Bioware, I love your games, but I really really wish that another company was making them. Take a leaf out of Blizzards book. Or CDprojektred, or Valve, or Mojang. Huge companies who pull in loadsa money and still have large, loyal and happy fanbases.

Hello I am going to only comment on some of the things that you have said, because I do not spend a lot of my time on this forum, but some things I will just point out.

 

Alright ill start on the way moderation is done. First off, given that I have no history on this sub-forum (outside of this post) I do not know the history of the user 'Drascas', they could indeed be a very negative poster, but the way you have brought up his name make it seem like you have a vendetta against him (once again my perspective). I can see that user has indeed received warnings before and they all came from the BioWare mods (much like all yours have). When we as employees come into a thread, undoubtedly we are going to be more warning/ban 'happy' than the mods because lets face it things can be heated and as you said we are human. Further more we take the perspective of you just came into our house and started yelling at us, so we have a right to throw you out, type of deal.  

 

There have been bugs yes but you make it sound like the majority of users out there have been broken for months and months and nothing has been done. Your examples of key bug, no xp, enemies spawning in my personal play (mind you for MP that is in the range of about 25 hours), I had hit the key bug 4 times (which was then fixed in future), but not others. Once again I understand that bugs are indeed super frustrating and we do try and deal with them as best we can. 

 

We arent making things up when we say working on 10 year old hardware is not easy. I have been one of the QA experts for the PS3 for the last 4 years, and even 4 years ago things were challenging and now when we are 4 years later and have something with 8x the memory alone, it makes it hard to develop/test them and concessions have to be done. Already things had to be done, xbox 360 has a mandatory install disc (do you know how many games have this? I can only think of BF and GTA and us) without it this game wouldnt have made it out the door. Do you know what the limit on Xbox 360 patches used to be? 2MB (cert requirement) and absolute technical limit of 2GB. Our last Xbox 360 patch (Patch 8) was 791MB for German (This was after we did something that technically was not standard procedure to half it) to contrast this Patch 5 (without our procedure to half it) was 360MB. Given that our next patch is looking on track to be 50% bigger than the previous one, something like that may be approaching the hard line technical requirements of the system, and there was no more tricks to pull out of that magical hat. PS3 has a technical requirement on how big your lifetime DLC can be. These technical requirements were based on what was imagined over 10 years ago, or was available to the technology.

 

We continuously talk about making decisions with 3 groups in mind: customers, employees and shareholders. Without each of them we would not have a business and it is a balancing act to try and satisfy each of them. Each of those groups like to believe they are getting the short end of the stick, another aspect of human nature. 

[Bryan Johnson]

Thanks for the technical input. Its very useful and would have been great to have been explained to us in this way from the start (since none of us, or few of us are actual game developers). Im sure a lot of users affected will appreciate this perspective from the inside

 

As for the comment you've quoted, this is usually true for most businesses. However, as has been demonstrated in the past, and is continuing to be demonstrated, EA places its shareholders far above its customers. I can't speak for employees obviously, but as a customer, EA does not make me feel like my business is of any value to them whatsoever and this is evidenced by the corporate decisions they make. 

 

One example I will give to you is Valve and the paid mods fiasco. Reddit and several other webspaces were on fire for a couple of days because Valve decided to monitise mods, taking a cut for themselves. 2 days later, the CEO came out publicly and apologised. The decision was reversed because the customers did not like it.

 

Valve almost certainly lost a good chunk of change as a result of that decision being reversed, but it made me feel like my opinion mattered. 

 

Im sure you have seen this video: 

 

 

Obviously its very over the top and exaggerated, but the core principles of why we as the consumer hate your employers so much are there. Businesses exist to trade a product for payment. They make profit in order to improve their services, product quality and to support themselves comfortably. The only thing that EA is concerned about is the last point, and they make it abundantly clear that this is something they obsess over. (quoted from that video btw).

 

'improve their services and product quality'

 

Dragon age multiplayer has WORSE networking that Mass Effect 3 ever did. its had more game breaking bugs and issues than ME3MP did. Its had less content and drastically less communication between fans and devs than what we had in ME3MP. the PC version of the game has clunky controls and was very poorly optimised at launch. No improvement on product quality, despite being released almost 3 years later. The only thing I can safely say has been improved is how the game looks. DAI looks great.

