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Name your price on some great games!

 

The globally acclaimed MMORPG goes live on December 20, 2011 in North America and Europe, but customers that pre-ordered the title will begin entering the game starting as soon as today, December 13, 2011 at 6:00 AM CST. Players will access the game in waves, creating a rolling thunder of fans pre-loading and playing the game. The Early Game Access program will help manage server volumes, helping to ensure a smooth day-one experience. To participate in the Early Game Access program, customers must pre-order Star Wars: The Old Republic and redeem their code** at http://www.swtor.com/preorder/code. Pre-orders are available in limited quantities at most participating retailers and digitally via Origin.com™.

 

 

A couple of us will be playing on a East PVP server name Saber of Exar Kun. If you have no one to play with, join us!

If this is how you compete with STEAM… people will hopefully wake up. Looks like most of my points are coming true, just as you should expect with EA. Did you take my help desk challenge?

We are receiving information from a number of gamers who have received forum bans for a variety of reasons who are finding they’re unable to play Battlefield 3 (or indeed any other game tied into the EA user account), and worse, when they try to contact EA for help sorting this out, they are either ignored or told it’s tough. So what’s going on?

Three examples we’ve heard of in the last week provide contrasting sympathies for those banned, but always with the same result. The thing to stress at this point is, no matter the reason – nor how valid the reason – someone may have been locked out of their forum accounts, on no circumstances should this affect their ability to play games. There are a whole separate set of rules that might see someone locked out of their EA account (and the legality of these, and EA’s rights to prevent someone from playing a game they’ve paid for without offering a refund, are another matter entirely), and one should not affect the other. As was explained by EA in March. Said EA’s Senior Director of Customer Support, Boyd Beasley to “Arno”:

“Unfortunately, there was an error in the system that accidentally suspended your entire EA account. Immediately upon learning of the glitch, we have restored the entire account and apologize for the inconvenience this may have caused while accessing other areas of the EA service.”

Read the whole article for more details and people that lost all their stuff at Rock, Paper, Shotgun!

I looked at what Modern Warefare 3 brings to the table. One thing that was a blast with Modern Warfare was the Co-op missions. I talked about it during some podcasts and I have fond memories of playing the Co-op during thanksgiving while my brothers in law where here. So, since I am skipping out on EA and Origin and figured I treat myself on my birthday to MW3 in the hope that the co-op will rock!

So…. IGN loves BF3, PC Gamer likes it a lot and nearly all my friends have purchased it. Matter of fact I was a LAN this weekend and that gave me the chance to watch people play, see the game in action and talk with people that like it.

At past lan’s I even timed the date of the event on or shortly after the release of a game. You guys remember Modern Warfare?! Just wow! The action, the fun and the hoot and hollering of 15-20 people blowing stuff up and learning how to use the perks.

Timing of this lan was perfect. Battlefield 3 released just a few days before. People still tweaking systems, starting to work out how the game works and see all that shiny new frostbite engine in action.

Well… you would think. I think at the most I saw 3 people play the game at the same time. While we all more or less sat in the same room you heard more chatter about the one or two round of CS that was played than you ever heard about BF3. And ask me what was the HOT game that nearly everyone played?… Dungeon Defenders

Jup, you heard right the little Indie game you can buy for $15 stole he show big time and was fired up multiplayer and single player almost all the time. But I don’t want to talk about Dungeon Defenders, but of BF3 so lets move on.

I honestly think that BF3 is very very pretty. I can’t say more than the environments look awesome. And aside from some weird issues with dead bodies floating mid air on occasion I didn’t see a whole lot of glitches (aside from one computer where it wouldn’t start anymore for the rest of the weekend).

I did see quite a few people dying without ever knowing where a shot came from and I wonder if all that HD is starting to work against us. Not saying games should be more low res, but man it was hard to make things out sometime. But is was pretty…

So I wonder, why did we not see people play the game. After all this is THE triple A game and BeerJedi who was at the lan and already made his point about the game and Simon also at the lan now posted that the game is a “Must Buy” if you are into FPS. I have my theories but I would love to hear from you guys. Are you playing with your friends, do you join on favorite servers and how does the environment help or hinder playing with friends?

As most of you know I am a FPS fan, but I have been clear that I will sit this one out and not compromise on my position. Here are the reasons:

• Origin is required

EA may also use this information combined with personal information for marketing purposes and to improve our products and services. We may also share that data with our third party service providers in a form that does not personally identify you. 

