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[theweaselking]

Bioware is having way too much fun with a game they refuse to release on a platform where I can buy it.

Twitter feed of Emily Wong, Alliance News Network.

via desdenova

Comments

[lafinjack.livejournal.com]

What's weird is that SWTOR supposedly also requires Origin, but once I was instructed to install it, the independent SWTOR launcher took over and I uninstalled Origin with no issues.

[kafziel.livejournal.com]

Well, if you installed it once, they have your information already.

[lafinjack.livejournal.com]

Well, like everything, I gave them a dummy email address (*@lafinjack.net), and SWTOR already had my physical address and billing info anyway.

[arielstarshadow.livejournal.com]

It was a pretty awesome feed throughout the day - and people even started using the hashtag as a means of role-playing.

[chrisrw109.livejournal.com]

Interestingly, I've always thought that Bioware has story issues. But that feed? That was damn well done.

[argonel.livejournal.com]

I will note that I can buy on the platform they are offering it on, but I will not. So instead of getting ~70% of the price on steam they are getting 0% of the price on Origin. Seems like great math for making profit to me.

[pappy-legba.livejournal.com]

Godammit I didn't know this game was a casualty of Origin until now. Looks like I'll be waiting for EA to be less retarded as well. I realize I'll be waiting awhile.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

I'd like to play the game, and I would have pre-ordered and paid the full-price ripoff fee and maybe even bought the special edition - but they decided in no uncertain terms that they didn't want my money, and I'm okay with that. I've got a ton of other games to play. Not getting to play this one doesn't actually hurt me any.

[pappy-legba.livejournal.com]

Yeah looks like I'll be touring Skyrim a bit more extensively.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

I am officially Done With Skyrim, having gone everywhere and done everything and gotten all the achievements, until there's DLC. Not even their evil high-res packs and easy mod-addition has brought me back.

But I've got a TON of games unfinished, including a bunch I still haven't started.

[jerril]

I started Skyrim a few months behind you, so I've still got content to leach out of it.

Don't write off the "mods" because a whole bunch of them are new territory and quests. I'm going to southwest Elswhyr (sp) tonight or tomorrow :)

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

I'm not writing off mods, I'm just refusing to get sucked back in yet.

Seriously, that game ate a lot of hours of my life.

[chrisrw109.livejournal.com]

TWK, just curious, what's your Origin based objection?

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

First: I have Steam. I'm not interested in starting over with a new delivery system, new Friends list, new place to track things, new list, new payments, etc. Steam's done a lot to prove themselves reliable, safe, and convenient.

So if I were going to set up a second digital download and management service, it would need to be a good one.

Second, Origin sucks. The game selection is tiny, the interface is terrible, the prices aren't good, and it's legendarily buggy as fuck. It's "Steam but worse in every single way". The ONLY advantage it has is game exclusivity, and none of the games exclusive to it are worth putting up with it for.

Third, even if Origin were as good as Steam, it contains spyware. It scans the contents of your computer (they claim only the contents of your Programs folder, but that's not what it tries in a sandbox and even if they weren't lying that's bad enough) and sends them to EA's marketing department.



So: Not interested in changing providers without a compelling reason, Origin is crap and presents no compelling reasons, Origin contains bundled malware. I think that's a decent enough set of reasons.

[pappy-legba.livejournal.com]

I held off against Steam for a long time, and with good reason. When it came out, Steam sucked. It had all the earmarks of another crappy, intrusive DRM system. Steam has improved by leaps and bounds, and it's about the only game DRM that respects the customers' rights as well as the sellers. I don't think that Valve made all those improvements that out of the goodness of their hearts; but because they had to win over a lot of anti-DRM curmudgeons like me.

Even in its current form, Steam is more intrusive than a lot of programs you run. It still acts as a gatekeeper to a bunch of stuff you've paid for and will occasionally make your stuff inaccessible if you don't have an internet connection. (I know about Steam's Offline play option... it has Issues.) I tolerate that behavior because it's added enough benefits to make up for these liabilities.