 

'support themselves comfortably.'

 

Right, now where do I begin here? The ending is cut short. We are left with a huge huge cliffhanger. We will most likely have this Solas DLC (which xbox and ps3 will never ever get now) released in the future, sold at a price of $14.99. We have cosmetic packs, exclusive content locked behind paywalls such as digital deluxe, logitech promos and AMD promos. 

 

This video sums the attitude that EA has on add ons nicely. Great business model for raking in $$$, scummy practice for us customers. 

 

 

Surprisingly accurate south park take on it:

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2luhwy3KAE0

 

Id write more, but i have work tomorrow, so im going to go to bed now. 

 

Further reading, for anyone who wants to learn more about why EA is one of the industries most hated companies: 

 

http://consumerist.c...erica-for-2012/

 

http://consumerist.c...ny-madden-fans/

 

http://www.polygon.c...rica-poll-again

This will be the last time I speak on something like this because it is going off topic. Once again ill preface this is my own personal opinion.

 

So lets start with the articles you linked, they have something in common, they are 2-5 years old and heavily affected public perception. Think about how hard it is to change public perception for the better, let me give you some notable examples. When I say BP, is your immediate thought the oil spill from 5 years ago? How about Halliburton does your thought go to that of Iraq? Can you think of firestone tires without immediately thinking about the roll over recall form 15 years ago? Exxon without thinking about the Valdez oil spill 26 years ago?

 

Do you know where EA was 2-5 years ago in terms of stock price? Looking likely that it would be involved in a takeover from Disney. So clearly that part of the pyramid was also seen as lacking. 

 

The video you linked of John Riccitiello (our former CEO, and I actually miss the guy he was really intelligent and nice), was doing a presentation to shareholders. Which I am going to assume do not know a lot about gaming, and if they do they probably know that something like Fifa and Battlefield are some of the biggest names and therefore the most profit associated with it. So how is it you can easily talk about the concept of micro-transactions to immediate explain the concept behind, you are not going to attempt to explain the whole foundation of fifa ultimate team, but everyone knows how a gun works so you can see how that kind of thing repeats over and over. It is my firm belief that this was just an example to show the concept, such that the audience would understand (remember the audience being shareholders).

 

Lets move onto Valve, you mentioned that you understand the pillar of Employees, Customers, and Shareholders. What is it that Valve doesnt have, Shareholders they are not a publicly traded company. I imagine part of this has to do with the juggernaught of money flow that is steam, they never needed the cash in order to grow, they created something that allowed them do that, I am sure when EA went public in 1989 it did so to get money for some projects it had in mind and thus created all 3 shareholders. The moding controversy that you mentioned also cost Valve millions of dollars in people complaining alone, so it was a financial consequence. They also are rated with an "F" rating with BBB, with 800 total cases, EA sits with an A+ with 2000. Valve has something that others dont though, a strong public perception and when you have done something bad people will say "oh they mistepped once" but if you do something bad and you have not the best historical perception you will pay for it strongly.

 

Once again you seem to perceive that we place shareholders above all else, whereas I do not feel that way, there are certain things that you might perceive as placing shareholders first but in some cases you are bound by law. Like if I was an executive, I could say, in a month we are going to release the biggest DLC you had ever seen and then not release it for another 6 months. The reason for this is you are making people think that the current value of your stock is going to go up because of future sales, based on a schedule. You run into issues when something is schedule to be released in a financial quarter and then it is not released until another one. Which is why I think you are seeing more and more people are talking less about release dates.

 

As for the MP part, I cant comment I didnt work on the MP part. I can say for more/less dev interaction vs ME, I believe that the people you would primarly be talking about would be Derek Hollan and myself (since we were the most active) and to a degree Eric Fagnan. Derek and Eric are no longer with company, and myself DA MP is not the type of game I like to play in my spare time. I have also moved to reddit as my preferred type of communication (the reason for this is because I like the layout more). I believe Billy, Blair and Luke do plenty of fan interaction just the interaction has changed from being on the forum (like you are probably used to) to twitch and twitter.

