Customer banned from activation of DA2 due to post in BioWare community forum

Let's say you're right BTA... again how much money should they give him for over 3 days without the ability to pay? Certainly not all of it, because he's able to play the game again and will presumably be able to do so for many, many, many years to come.

 

A free DLC would be nice. If he gets that, let me just say that I'll be the first guy on the Bioware boards trying to "replicate the issue." I'm sure I could dream up some new swear words that would be ban worthy!

 

How about we work on something togehter.

By the way, my Bioware username is MEBengal2008.

 

Forget banning - now it is termination. I wonder how EA will respond this time around.

 

EA has a new policy and if you attack Bioware directly or another forum member you are banned. As for attacking, it can be a simple word like I hate what you did for game x.

 

Four-year necro seems pretty extreme, but I couldn't pass it up. Apparently, gaming companies these days (now it's probably worse than it was 4 years ago) get to police the feedback they get and falsify community reception by discouraging negative feedback with a sort of chilling effect by rules and moderation and focusing on the positive. This can be used to remove consistent unwanted influencers who have zero record for real infractions.

A similar thing has happened to me on a different publisher's official board, and I've ended up being unofficially placed on their forums' discouragement list, which means simulated errors effectively making the forum useless to the user with perfect deniability and without having to deal with the backlash of a real ban. But they threatened me with that too, while also trumping up infractions such as spam or trolling or baiting me into replying to their taunts, which was then regarded as violating the rule that prohibited discussing moderation or disputing moderator actions, even though those were not actually moderator actions, not even a warning. And since every dev or marketing employee is technically a moderator, so quote + reply is technically responding to a moderator… you get the point. These kinds of loopholes is what gaming companies are already abusing in order to falsify feedback and manage a positive image.

This is a bit of a companion issue to how they eliminate substantive communication — or in some cases any communication at all — by designing their support lines in particular ways, so that there's effectively no support but community support.

Some companies go as far as not fixing bugs because they rely on community modders to do it for them. I've also seen bugs simply redefined into non-bugs by narrowing down the definition — there, problem solved.

Entire models are designed to cut more and more from the products and services offered to gamers while milking the cash. Add (depending on genre and publisher) rushed games, cut content, bland quests, recycled dungeons, skimping on large/important areas, underdeveloped AI and other ways in which we are being treated like idiots by marketing departments that think we're going to just take all crap they give us because they're so smart (or so they think) and we're so dumb.

They won't understand anything else than a PR shitstorm.

They won't even understand a sales drop, because that can always be blamed on insufficient appeal, bad timing, less than ideal communication — anything but treating us like crap, which they won't believe harms them until they see a PR shitstorm followed by a sales decrease, and only provided that they can't pull a strawman to blame someone else.

Speaking of which, corporate hubris and either rudeness or passive aggression is a problem. Or rather the problem is that they know they can get away with it, which has a demoralizing effect on them.

But if you vote with your wallet and support indie developers, you're soon going to see paid DLCs for early-access games. What's to stop them if even establish gaming companies are ready to stoop to crowdfunding and rely on community content creators?

This is part of a larger trend in business worldwide, which includes demonetization of certain professions, e.g. expecting creatives to work for fun and exposure rather than money, expecting translators to accept poverty out of passion for their work etc. — all so that some seriously underdeveloped (if not mentally arrested) manager or marketing person can rake in a bonus without doing real work any more.

Corporations are playing hardball, and they need shitstorms because shitstorms are the sole remaining form of communication they understand, short of massive fines from regulators.

 

The wonderful world of AAA publishing. Act like an asshole, cut every corner you can, and blame everything on the consumers.

Still, I don't hate the suits. I hate every single person who enables them to act that way by preordering, buying day 1 DLCs and DLC season packs, or just generally throwing money at publishers for bad games and bad customer service, either because they don't care or are too ignorant to know better.

Support companies that care about their playerbase and buy AAA garbage when it's on sale for spare change if you really must. That's pretty much all you can do besides whining audibly, unless of course you have a large community platform where you can voice your opinions and expect to be heard. We could always use more Yahtzees, TotalBiscuits, etc.

 

I believe some indie developers are not averse to trying to block negative reactions, either. The big corporations are not alone in that, at least.

I'd vote with my wallet and just don't buy games anymore. It's not like I've much time anyway, nor much inclination to play new games. My last played games are: Jade Empire, BG, Jagged Alliance 2, Stalker: CoP. Nothing newer than 2006, I believe.

But I believe I'm the exception, rather than the rule, given the reactions to e.g. any given CoD game, which gets a lot of hype and at the same time reactions of people saying they won't buy it because of how bad the previous iterations were, and then the game is released and they buy it anyway, then inevitably start to complain on how bad it is. You'd think people would learn from their mistakes, but maybe they're all hopeless optimists. Or hopelessly, naively, against better judgement, still buying into the hype train. Humans are herd animals, after all.

So in that respect, the marketing department's confidence in themselves appears, on the surface, to be not completely unwarranted.

 

Definitely the sad thing is that they are not wrong in thinking they can get away with it. On the other hand, it is also a sad thing that they are liable to going down the drain the first moment they catastrophically screw it up, which is not impossible, even though it would be difficult for them to feel the full backlash of it given the empty hype generated by whitewashing-brainwashing marketing and the prevention of negative moods from spreading or finding expression at all. Like I said, voting with the wallet is not going to work simply because they're going to believe anything but that their cutting corners or being mean, passive-aggressive or exploitative was seen through and reacted to by the player base.