We need to get attention of EA/DICE!
This is NOT about nerfing this or that. This is about EA/DICE's way to handle their customers.
Battlefield 3 have been out for a month now and have supposedly sold 8 million + copies worldwide, which are loads of money and I'm pretty sure, that EA is very glad to have DICE on their side so they can point fingers at Activision (Not fanboy related, but my assumption how the top in EA were when they have sold that many copies). With the upcoming Back to Karkand DLC (15 USD in the US, but like Steam fails to convert the value into other currencies. 15 USD =/= 15 Euros [1]), EA can once again look forward to getting more money between their dirty hands and laugh at all us who have bought this game.
At this point my problem regarding Battlefield 3 isn't the game itself. It's EA and its DICE. If anyone has used the Battlelog regularly, you will notice in one of their news-feed that they monitor the Get Satisfaction forum on daily basis [2]. While this may be true or may be false, by combing some of the answered topics, you'll notice, that it is EA who are most likely to answer and not DICE. What this means is, that people who do not have anything to do with Battlefield 3 are answering question regarding the game and most likely just send you further into the system of a black hole or even responding you with something irrelevant.
This bring me towards my first proof, that they are careless about customers; Time between answers and quality of the answers. If you take a look on the following picture I took of the forums (So everybody can see it - Also people who do not have Battlelog-logins. For people who have and want to see themselves: check source [3]) http://i.imgur.com/7LKJY.png
As seen on the picture above, there are big chunks of time between answers from EA. There are loads of answers “1 month ago”, presumably when they launched their site. Afterwards few answers have been given to buyers of the game. I don’t expect EA, DICE or God to answer every single post existing on one of their two forums, but the amount they currently have is less than 1 answer per day. Creating forums for feedback is in my opinion a good idea, giving players the option to come with suggestions, bugs etc. but when they clearly don’t seem to take care of it, I don’t understand why they even bother having them. If we check out the quality of their answers, it saddens me to announce that this is even worse. Let’s take some examples, proving my points.
Irrelevant answer: [4] http://i.imgur.com/JdlaW.png , [5] http://i.imgur.com/i6rbX.png
Generic answers: [6] http://i.imgur.com/szpgz.png , [7] http://i.imgur.com/Sev6G.png , [8] http://i.imgur.com/qeaMR.png , [9] http://i.imgur.com/n0h2H.png
I know above links aren’t much, but its most of their answers. It’s disgraceful delivering such “service” to consumers who just want to (help) improving the game. Other games may suffer from same problems, but this is solely about EA and DICE, the two heads behind Battlefield 3. These pictures are only from the GetSatisfaction forums due to the spam on the Battlelog forums and need of responses from DICE (Locking threads does NOT count).
As if their response on their two forums wasn’t bad enough, they have one other major flaw and this is some of the worst I have ever experienced within customer service between company and consumer, or should I say robot and consumer? On every page on their Battlelog there is a little yellow box on the left side of the page with the text “Feedback & Support”. Pressing this box gives you two options: “LIVE chat” or directing you to their forums to leave feedback. The “live” support is for technical problems regarding logins, origins and so on. Since this is easiest way to get contact with the team behind their games, many people use this button to complain about hacks, exploits, within the BF3 game . But what exactly does your subject matter, when the person you write to in reality is a robot? If you have ever tried having a “live” chat with EA you’ll notice, that it’s not a human being on the other side of the screen – Even though it claim to be. Please read following link to see what I mean:
Now I know I was just a douche on that chat, but nonetheless it amplifies that it is not another human being writing back to me. The conversation took place within their opening hours, which is “Live chat is also available M-F from 08:00-19:00 CST.”
Now, why do I create this thread? To get attention! While EA and DICE is counting money over and over again, we sit here with the result of that: Patches that “fixes” things that are not a problem and creating new problems, not banning hackers or obvious cheaters (2.000 score per minute is clearly not possible), not answering threads, not responding on their LIVE chat, etc. I don’t think this is any way near acceptable and only proves that EA is starting to be just as big a money whore as Activision and don’t give a damn for the fans.
I’ve tried using the GetSatisfaction- and battlelog-forums and that obviously didn’t help out at all. This is a serious problem that grows not only within EA but the whole industry and we as gamers must start to say NO and not wasting all our money on meaningless map packs. We need to stop supporting the culprits who only thinks of money (Why do you think that Battlefield was released just BEFORE Modern Warfare 3?!)
DISCLAIMER: I have no intention to denigrate other gamers in above links. I have also attached links on EVERY thread, making everybody able to see their usernames anyway.
Sources (NOTE: Battlelog.battlefield.com and getsatisfaction.com REQUIRES battlelog-login) [1] http://bf3blog.com/2011/11/back-to-karkand-retails-for-15/ ,
[2] http://battlelog.battlefield.com/bf3/news/view/2832654774472844230/ ,
[3] http://getsatisfaction.com/battlefield3/problems/solved ,
[4] http://getsatisfaction.com/battlefield3/topics/friends_on_the_opposite_team ,
[5] http://getsatisfaction.com/battlefield3/topics/joining_with_friends_blackscreen_crashes ,
[6] http://getsatisfaction.com/battlefield3/topics/joining_with_friends_blackscreen_crashes ,
[7] http://getsatisfaction.com/battlefield3/topics/filter_ticket_size ,
[8] http://getsatisfaction.com/battlefield3/topics/what_about_the_much_acclaimed_destruction , [9] http://getsatisfaction.com/battlefield3/topics/revive_with_a_hand_gun_please_change_to_the_same_weapon_you_had_before_you_died
TL;DR – EA and DICE should have better customer service and to get that we must start saying no!
Posted Dec 2, 2011, 1:13 AM UTC · edited