Dear Crossfire, today I am going to reveal to you my struggle with what I consider to be one of the most enjoyable recreational drugs released in many years, Battlefield 3. I am, or I would like to be, an addict.
It all started on the Battlefield 3 Beta, I posted here on Crossfire my dissatisfaction with what I thought to be a terrible game. Many people told me that I was wrong and that I needed to give it more time, get into squads and play more. Actually, I didn't on the beta - time didn't allow for it however I was lucky enough to be given a copy of the game so I figured I'd give it another try.
Upon release the obstacles to actually calming my dislike were quite large. I had to disable features on my router to get in game and even that didn't quite assure me of a solid connection but as Jeff Bridges said in Tron...I Got In.
When I get on a server I do everything a competitive player probably hates. I love to ride around in my tank, I love to ram my Jets into people and I love to baserape. Is that such a crime? I have the very same feeling I had as a young TosspoT hiding on in the vents on mp_beach with my venom. For me the key difference in BF3 is that everything actually works in game (at least for the way I chose to play it). The flying experience is brilliant, the tanks are powerful but easily destroyed, I feel quite confident as 1 soldier I can take down a tank, yet in a tank I feel quite confident I can kill everything that moves. Its a thoroughly addictive public server game.
I could quite happily sit and play for hours upon end until....Game Disconnected. Why? Why has my game disconnected? What did I do? What the f#!k? Its not just game disconnected, I could be mowing down an army and then suddenly this huge lag spike will come and my game will freeze for 10 seconds. Normally one of two things happen, either I'll come back from that lag spike or ill get a second spike moments later and that's GG for me! I have never actually played the game for longer than 45 minutes concurrently!
For those that haven't played BF3 or any EA games you've got 3 contributing factors into the demise of it all. 2 of those come from Origin and Battlelog. Origin is EA's (evil) equivalent to Steam, its simple download manager that manages updates and purchases only the one thing it can't do is simply stay connected to the internet! Battlelog is EA's equivalent of the 'In Game Server Browser', imagine when you load ET or CS and you have your options screen, server browser and profile options - EA took that into a web 2.0 facility and actually as a concept its great. Between the two of these though, one can't stay connected to the other for very long and neither are capable of informative error messages.
Lastly out of the 3 factors that contribute to my hard comedown, Punkbuster. Seriously you forget the difference TZAC makes until you go back to life with PB. I had a taster with my Xmas RTCW Server from Homie kicking me during my Christmas RTCW renaissance but in BF3 those 10 second lag spikes absolutely take the problem of PB Lag Spikes from a few years ago to a completely new dimension.
So what do I do? Give up on what I consider to be one of the best PC 'shooters' (its not really a shooter) in many many years because I know that EA/PB will never get their act together or do I soldier on, get my fix where I can, a quick hit every now and then fight the good fight. For now I chose to fight (mainly because there's supposedly a patch this week), but this cannot go on forever!
It all started on the Battlefield 3 Beta, I posted here on Crossfire my dissatisfaction with what I thought to be a terrible game. Many people told me that I was wrong and that I needed to give it more time, get into squads and play more. Actually, I didn't on the beta - time didn't allow for it however I was lucky enough to be given a copy of the game so I figured I'd give it another try.
Upon release the obstacles to actually calming my dislike were quite large. I had to disable features on my router to get in game and even that didn't quite assure me of a solid connection but as Jeff Bridges said in Tron...I Got In.
When I get on a server I do everything a competitive player probably hates. I love to ride around in my tank, I love to ram my Jets into people and I love to baserape. Is that such a crime? I have the very same feeling I had as a young TosspoT hiding on in the vents on mp_beach with my venom. For me the key difference in BF3 is that everything actually works in game (at least for the way I chose to play it). The flying experience is brilliant, the tanks are powerful but easily destroyed, I feel quite confident as 1 soldier I can take down a tank, yet in a tank I feel quite confident I can kill everything that moves. Its a thoroughly addictive public server game.
