An Open Complaint Letter

"Playing with your friends has never been this easy."

I report this statement as a problem, because playing BF3 with my friends is the most difficult aspect of my BF3 experience on the PC.  Instead of facilitating player groupings and entry into games, BF3 is dysfunctional at every turn. My irritation is directed toward the product that is BF3 holistically-- the game itself, Origin, Battlelog, Punkbuster, ESN Sonar, and whatever else might be required to run the game.

The thesis of this complaint is that the BF3 experience is nearly entirely ruined by bugs, superfluous software, and incompetence.  To elaborate on my thesis, I will criticize Origin, Battlelog, and BF3 individually, attempting in each section to explain my discontent in depth without being bogged down by an abundance of detail. I have tried to be patient and evenhanded in my criticisms. I have also tried to be diligent and to offer praise where it is due, but most of all, I have tried and failed to play BF3 at several points in time while writing this complaint. To begin:  the Origin of my discontents, and a gamers’ perspective on the game market.

We are forced to use Origin software before we are allowed to play BF3. First of all, why are we made to use something whose functionality is already present in another program which we already have? Steam is ubiquitous in the PC market, and gamers love it because it allows them to play games with their friends and keep track of their communities in an environment which is well designed, intuitive to use, and maintained fantastically. In contrast, Origin is entirely dysfunctional, ugly to look at, and rarely launches or closes correctly or quickly, frequently requiring the opening of the task manager to close the process. Origin opens multiple copies of BF3 without being prompted to, and refuses to launch Battlelog in the default browser. Additionally, Origin is frequently activated by Battlelog, causing problems and lock ups. Battlelog and Origin friends need to be synched, which rarely works properly and in fact should be fully automatic. It sucks.

These problems indicate that Origin is programmed sloppily. I do not want a sloppily developed program running in the background of my computing environment, but you have forced it upon me in order to attempt to compete with Steam. As a gamer and a customer, my endorsement is essential for your success, and I do not approve of being unwillingly involved a second time in Origin’s competition with Steam. As a gamer, I was already involved in this competition when you launched the product in opposition to steam, and I make discriminating choices when I buy products as a result.

As far as I am concerned, Steam is the superior product, and it is the product that I would choose to use to play BF3 if it were an option. By forcing me to use Origin, you are pulling me back into a competition that I have already judged definitively. I do not appreciate being forced to use your software in order to support your new business idea. I also do not appreciate attempts to buy me off with %15 off coupons when I complain to Origin support staff. In fact, I resent these things immensely, and my opinion of both DICE and EA has soured as a result. It is difficult to respect organizations which have no respect for your decisions and opinions.

I will take this opportunity to state that I have been a Steam user since the very start, and Steam was never and will never be as buggy or obstructive as Origin is. I can see now that the difference between Valve and EA is very great; Valve focuses on quality more than money, and EA is the opposite. In every department where Origin fails (which, objectively speaking, is every department-- Steam has had a much longer time to refine itself and a much more methodical development staff) Steam succeeds. If I could ditch Origin and Battlelog for Steam, I would do it in an instant.

 My complaint here is not that Origin is not Steam, but rather that it tries to pass itself off as a competitor of Steam. It is not on the same tier of quality, nor in the same ballpark of quality. I understand that people worked hard on Origin, and that they thought it'd be really great and revolutionary, but sometimes people are wrong. Origin should not exist, and its existence is a constant reminder of how cynically desperate EA is for money.
When I purchased BF3, I made it clear which product I wanted—BF3. Obviously, I didn’t anticipate that my wishes would be ignored by someone who assumed that they knew what was better for me. While regaling us with random sounds and crashes, the Origin overlay system is extremely buggy, and no single functionality works entirely, often crashing both itself and the BF3 client. Both Origin and Battlelog crash constantly for me and my group of seven friends who play. If you promised to fix the problems with Origin and Battlelog yesterday, it would not be soon enough. These problems should have never even come into my awareness, and when I preordered the game for sixty dollars, I expected it to be polished.
The more people we would like to play with, the less we expect Battlelog to work. Aside from this expectation, the interface is absolutely terrible-- I can offer you dozens of specific bad interface choices if you're interested, but the most idiotic interface choice of all was not having an "invite to party" button. Dragging is not intuitive when there are buttons on everything.

Even properly installed and configured, Battlelog often doesn't load correctly for many people. Aside from this, it "feels" clunky with its button presses, and the "comm center" bar is especially torturous.  The explicit consensus is that we are sometimes able to play and somewhat enjoy BF3 despite EA’s and DICE’s attempts to absolutely ruin it for us with unnecessary programs and poor worksmanship. These severe quality control problems are pervasive in every piece of EA software that we use, but in particular, Origin, Battlelog, and BF3 itself are all exceptionally buggy. This amount of bugginess should have been quashed in the alphas of the various products. Speaking of the BF3 alpha, I’ll take a moment to talk about the earlier stages of BF3 and then springboard into BF3 in its current incarnation.

