Hilarious. The world hates you because of how you treat PEOPLE. Yer a record label, idiots - you fuck people over for fun and profit: coders (artists - remember when you pioneered thinking of coders this way?) and players (you understand the analogy at this point, right?)
We Can Do Better
111–120 of 121 posts
Re: We Can Do Better
#112EA is my first blacklisted company. I stopped piracy last year and now every piece of software on my laptop is purchased or Open Source and Free. This in a country where software is still thought to be free by most people.
BUT I am pirating EA games. Their policies are anything but customer friendly! So while have a 70 game library on Steam, I still have pirated Lord Of The Rings: Battle For Middle Earth 2 and Mass Effect series.
And I can play my games when I want, the way I want without that draconian policy of always on DRM in a single player game.
I am sure I am not alone doing this. With Sim City, they have pissed a lot of people. And with PR like this, they are making this worse.
Re: We Can Do Better
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe I'm naive, but I dislike EA more than Equifax, and I have actually had Equifax stick nonsense on my report before. I believe Equifax are actually trying to do a good job in general — their mistakes are not the sort where I feel like somebody actively considered me and said, "Eh, screw him" — whereas I don't believe that about EA. Similarly, I don't think Ticketmaster is all that bad these days. My dealings with…
Your dealings with the company that coerced every concert venue in your major metro area to accept contracts that prevented them from booking concerts through anybody but Ticketmaster so that they could continue to collect nonsensical exorbitant handling fees were better than your dealings with EA, because you didn't like one of EA's games?
I don't recall the fees being all that exorbitant the last several times I bought through Ticketmaster. They came out to something like $2. I am not a rich man, but boy would I feel silly hating a company over a couple of dollars.
Meanwhile, my distaste for EA comes not from my critical evaluation of one of their games, but from the fact that their games don't friggin' work. I don't even play EA games (simply not my cup of tea), but my fiancee loves her some Sims. I defy you to try and do tech support for an EA game and come out still hating Ticketmaster more. I would gladly pay a $5 fee to make their games stop crashing and corrupting her data! There are game-breaking issues in their products that have existed for years for which the only known solution is "Use the version on The Pirate Bay." As one of the few honest PC players who refuses to torrent games, that is just galling to me.
Re: We Can Do Better
#114I've always found defensiveness really unattractive, especially in companies. Unless you are bringing new facts to bear, any piece that tries to make the "we're not so bad as all that" argument will probably be unsuccessful at winning hearts or minds.
Yeah. When has trying to convince critics that they're wrong ever worked? EA/Maxis keep trying. They simply can't win this one. They're in the wrong, and for the most part they probably know it. If they can't say anything positive, the best response would probably be radio silence until everything blows over. Stuff like this only fans the flames.
Or just honesty . . . I don't know how it would blow over in the press, but personally I would find it really refreshing if they just said, "Yeah, it's always online because you fuckers pirate too much. Deal with it." I guess that the gamers would probably not like that very much though.
Re: We Can Do Better
#115"The tallest trees catch the most wind." I hated the article starting there. It is cowardly, evasive and deceitful. It completely ignores the issues people have with EA.
They might as well have put up an image macro containing "haters gonna hate".
Re: We Can Do Better
#116I think WCIA is an awesome concept and we should do more to tear down, embarrass, and ultimately dismantle bad companies. That said, the idea that EA would win a WCIA bracket with Time Warner Cable and fucking airlines ? Makes a mockery of the whole concept. Especially now. Yes, AAA games are pure dogshit. No question there. Just awful. It's easy to get nostalgic for 1995. Chrono Trigger was excellent, so was Final F…
On EA, I posted this as a suggestion:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5352969
Given the old CEO recently left the company, I hope the board is listening.
Re: We Can Do Better
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can't think of any age group who doesn't have to think about Equifax but happens to be large buyers of EA products?
I doubt most of the voters in that poll were under 17. But maybe.
You just need to thread on some popular forum pushing people to vote. After the Time's Person of the Year and other 4chan-influenced polls, you shouldn't assume there's anything valid about online polls.
Re: We Can Do Better
#118I follow a fairly large number of conservatives / Tea Party and libertarians (who would complain about the conservatives in this context) on twitter and the only mention of EA has been Sim City's problems. Must be the same people bitching to the FCC about TV shows.
gotta love down votes for a post like this - shows the intolerant politics of some folks
Re: We Can Do Better
#119Here is the poll. Now you can go vote for them as the worst company. (I wish they'd linked to it with "bring it on".) http://consumerist.com/2013/04/05/worst-company-in-america-s...
Wow. So of all the companies in the US, the "worst" one will be either EA or Ticketmaster? Not Lodsys or any of the other patent trolls; not any of the banks or oil companies; not any of the weapons manufacturers or dealers. A video games company or a company that sells tickets to gigs online. OK.
On the internet, out of the companies that people interact with that were entered for the poll. Yes, those would seem to be the worst.
Re: We Can Do Better
#120They could've "done better" by actually saying what they will do to improve things. This was an absolutely atrocious PR piece. It didn't address any of the issues people were having. "45 million registered users are proving them wrong." Such a goofy and useless statistic. When you require registration for your products, that doesn't mean people are satisfied users of your service, it means you got a lot of people to…
To be fair, people werent exactly happy when they had to sign into Steam to play HalfLife2 in 2004 either. Times are different i know, but people tend to forget that Steam was forced upon us in quite similar ways and really wasnt everyones darling like it is today. I agree with the rest of your comment though.
Actually I still dislike Steam and avoid that too. Generally I will buy a non-steam version of a game if it is available.
I don't want my computer to take longer to boot up or to run slower in case I want to play a game so I don't have Steam set to start automatically.
This means that if I want to play a Steam game (I have a couple like Portal) I must first wait for Steam to open up, get internet, log in (oh so slowly) and finally it will think about opening my game. However undoubtedly there's been an update and so steam will decide to install this first. All in all I'm bored by the time the Valve logo pops up and the actual game can start loading. Or you know, I could just pirate the game and it would open straight away without the need for Steam.
So in short, Steam is also horrible and forced. But at least they make better games and have something like customer support.