I could quite happily sit and play for hours upon end until....Game Disconnected. Why? Why has my game disconnected? What did I do? What the f#!k? Its not just game disconnected, I could be mowing down an army and then suddenly this huge lag spike will come and my game will freeze for 10 seconds. Normally one of two things happen, either I'll come back from that lag spike or ill get a second spike moments later and that's GG for me! I have never actually played the game for longer than 45 minutes concurrently!For those that haven't played BF3 or any EA games you've got 3 contributing factors into the demise of it all. 2 of those come from Origin and Battlelog. Origin is EA's (evil) equivalent to Steam, its simple download manager that manages updates and purchases only the one thing it can't do is simply stay connected to the internet! Battlelog is EA's equivalent of the 'In Game Server Browser', imagine when you load ET or CS and you have your options screen, server browser and profile options - EA took that into a web 2.0 facility and actually as a concept its great. Between the two of these though, one can't stay connected to the other for very long and neither are capable of informative error messages.
Lastly out of the 3 factors that contribute to my hard comedown, Punkbuster. Seriously you forget the difference TZAC makes until you go back to life with PB. I had a taster with my Xmas RTCW Server from Homie kicking me during my Christmas RTCW renaissance but in BF3 those 10 second lag spikes absolutely take the problem of PB Lag Spikes from a few years ago to a completely new dimension.
So what do I do? Give up on what I consider to be one of the best PC 'shooters' (its not really a shooter) in many many years because I know that EA/PB will never get their act together or do I soldier on, get my fix where I can, a quick hit every now and then fight the good fight. For now I chose to fight (mainly because there's supposedly a patch this week), but this cannot go on forever!
I haven't really had any problems with origin/pb (yet atleast), but battlelog has been pretty buggy and it usually takes multiple attemps before you get your party going and manage to join your desired server.
:D
:/
On a side note, the web GUI is quite shit. Not because it doesn't work like it should, but mostly because it's a bitch to have to reload the entire game every time you swap servers or have to reconnect.
!
explain to me why you want to avoid origin?
Sorry, how is it an 'excuse'?
how did it actually harm you in any way?
I don't like Origin for several reasons, the main, and only one you are getting is that it stops me playing games that I've paid money for due to it's shitty service, support and all-round usability.
so you have bought EA games which require Origin but you dont play them because of the
1) Service.
It autoupdates ur games. Steam doesnt do any more than that. whats wrong with the service?
2)Support.
What do you need the support for to play? Are you having technical issues?
3)all-round usability.
You browse servers in the browser click "play", the program starts, logs in and connects without you having to interact with it once. My point being you dont have to use it at all.
I still really can not understand how Origin is negatively effecting you. you say words but they dont make any sense to me. elabroate please would you.
you dont have a reason. you name random things that you have heard people having "problems" with but there is nothing actually stopping you from playing.
so this brings me back to my original point: you are making excuses.
there is nothing wrong with Origin, it works like a charm.
BFBC2 was a bugged piece of shit for quite a long time, just stick with it all will be fine eventually.
PB is PB and will always be PB. wait for the next patch and hope it will improve.
same story here about disconnected game, so booooring :/
and first game I can sit and play few hours since ET ( cant even do that anymore with ET lol )
apart from this... which seems to be fixed now
edit: just started happening again >.<
will be always a decent pub game for me, but nothing more than that
Nice read Tosspot :)
it's funny how you can get down by the technical side of things sometimes. Happens a lot in different situations aswell.
However the only problems I get is connecting to the server initially, but when I'm luckily on the only time I am to get kicked is if it decides to crash..
Other than that my BF3 experience has been wicked :)
metro 24/7 1000 tickets<3 60-100kills incomming ;D
and m320<333 around 300kills and 50% acc fuck yeah. its like rifle thats why i love this weapon ;D
add me bSTURZ-sPECULA
+ like a 5 man nade!