 

I do agree with you, that there is certainly things that we could do better and that is what Conal was stating that we can do so with constructive feedback. Typically yelling at us (not saying you do, but some people definitely do), attempting to do gotcha journalism (like when I was linked in this thread with the description "dev confirms bugs arent getting fixed") or if you go to my point of once you have a reputation providing arguments with a video whose 'claim to fame' being fart jokes. I know my typical way of communication is from the technical side (which you have seen earlier), and given that I can not speak to anything in terms of technicality I do not believe that this will be as "effective"

[Bryan Johnson]

Thank you for the insight.  I'm not going to be happy about this situation, but its nice to see this.  Good on you.

 

I will say the amount of time the RTC glitch (which was in from the day the game released) and the key glitch were in the game was an extremely long period of time

 

For the record I would have preferred the game not be released on PS3 at all as opposed to this crap.  This is not acceptable.

I am sorry you feel this way, but I do have to ask you a question, if at this point we were to say no more for anyone, would you feel happier? 

 

The reason I ask is I believe people are far more likely to get upset about something when someone gets something they dont vs things ending. 

[Bryan Johnson]

Also food for thought.  Dragons Dogma Online is coming out for PS3, PS4, and PC.  It also offers cross platform play for all players. It's made by Capcom.

I am sure this is something that they negotiated with Sony, and if the game was actually released on Xbox, this would not be the case.

[Bryan Johnson]

I can only imagine what tomorrows stream is going to be like (if there is one).
 
One thing I'd like to ask though. Would it be possible - for the XBO and PS4 versions - to decouple the Multiplayer from the original game? I understand that it is financially - and technically - burdensome, but if such a thing were possible, than it would at least give former 360 and PS3 players of MP a chance to get back into the game.

Alright would it be technically possible, yes but not as easy as one would think and not without a lot of ramifications. I am not sure if you are aware, but the trial on PC is basically the hinterlands and MP and it is not that much smaller than the main game. So same would be said about anything for PS4 and XboxOne. As I said in an earlier post, if we were to do something like this there would have to be some sort of incentive for first party to allow it on their platform.

[Bryan Johnson]

EA/Bioware decided, at some point in time, to abandon a portion of their customer, and fan base to focus on what they see as a more financially lucrative path, leaving that portion of their customer/fan base with a product that, at best, is not working as intended, purchased in good faith.

Even with that, imo, morally nebulous bit of trickery, the sting would have been eased if EA/Bioware had accompanied their announcement with some at least minimal offer of reparations; if not a free upgrade, then a discounted transition to new gen; no DLC, fine, but no effort made to patch remaining issues? No effort made to at least leave these abandoned customer/fans with some sort of good feeling? No concession given to leave them feeling any sort of loyalty, but instead a semi-commiserative, yet still practical indifference to their frustration and disillusionment.

Totally understand y'all taking things personally, in your place I guess I would too.

Alright you'll have to bare with me this one is coming from my phone. I am quoting the parts I am addressing since as I said I am decoupled from MP. Also paraphrasing some answers because I went into more detail already in a previous post.

I would not say that next gen is more financially lucrative compared to last gen, if we could flip a switch and have what we do work on last gen without a ton of effort (or in some cases technical impossibility) then we would have certain done that. If the argument is we are money focused then we would do everything in our power to make that money. So the options left are, it can't be done, there is too much variables to allow a reasonable guess such that potential profits are not worth it or it simply would not be profitable. Yes I know for the last point technically something like patches do not have a sense of profit inheritantly.

For the offering free upgrades or a discount look a page or 2 back when I say that, that would be a very costly thing to do.

As I have initially said the main purpose of future patches is support for DLC (notice for pretty much every DLC we put out there is a patch immediately before it?). Does this mean all the patches will do is support DLC, almost certainly not, but introducing a bunch of changes that effectively serve no purpose, is just adding pointless risk. Decoupling those changes that are new things or bug fixes from the rest is just asking for even more danger.

Oh and so far I have not taken anything personally except being falsely represented. Only once have I been driven to anger from this board.

[Bryan Johnson]

Bryan, we may disagree on some issues but i just want you to know that i have a huge amount of respect for you for giving technical insight and for discussing things in a calm professional manner here.

Really hope to see you more in the next mass effect game.