The BF3 beta was a shitshow. I don't like to cuss when I'm trying to make a serious rhetorical push, but it's the only word that fits. The abundant bugs of the various programs involved reared their ugly heads for the first time, and players were anxious about whether the bugs would be fixed by release, along with the inclusion of other essential functionality, such as squad support. We were promised that the release would be substantially better than the beta. It isn't.

Some of the bugs are fixed, but as a whole, the game and the other programs are of beta or even alpha quality. Wisely, a number of my friends canceled their preorders in light of the trashy beta. Unfortunately, I was not as wise as they were, and kept my preorder, with the condition being that the game would need to improve substantially in order for me to be satisfied and not demand a refund. The game has improved, but perhaps only 30% as much as is required to move a game from beta to successful, operational, release. Squad support is still feature-incomplete and confusing to use; there simply aren't enough squads for a 32 player team where everyone plays with their friends.

The game's interface is clunky and terribly designed, constantly requiring navigation through arcane and convoluted menus. The interface is not user-friendly, visually pleasing, or efficient, and receives a grade of "F" from me. I flunk BF3 specifically because I genuinely believe that I could make a better interface myself by taking out a book on Visual Basic from the library, reading it, and then writing a program to display a new interface. It is that awful. Let me state that again slightly differently: the interface of Battlefield 3 is so awful that I believe that I, person with no computer programming skills, could learn some rudimentary programming, and create a better interface.  The gameplay begins to suffer when the chat box is gargantuan and imposing, and the map is useless due to zoom level idiocy. The interface issues interfere with gameplay consistently and frustratingly. Gameplay issues are also quite crippling and pervasive.

At this point, I'd like to point out that I haven't even really elaborated on the specifics of a lot of the bugs of BF3, Origin, Battlelog, etc. I don't think that I need to for the purpose of this post-- countless other people have already reported these bugs on forums, and I don't want to waste time with too much detail. Unfortunately, my entire argument appears a bit flimsy without some sort of supporting evidence, so I will take this opportunity to list a number of the problems that I’ve had with the game itself. The game is pretty and sounds great, but suffers from many of the same bugs as the beta, such as missing crosshairs, grotesque ragdolls of living people, grotesque ragdolls of dead people who appear to still be living, long periods of no sound whatsoever, reload animation playing while player is not reloading, stopping of all environmental and running sounds, random crashes, random bluescreens, extreme stuttering and rubberbanding, brief flashes of colors, inability to click anything on the deploy screen, players clipping through terrain, weapon models not appearing and not showing animations, players appearing to be on the wrong team, vaulting not occurring despite animation playing, weapon sound not playing, team switching not possible at times, squad switching problems,  and unlock/experience gain problems. I would like to note that if you have ever experienced these bugs, you should be grateful for being in the game at all. I am not entirely sure how such a buggy product was ever okayed to be released. This would not fly if I were in charge and cared about a product’s success.

This release is one more strong confirmation of EA and DICE's bad reputation among gamers. If you are not aware of their reputation, I will summarize it as this: EA and DICE tend to release buggy, shoddily made products, and then leave them unsupported in order to churn out DLC and expansion packs to make more money from whoever is willing to buy more buggy products. Luckily, the gameplay is usually salvageable. They simply don't care about quality, so long as it turns a dime. It is this trend that inspired me to write this post. With the BF3 release, it is getting very difficult to take EA and DICE seriously specifically because I anticipated that it would confirm the trend. Aside from blatantly holding the customer in contempt with the introduction of Origin and Battlelog, EA and DICE have released another game of poor quality, betraying their customers.

My friends and I had very high hopes for this game, and in the DICE and Battlefield tradition, the actual gameplay of BF3 is quite good, but the terrible software that we need to play the game is utterly ruining it for me and my friends, and we can't be silent anymore. Simply getting into a party and joining a game often takes twenty or thirty minutes due to the buggy mess that you passed off to us as a game. I hope that I don't need to state this explicitly, but for a game with round times of 20-30 minutes, a delay of 20-30 minutes to join a game is not acceptable, whether due to crashes or anything else.

Today, my three friends and I could not play a game together due to a combination of BF3, Punkbuster, Origin, and Battlelog problems which repeatedly kicked us from the server or crashed our various pieces of software while attempting to join. There were also extended periods of time where we could not see each other as online. I understand that your servers are under a heavy load, but that really isn't an excuse in this situation. The errors ranged from the incorrect, "kicked by administrator" to the ambiguous, "you have been disconnected from the server" to the mysterious, "Unable to find friend to join them" to the downright confusing "You are already involved in a party join." The abundance of these kinds of errors tells me that the people who made the game do not care about its success.

I really enjoy playing the actual game, just as I've enjoyed many previous Battlefield games, but if I can't play it, it's a big problem that eclipses my love for the series. I paid 60 bucks to order this buggy, unplayable game. In exchange for my money, I now have three unwanted pieces of software on my computer: Origin, the Battlelog browser plugin, and ESN Sonar. These programs run in the background and eat my system resources. I am not sure why these programs are not included in BF3 itself or omitted entirely.

I want my money back.