Ill add you when I'm on later!
also I never had any issues except when I installed the game (have it on CD, had to redownload it for unknown reasons)
great game.
maybe its for the better! ;P or maybe I will finally update to w7 :l
w7 would have to be much better to get me excited about changing os
i will be switching soon anyway
XP > *
I really like the game but I dont like tanks and jets so i'm playing infantry only and I dislike most of the maps so I'm only playing metro and bazar
Sounds like on big contradiction :P
I really like BF3's gamestlye, sometimes its quite fast and sometimes its really slow. You can choose the way you want to play, fast actions with assault, camping with the support's MG and killing 4-6 people in 3secs, standing back with the sniper.
Also, the physic engine impressed me: Aiming a little over the opponents head with the sniper when he is far away, the realistic damage made by rpgs and other explosives towards buildings.
BF3 nick is f00f1ght3r if anyone wants to look me up.
tbh I don't know why I like it, you pretty much have to scope to hit anything, movement is OK but obviously not as fast as ET, maps are generally huge, there's gazillions of weapons including plenty of lame shit like tact lights and IRNV and people who insist on using RPGs on infantry servers, but I can't remember enjoying a game as much as this since I first started playing RTCW 10 years ago, and that's saying something.
Steam is filled with a great many bugs, including the one I'd like to call "Oh-you-pressed-a-button-outside-of-the-game-so-gg-shuttingdownwindows". But it is also a system resources eater. Is it really necessary that my hard drive goes nuts just because I launched an application that really shouldn't do anything besides checking some version numbers of the currently 3 installed games? Why does it have to be that slow? Why does it make my whole system feel sluggish? ( Granted that this is actually less worse on a Windows 7 machine, but still there ).
-- for the Mac Steam users here:
As the programmers at ValVe are inexperienced and clumsy they decided to use outdated and the incorrect frameworks for the job. They are complaining to Apple claiming that Apple did not provide an API in order to find out which process the IO event belongs to. If they would not hook to the hardware input device using IOKit and instead use the proper API's ( NSApplication in AppKit ) they wouldn't have this problem as the API handles it for them. It even gets worse. They also decided to use Carbon, which is 32Bit only and has been discontinued around 2008. Their argument is that it needs to retain cross platform compatibility, Carbon is C ( C++ ) based and would therefore seem a logical choice opposed to the Objective-C based AppKit and C/C++ based CoreFoundation/Foundation. The issue here is that Objective-C supports something neat called Objective-C++. It would allow them to write a wrapper just as easily using AppKit as they did with Carbon. ( This would also automatically get rid of the bugs they haven't been able to fix yet ). As a community we've told them about a few of these issues, yet they decided its easier to simply deny it.
A few things I like about steam include the huge amount of payment options available and matchmaking. It supports uPnP so I do not have to add any exceptions to the firewall of my router.
And that should be about the biggest rant I ever wrote inside 1 crossfire comment.
Edit: steam eating 10% while idle: http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?p=26219755#post26219755
add me for some simulated murder!
1) Buy XIM3
2) Buy Battlefield 3, MW3, any game for XBOX360
3) Use XIM3 to play with my keyboard and mouse for xbox games
4) Make XBOX players cry because of my amazing aiming/movement
5) Jerk off
registered my bf3 key with xbox live + created an EA account for the game.
Traded it the very next day for modern warfare 3 which doesnt require any key or whatsoever. Just put it in and play.
Battlefield 3 is just a huge sniper experience and when it comes down to this i gotta say no ty i rely on reflexive aiming therefore bf3 is not my game. Also that shitty registration i mean come on so many updates right at the start, then enter key -> type-O -> enter again finally ABLE TO PLAY and EA says screw yourself you need to register an origin account. GOod, registering via xbox..ok..multiplayer disc inserted...multiplayer..login..join quickmatch...BOOM dead, sniper ftw. fk this game seriously