Thank you very much for the compliment, and unfortunately you likely will not, as I am not slated to go to that project.

[Bryan Johnson]

Would you look at that BroJo answered 2.5 out of 5 of the questions I posted.

 

So BroJo would you agree that issuing a End-of-Support (EOS) or End-of-Lifecycle (EOL) notification prior to a major release and at the earliest possible time is a pretty standard software business practice?

Well I was not directing my answers to you, (otherwise would have quoted you). So not sure if you are saying you are happy I answered or upset that I didnt answer all. And looking at your history I can see the quesitons you asked. So I can state quesitons 1-3 can not be answered by me, since my role is not to make decisions, nor am I privy to when they occur if the people who make those decisions do not include me. Number 5 is answered as common code base, technically different solutions for each platform but that exists mainly for things like build settings (the solutions are auto generated) then you have # defines for specific consoles. Some data has variable sliders but that gets dealt within a pipeline.

 

Given the gaming industry I see very rarely an actual statement for end of life of either DLC or Patches, I will see a statement for cutting server support but generally not for patches or DLC.

 

 

Also to address your point about warranty and software, directly in our terms of service it is stated you are buying a product as is and as available. At the time of purchase there was no DLC and no patches available. Now I know this is not the most popular thing to bring up, but it is indeed a fact and stating we are changing the rules midway through, is not the most accurate. 

 

Side note:

Given that you seem to be part of the software industry, can you definitively state to me that you or your colleagues have never once shipped something that was intended to be a prototype out as the 'finished' product?

[Bryan Johnson]

It is so, so nice to see BroJo here again, even if fleeting. 

 

You can already see why we loved him so in the ME3MP forum. Good fellow and answers what he can as best he can. And he's highly intelligent, Yumi, he's not one to slip up and over-explain something that would land him in trouble. BroJo'll be just fine.

 

 

 

Well, poo. I know it's not something you can probably answer publicly, but I hope that means you're eventually moving on to the mysterious "new IP" project and not out of the company entirely.

I am moving to the new IP on October

 

 

Note to self: Next time ask for the QA guy first.

Both actually.

 

 

The gaming industry not adhering to traditional software models is a separate matter (that I've brought up before) however the question centered around the software market in general. Most users would say yes they have an expectation of an announcement if/when support for the product they are using is dropped. Let's split the baby and say in regards to patches, SP is not updated near as much as MP and support announcements in one manner or another are usually made for MP games, though this may vary by company. For the sake of those reading, here are examples of EOS and EOL announcements. Depending on who you're talking to, the terms can be interchangeable. My own personal definition of EOL is zero support, all dependent systems removed (no servers or back up systems exist to support or run the product anymore).

 

 

TOS aren't ironclad and people may have additional protection via consumer protection laws, including against as-is, that vary by country, state, or province. That's why all these corporations (not specific to the gaming industry) keep changing their arbitration clauses. As-is doesn't allow a seller/retailer to carte blanche sell a defective product (or one made defective by the seller/retailer).

 

Your sidenote: Depends. Before I was hired I heard horror and "remember the time" stories. Some of those people went on to become managers and senior-level employees. As we hired more qualified professionals that knew how to run a software company, those people were terminated. I wasn't sad to see them go. If you're drawing a comparison to DAIMP where 50% of the product is in a prototype phase, then the answer is no. If you mean have we ever shipped a product and gutted deliverables then yes however you'd be talking about sub-features. We have daily SCRUM meetings and monthly team meetings (including with support) about current objectives and pending changes. We outline, prioritize, create/fix, then ship (rinse and repeat). Due to the time and data sensitive nature of our market, we aren't afford the luxury of, for lack of better term, guinea pigging our clients on the production side. We invest millions and several years of research on scratch products even before we reach out to beta clients. Option 2 is to buy out competitors or a niche product, keep their best people, and expand our tentacles (i.e. pulling a EA/MS).

My beef isn't with BW dropping legacy. It was the lack of notification. When asked was the decision made prior to the Nov sale, I'm given the run around, being psych-analyzed by people who don't even have a Psychology degree (at least when Amelia did it she made me laugh ), or being told I need to kowtow for an answer.

Sidenote: Did you feel threatened by any of my questions? How do I play ME3 DLCs offline once BW or EA goes out of business or shuts down servers?