I will not and can not compromise on my privacy. To write yourself a blank check to my data and the right to use said data is a no go. I am hugely surprised that all it takes is a few shiny moving pictures to sell their private data. I know people that rant and rave how they hate Facebook, but find it of no concern to install Origin on their system.

• Origin as Steam substitute
  The point of Origin is to compete with STEAM and I am all for competition. While Origin certainly has it’s shinny side and  things that work it also has quite a few half baked ideas that can and will hurt the customer.Case in point, if you get caught using a hack/cheat playing CS you lose that game (VAC ban) and your penalty if you want to play on protected servers again would have to be to buy that game again. All the while all your other STEAM purchases are unaffected.

  Now lets do that on Origin. Lets say you lose your cool because the one bug that is affecting your system and ability to use a product you paid $60 for is not addressed or even mentioned as low priority. You vent, you go onto Origins forums and give the devs a piece of your mind… maybe pushed the language a little to hard or the mod had a bad day and you get banned from forums. But wait…. everything is tied together. A ban from one aspect of Origin means a band from every aspect that will include your games! Be that one, two or in my chase with STEAM 195. Not a big issue now… maybe while you only have one or two games, but what about down the road?

  A little challenge for you. Contact support for STEAM and ORIGIN right now. I mean a real live human being that can help you with a hacked account. I bet I know who wins! I have had issue with my EA account before and I have spoken with STEAM support live and on the phone. But don’t let me spoil it for you… spend a minute or two and try to find support for both companies. No really, go ahead and do it right now… I wait here…

• I don’t trust EA
  STEAM has years of reputation, started 2002 and over the years has shown nothing but good will to it’s fans and developers alike. The amount of small Indie titles that gets sold on steam is amazing. In our talks with people that have worked with STEAM it was clear that they are happy with the value they are getting. There is a reason people like Gabe Newell and he feels like someone I want to hang out with. His comments about serving “me” the customer and first do no harm to fans are well known and plenty and over the years backed up by actions.
  Can you imagine the CEO of EA to do this?
  EA… I’d some up with a love hate relationship with the occasional feeling of an abusive spouse. Their stocks do well, but the choices that are good for the stocks sure aren’t always good for me the fan of a game, franchise or developer that got purchased by them. EA has a horrible reputation of buying some dev because of a hit game, running it trough the sequel mill, trying to make them do something that is “cool” and all the while doing the best to alienate the loyal fans.
  Worse yet, very often a game is poorly supported if at all and patches are few and far between. Don’t even get me talking about the shutting down of game servers. EA is well know for it and not just on the PC but also with console.
• Always on…
  To my knowledge if EA’s webserver has issues you won’t be playing your purchase, online or offline. Sounds like a bad idea! But over the last couple years we have given UBI such a hard time and again here this didn’t seem to factor in for anybody. I guess we can be made to like anything if the treat is sweet enough.

EA has refuted claims from German gamers that download service Origin – required to play Battlefield 3 on PC – spies on users’ computer activity and could potentially break the country’s privacy laws.
German Origin users reacted in anger after images surfaced online appearing to show the service accessing external programs and data synced from mobile phones.
Additionally, the Spiegel newspaper printed a list of items from Origin’s license agreement it reported could violate German privacy law.

Media storm ensued after someone found Origin quering Tax data stored on the users PC:

Here is a game that has been plagued with it’s fare share of delays and massive community unhappiness due to it’s bad record of communication with the fans. Delays without explanation are never a good way of making fans.

I was able to play a few minutes and it delivers everything that w have been waiting for. But I also heard that some might have issues launching the game. Lets hear it?!

There has been a lot of negative push against BF3 by PCPCGames.com over the last few months as the launch became inevitable.  Mainly due to the practices of EA and the focus to produce a Steam competitor through their tool Origin.  EA’s practices soured many of the community users on the game before it was released.

Well, I am here to set it straight.  I am first and foremost an FPS fan and I have played my fair share over the years.  FPS to me is all about multiplayer.  All about the game experience, and to put it very clearly:

BATTLEFIELD 3 DELIVERS!

I cannot make it more clear than this.  This is the first FPS in ages that truly (continue reading…)

Looks like a lot of forums are ablaze and some news sites start to report about a lot of people that can’t start the game or if that not connect to the servers. How are you guys doing? I know quite a few people purchased it.