Origin, by comparison, sucks more. It gives many fewer benefits and is many more liabilities. For me to even consider it, it would have to leap through all the hoops that Steam has already jumped through. I doubt that will happen; EA is nowhere near as savvy or considerate as Valve is.

But EVEN THEN, it's still a duplicate DRM bundle that replicated the behavior of the one I already have on my computer, the one that I have a grudging respect for. It's a bastard red-headed clone of something I don't like too much anyway. If I let this one through the door, next month there will be a new DRM bundle coming out of every major publishing house. Not only will I have Steam and Origin tramping all over my computer, but 2KGame's steaming DRM pile and who know how many others.

No thanks. If I really get impatient about Mass Effect, I'll buy a retail copy and torrent then the pirated, Origin-free version that will probably be out in a few days.

[chrisrw109.livejournal.com]

All good arguments. Many of which I suspected but wasn't completely certain of.

[eididdy.livejournal.com]

Do you have something that shows it sending off the the results of the scan? Not that the scanning isn't bad enough, but the proponents of Origin claim that it's just reading and not sending anything.

[kafziel.livejournal.com]

Why is it reading in the first place?

[eididdy.livejournal.com]

Hence the "not that the scanning isn't bad enough" part of my comment.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

The people who caught it scanning says it did... and what would be the point of scanning if it wasn't calling hiome with the results, again?

[eididdy.livejournal.com]

I read someone who claimed to have run a Wireshark test and got nothing, so I wanted to see if you had come across something else.

[lafinjack.livejournal.com]

Not to mention that even if it were as good as Steam and had no spyware, it's yet another thing running on your computer. At least Impulse seems to be slowly migrating to Steam.

[richard kershaw (from livejournal.com)]

Concur.

I recently attempted to purchase SW:TOR via Origin. Confusing UI. Links that go nowhere. Requirements that cannot be met (best example - you need to purchase additional time to start playing - yet inside origin there is no way to do so).

Never mind the 3 hour lag between purchase and delivery. Steam tends to have sent me an email within 30 seconds of ordering, and that email doesn't include the "unlock codes" as the product is intergrated and already available.

Like Steam - but braindead. And slightly more evil.

[wyatt1048.livejournal.com]

You say 'They don't want my money' like it's a joke, but I'm starting to get the feeling it's not. I tried to buy ME3 through Origin. Didn't work. They say they accept PayPal, but that doesn't work within Origin. The system won't take debit cards - only credit cards. The way I found to buy it was to buy it from their website, although it took them four days to send me an email saying that had worked - I'd long since given up.

Even more ridiculous is the DLC - you can't just pay money for it. No, you need Bioware points. Which you have to get from an option three layers of menus down once you've logged into the Bioware website. I had to look up - on a third party website, because their help is all blank pages - how to buy them.

It's like they're actually trying to stop me giving them money.

And of course, now I have to wait until Friday because I'm in the UK. Why is that again? I do hope it's not because they're trying to get all the translations for the European market done in three day, but that wouldn't be the most insane part of their marketing strategy.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Extra reason to not buy via Origin!

I mean, I actually bought games a second time, on Steam, rather than put up with MS Live. MS Live and Microsoft Points were so terrible!

Money, people. Mon-eee. Not company scrip, not Bison Dollars. I want to give you MONEY, and take YOUR PRODUCT. Why is that so hard? Oh, that DLC costs 800 "MSP". Great. What's that in MONEY? You can't tell me, but I can buy 1000 MSP for $10? That's a dick move, but it makes the price of the DLC clear: $8. why can't I just buy your $8 DLC for $8 of MONEY, again? Agh!

[pappy-legba.livejournal.com]

There is a body of law controlling what can and cannot be done with currency. As soon as you convert currency to Imaginary Points, all those laws get tossed out the window.

For instance, if Sony or MS or whoever held your MONEY in an ACCOUNT, it would be regulated in a buncha ways. However, MS or Sony STUPID POINTS are not. They could revoke them all tomorrow. I believe many varieties of STUPID POINTS have an expiration date-- something blatantly illegal when applied to MONEY.

There's no question of why MS or Sony or other scummy corporations do it. The question is A) why do customers put up with it, and B) why major nation-states haven't regulated it out existence yet.