Alright ill start with the bottom up, to answer your sidenote before I left the project one of the last things we did was prepare a sunset patch for both ME2 and ME3 so in the case of shutting down servers that will be deployed. In the case of the company going out of business, that I can not comment on, because if such a thing were to happen depending on the means of the type of the company going out of business then it might not be possible. 

 

I cant comment on the decision for when to notify, so cant comment on that. Also based on my recollection, I do not recall hearing anything about dropping past-gen support prior to the game launching. 

 

Do I feel threatened by your questions? Not directly, although I know that these types of questions are likely to end up spreading and possibly onto news journalism sites if they are not clear. 

 

The reason I asked my sidenote is a matter of curiosity, I had heard from people that some products were released while they were technically prototype. Given my experience in the software industry is limited to Academia and the Game industry, I was curious. 

 

You are correct that ToS's are not ironclad and may include notes and may have concessions due to local laws etc. That is actually covered in the ToS:

http://tos.ea.com/le...TERMS/US/en/PC/

 

In your example of EOL and EOS, EA does provide notification of EOL. And for EOS you could argue that is what this, but just because patch support is cut doesnt mean that the entirety of the product is not supported.

[Bryan Johnson]

Bryan thank you for taking the time to share techincal insights with us.

I want to bring the focus back to the point of offering a discounted download for transitioning old genners. You brought up the figure of $6.40 as the cost of facilitating the download. Why not make the discounted price of upgrade $6.40 then? You could even make it $7.40 and still make a buck off everyone (which honestly seems to be a higher priority for this company than sustaining a loyal fanbase for the long haul).

BW is hesitant to post the important news of discontinued support anywhere besides this small venue, and for good reason! The fact is, you are all ashamed and embarrassed by the decision and want to cover it up and sweep it under the rug as much as possible to do damage control. However, the discount would turn this all around. Example: "Hey everyone DAI's updates and DLC have grown the game so much that it no longer fits on the PS3 and XBox 360. But now you can upgrade your DAI to the next gen for ($6.40), which is the cost of the download it itself. Happy gaming y'all." And that's how you start to build a fanbase based on trust, respect, and transparency instead of walking on eggshells (eggshells being the legacy gamers) and hoping none of them screams too loud.

Bryan your posts convey an attitude that EA's public image is already wrecked with negativity, and so why bother trying make it right. Bioware should be treating this "unfortunate news" more as an opportunity to build a more positive relationship with the customer... Not leave them in the dark.

 

Hello, you may have missed my further note. Although the dollar amount may be 6.40 (for Sony), attempting to facilitate such a thing would be far more costly than that, plus remember we would need to get both MS and Sony on board for such a thing, so there has to be a financial incentive for them to do so. 

 

I believe Billy mentioned we worked with retailers to put on things like half off sales already.

[Bryan Johnson]

The financial incentive being keeping your fanbase happy for future revenue... Nah, just dump the old gen'ers and charge them regular price, they won't mind, right? 

 

The biggest issue you have not addressed is why only spread this news on small venues such as this forum? (There was also a pretty negative conversation between BW employees and customers on Reddit I've heard about, but not had the displeasure of slogging through the comments) It's not on Facebook. And on your website, the article posted 2 weeks ago DOES NOT explain that you're dropping PATCH support. It only details future dlc content to new gen. 

 

That's misleading a large amount of potential customers buying your game now discounted PS3/X360 version of the game (Listed at $39.99 on Gamestop et al) and the assumption that consumer has is they'll be getting a supported game, and a game that works without tons of bugs your dlc created that you never bothered to fix. 

 

Why not post Billy's initial communication on Facebook? You have 1.3 million followers there. Why not update your website to include the information mentioned in Billy's post here, that you're also dropping PATCH support. There's a huge difference. Saying you're dropping dlc support doesn't include bug fixes etc.

 

How can you say you're being transparent, when information like this is left off larger mediums? I'd say you're not only being less than transparent, but misleading future costumers, and incredibly nearsighted in how you've (BW) handled communicating the transition to your current customers.

 

When all you do is refute arguments and not come to the table to accept the criticism given, you're not listening, and you're missing our points.