Gamefront News and comments:

• I can’t even get the game to load battlelog tonight. I’ve restarted etc. It just gives the loading pop up screen and that’s it.
• Anyone know how DICE or EA is going to fix this? As far as I can tell no official word has been given regarding these issues.
• Can’t get on the game on pc, can’t play at all, no launch. I have been on the phone with tech support for 2 days and still can’t launch, they don’t have an answer. 
  What a nightmare!

This is LIKE WAY late, but I thought I would share this with you all.

You all remember a quirky indi Movie called The Gamers: Dorkness Rising?

We talked about it before. Great news here. The guys over at Dead Gentleman Productions have something new! Okay, its NOT so new, cause its been out for over a year… I cannot believe I missed this. Anyways, they started a web series called JourneyQuest!!! A series that was well revived by fans of their other stuff, and now they are going to do a 2nd season!

Now normally I would be like support them! Buy the season one dvd, and such. They even have a kickstarter page… thing is, they already met their goal for season 2. IN JUST 11 days!! WOW. Now they say if they can get a bit more in the next month, they will film the third season as well!!! These guys are completely supported by fans!

Well I am already supporting them by buying season 1 on DVD, and I will support their future growth with season 2, and I ask that you do the same. If you need some help trying to decide if you would like this, season 1 IS ON THE INTERNET, at their site, on youtube, and hulu. But, I am going to go ahead and post the trailer to the first season here, and get you hooked now.

Enjoy. I know I did.

Sandforce SSD Corsair Force GT in raid 0

Here is a short but sweet review of 2 Sandforce Corsair Force
GT 240Gb SSD hard drives in a RAID 0 configuration.

I moved from a single 256gb SSD drive to a raid 0 for a few
reasons.

256gb is still a bit on the small side and I wanted more
space.  The cost going from two 240gb
drives to a single 480MB drive  or 512gb
drive is about the same in cost. But the performance for two drives in raid 0
vs one drive is two times the performance. This is a lot of money to spend on
Drive space, so I figured if I was going to go big I should also keep performance
in mind This is why I went Raid 0.

This Gives a 2x performance gain for the same money as a
480GB Corsair Force GT.

I also thought of doing 4x120GB drives but My SATA3 6GB/s
controller only would raid 2 drives in 6GB/s.

My old SSD the Crucial C300 at the time was the best performer
coming in at 219MB per sec on the writes and 380MB on the read. At the time
this beat all other SSD’s in a 2.5” format by about 100MB per sec.

The Corsair Force GT 240GB comes in at 515MB/s on the write
and a blazing 555MB/s on the read. It uses the SF-2000 SSD Processor.

In RAID 0 the drives get
1030MB/s writes and 1100MB/s read.

See ATOT benchmark below.
When I say things open in a blink of an eye I really mean blink and
there the app is.

Rage has been out a couple days now and I would like to chat about it. Anyone want to join me tonight in a google hangout and talk about it?

You can pre order and buy Afterfall for only $1 dollar if 10 million people pre order.

http://www.afterfall-universe.com/en/index

Great article over at EuroGamer about Piracy, real and imagined damages and the a special look at UBI and the damage they have caused by insisting on punishing customers. It looks like customers did vote with their wallets and my assesment of “Driver: SF” and it’s lack of sales wasn’t far from the truth.

Notable quotes:

“Ubisoft told me that their PC game sales are down 90 per cent…”

“[There's] no public data to suggest that DRM works,” says Pachter, “but the fact that more companies are imposing it strongly suggests that they believe it works.”

“Consumers are right to complain about DRM, since it impacts both legitimate and illegitimate users,” reckons Pachter. “The problem is that the companies think it limits piracy, and an industrious and determined hacker can work around DRM, while a normal, legitimate user must deal with a hassle. I’m not sure where to come down on this, as I respect the companies’ right to protect their intellectual property, while acknowledging the legitimate consumer’s complaint about the problems created with DRM.”

“There’s good DRM and what we call bad DRM,” explains Svensson. “There’s a huge breadth of parameters and technologies available, and no one technology is bad – it’s the implementation that can be bad, the communication around the implementation that can be bad. What we try and do – and we haven’t always been successful in this – is never hurt the legitimate user. If the legitimate user is ever going to have a more negative experience than a pirate, you’ve done something wrong.

Of utmost importance, says Svensson, is “being upfront with fans”. And he himself has been on the receiving end of fan backlash before.

“If I were a console evangelist I’d totally play up piracy on the PC,” Ployhar says. “But I have to stop and wonder how in the world they can continue to make that argument when a few years from now most games are likely going to be free-to-play anyway.