 

I guess we all digress...

Hello Innarra, I unfortunately can only speak to some of your points because some of it is completely outside my area of responsibility, and would feel unqualified to answer.

 

The Financial Incentive I was speaking of was for Sony and Microsoft, since giving away free copies (or "at cost") does not benefit them, so why would they agree to go along with things. It is kind of a prisoners dilemma, if one of them jumps then it is better for them but if neither of them jumps then there isnt much loss.

 

Given that I am the most active person on Reddit, there is no conversation that I can remember where I (or another) had that was something I would consider negative. May I ask where you heard this?

 

A ton of bugs is something that is a very subjective statement, so I can not really comment on that. If your argument is that the DLC/Patches have made the game worse in terms of bugs then it is a good thing that we stopped patching, as to not make things worse. On the other hand your argument is that we have made things better through patches then in essence you have gotten more than you initially paid for. If your expectation was that patching would continue until a point that all the bugs were fixed, then that is an expectation that unfortunately would never be hit. 

[Bryan Johnson]

I have. I have a reddit and a twitter account. No death threats or threats of violence. 

Despite there not being any currently that you see, and it might not be currently directed at us such a thing has (and likely will more) exist. We can look at something like Gamergate, or our own Jennifer Hepler to see examples of this, and something like that is not easily forgotten in a short time frame. Like I stated in another post and on another topic, people have memories and associations with certain things. Some developers have the association of if you talk online people will make your lives miserable (including long term). 

[Bryan Johnson]

Hi Bryan, nice to chat with you here. Thanks for taking the time.

 

Nice attempt at refute here, I'll give you that. Please allow me to continue the criticism and further explain, since you are arguing semantics instead of the actual points I raise.

 

You argue that it's better that you dropped support altogether, so you're not making it worse. Is that really how you want to run with it? "Sorry we suck at patching our game, so we will just stop". My argument is that you gave us a dlc that never worked well, and that you never bothered to patch it and fix the multitude of issues. Then because it wasn't making BW/EA $, it was dropped. Regardless of the fact that 8 months ago, you decided to release it for the old gen. 

 

Would you say that you can safely bring a Virtuoso into the FC? No, no you can't. Everyone on the PS3 community knows not to bring that class to the FC. You are guaranteed to make the Host's PS3 freeze, resulting in them having to hard reset their system, and then host migrate. That's just one instance where the dlc (Dragonslayer) doesn't work. There are so many ways that connectivity does not work in this MP. I'm happy to list them if you're somehow unaware of the many bugs that plague your game. It's laughable that you need specifics from me to get the accuracy of my argument. Please let me know if that's actually the case.

 

As far as the reddit post, here it is. Someone had even posted the same link earlier (like page 12 or something)

 

https://www.reddit.c...en_inquisition/

 

Not sure if that's you, but no matter. That's the point of reference. The conversation held between BW and the public there is childish at best, and the argument is that it happens to all games, so this shouldn't be a big deal. Great arguing point... It's probably not you Bryan, you seem to be a bit more eloquent. 

Hello, 

 

First off yes that is me on reddit, I am sorry that you see my responses as childish, part of that comes with the medium where it is not tailored for speeches followed with rebuttals (such as the case of the forum). It flows more as a dialog where speed is typically priority over speaking properly. Here on a fourm you are nearly required to view a post that I like (and vice-versa) whereas someone who makes a pun can easily become prioritized over a 3 page document that is written 10minutes later.

 

My "refute" was to place thinking into one of three camps, since I saw those as a potential options for a thinking pattern regarding patching. So I had no real argument I had poised scenarios and let you decide for me which argument to make. Your next comment is kind of a hybrid of them. The free optional content that was provided has had major bug with it, so if something like that was not possible to fix (see memory) would the more honorable approach be to pull that content completely or to leave it as is knowing it is broken? Do I agree it is ideal? Absolutely not. 

 

Your statement of "I'm happy to list them if you're somehow unaware of the many bugs that plague your game.", I most certainly do not know all (or likely most) bugs that are in the game. This is not a function of my the role that I am currently serving. I do however know the number of bugs that we as QA have filed for the lifetime of DAI and would likely be a shock to most (for how high it is). But this is something I do not believe I can speak about as a concrete number.

 

I want to know where this argument was that it was dropped because it wasn't making us money came from. There are a good deal of things that we have done that did not make us any money. Patches in general do not make you money, definitely not directly and only partially indirectly. 

[Bryan Johnson]

If you didn't drop the PS3/X360 due to money cost, then why else would you drop support for the game less than a year after it's release? That makes no sense. Of course it was money. C'mon.

Once again I am not the one who makes the decisions but if you read my posts in this thread (all of them) I laid out a few technical reasons why I could see things being stopped.

 

Also I believe if you look at the "industry standard" patches generally stop in under a year. Shadow of Mordor I believe was 6 months. 

[Bryan Johnson]

I'd like to get back to my original argument, that no BW employee has addressed yet (Billy said "thanks for the suggestion" and that's as far as it went)

 

Why not post this information to a wider audience, and fix the post on your website to include the information that BW will no longer support patches for old gen?

 

Is there something you're trying to hide by not communicating that info beyond this forum and Reddit?

What you have now is misleading to the public, your website only includes dlc and says nothing of patch support. You may think you're being transparent by posting here, and that's great. We all really appreciate the level of communication from you. It's really cool we get to talk to developers and producers and real people involved and invested in this game. 

 

The fact remains, that on this forum, there's only a few thousand active members. Why not reach out to everyone with this? 

Once again I will re-iterate if this is directed at me, it is not my position to do such a thing.

 

It is also not common practice for game teams to say in any sort of widespread announcement that they are no longer releasing patches. Did you see one for ME3?

[Bryan Johnson]

The internet seems aware.
http://bfy.tw/15n2

Hello that seems a bit rude to reply in such a manor, so consider this a verbal warning.

 

Also the topic at hand is not DLC it is that of Patches.

[Bryan Johnson]

It doesn't matter that you're not the one making the decisions. You're still representing Bioware. I'm not personally upset with anyone on your team, you guys have been great... but you all work for the same company that makes decisions together. Saying you're not the one, don't blame me is a cop-out. Nothing personal, but why refute our arguments when you're apparently not the one with the knowledge to back up said arguments?

 

I have read your posts, and you've been pretty forthcoming with a lot of info, which is giving us a better idea of why support was dropped. Thanks for that! I understand money isn't the be all end all, but saying there were tons of other factors that helped BW come to that decision is a smoke screen for why money really was the deciding factor... it's just asinine. It's always the biggest factor. You don't make games out of the goodness of your heart, or because it's fun, it's your job, your livelihood, and EA is a huge corp with a bottom line to consider. We all can understand that it took more effort than it was worth to BW/EA to continue offering support.

 

I'm not arguing any of those points. Of course I'm sad that I bought a game on an old gen system I thought would be supported longer, and a game I thought would work better. This game, mainly the MP was honestly the most fun I've had in a long time (90% of that being the community of players here on PS3, who really are an amazing bunch of folks), but also the buggiest. We spent countless hours dealing with connectivity issues, key bugs, commander death bugs, etc, and we stuck it out and kept up the loyal fanbase you enjoy. I understand it wasn't worth it for you guys to fix all the issues that plagued the gameplay. Did you fix some? Sure you did, and thanks. The game was mostly playable to a fault.

 

What I am arguing, is that by not continuing support for a game you're trying to sell more copies of, and not communicating that dropped support to a wider audience is misleading. Your team posts to Facebook every day. Why not say something there about this? Why not fix your website to include all the information (i.e. Patch support). Honestly, all you'd need to change is one word there. Stating that "All future dlc will be available on PC, PS4 and XboxOne" does not communicate that you're dropping patch support. There's a big difference there. That was stated here: http://www.dragonage...s/save-importer

 

Sorry guys, but I'd like to know why BW champions themselves as a transparent company, when it's clear they're leaving a vast majority in the dark about their decisions.

 

Oh... this poor, dead horsey just keeps taking hits.

I am sorry I do not agree with the notion that just because I work for the company and am a representative that I have to (or should) speak on everything. When I say I can't answer your question because it is not my position to say I am not trying to deceive you. You can also say we all make decisions together but ultimately that is not true, we do not have a flat corporate structure where everyone voice is the same.

 

No It is not a smoke screen, money is a factor yes, but it is no where near as large as you make it out to be when you have statements that you said of "Then because it wasn't making BW/EA $, it was dropped. "  your argument becomes singular and with an agenda. My statements at another point in this thread stated that we would be best served continuing to make DLC for last-gen in order to increase our profits. If we were only interested in cutting off things that make us the least amount of money last-gen would not be where we would start.

 

Given that your "dead horse" is regarding why we do not post on facebook and I have repeatidly respond with I can not answer that question this is the last time I am going to reply to that question or anything that is similar to it.

[Bryan Johnson]

I don't understand the white-knights. Approval of PR statements and giving a free pass to ethically questionable decisions because the "employees are cool ppl" is exactly why customers keep finding themselves in these situations. The act of WK'ing is borderline idiotic.

Okay I understand the frustration with people who are WK'ing, but what I think I dislike more is if people say something positive or agree with an official message then they get labeled as a WK and harassed and attempted censored. 

 

Not saying that is what happening here, but that type of harassment is (in my opinion) a form of attempted censorship.

[Bryan Johnson]

This makes me so mad. Not only has it become standard business practice to give PC players terribly optimized console ports, but they even deliberately downgrade the games in the name of parity. Ubisoft did it with Watch Dogs, CD Projekt RED did it with Witcher 3 and apparently Bioware did it with DA:I.
 
The hair models in this game are atrocious. Is there any way to use the hidden hairstyle models?
 

 
Please tell me this is not true.
 

Here is the fun thing about both of these things they are conclusions based on zero evidence. Outside of fuzzy statements I have not seen "proof" of either of these things.

 

Now, I do not know what the assets were but I am going to go on a little story to have a possible explanation for such things. On Dragon Age we have things we call DA weeks where the intention of these projects is to allow people to do their own pursuits without full guidance, sometimes these will make it into the game sometimes these will not. I know of one such occurrence where one of our QA was interested in learning Maya and in order to do so decided to make some rather beautiful looking hair, now I am uncertain if she presented these things to leadership as potentially getting in the game, but she had made them as a learning project. Now it is not too difficult to get things that are not intended to get into the final game to actually make it be "put in the game but never used". I am sure if I looked close enough I could find some of my test assets that made it onto disk. Now I can't say for certain that this is what caused what you have quoted but I think that is a reasonable reason.

As for ME:A being on last gen, provide me one shread of evidence outside of people claiming they heard it would be on last gen and I'll shut up, but I am putting 100% burden of proof on the "community" for this one.

[Bryan Johnson]

There is proof for Watch Dogs (players found a way to "unlock" the better graphics that were shown during the E3 presentation). The CDPR devs denied any kind of downgrade until after the game launched and then admitted that they didn't have the budget to develop two separate versions of the game and therefore had to optimize for the weakest hardware (consoles). I'm not sure about the hair textures in DA:I since I just read about them, but the tactical combat was terrible and made for consoles (just compare it to the PC version of DAO). The whole game (both SP and MP) plays like a console port.

 

I don't think I need to remind you of ME3's one button to rule them all either.

 

 

Consoles will always be a limiting factor when it comes to game development. A 400-500$ console simply can't keep up with a 1200$ PC. So the games are optimized for the consoles and then ported to PC, just look at the system requirements of the Witcher 3 PC version. That's hardly optimized.

 

Or I remember TotalBiscuit saying in his Assassin's Creed Unity review that he couldn't play the game on it's highest settings with his double Titans. Mind you, that game was a total trainwreck at launch, but it's definitely a trend. Developers who want to make games for both consoles and PC nowadays can't optimize their games for PC, since the consoles wouldn't be able to handle it (and yes, I'm talking Xbone and PS4 here).

While you do have points, and this is something the industry as a whole needs to consider. I was merely commenting on your comments about our game not for Witcher/Watch Dogs/Assassins Creed.

[Bryan Johnson]

I'll accept this explanation because ingame hair models have stayed the same since the early demos (E3/EGX)

Thank you

[Bryan Johnson]

Fair enough. I still maintain my point that the game plays like a console port. The fact that many of the devs supposedly played with a controller on PC speaks volumes.

To be fair thats because it is natively supported in the engine.