I bailed after 2142
My group of friends and I had a blast with Battlefield 2. It's simple : I played that game so much that the DVD broke and I had to buy another one.
Of course, we played on my local server, hacked by a now-defunct team of dedicated Internet gaming experts which allowed me to run a 128-slot server populated by the largest maps and tons of bots for whatever slots were not taken up by players. We also had custom airplanes, and I particularly liked the Warthog.
We had tons of fun, and our own ranking board.
The only issue was that, of course, EA Games did not like that people had servers that they did not pay EA Games for, so every update broke the ranking and, sometimes, even broke the server. When that happened we had to find workarounds, like putting specific addresses in the hosts file to ensure that the server stayed local. It was an increasingly frustrating headache, but that did not make us stop.
What made me stop was BF 2142. It was not uninteresting, but you couldn't play solo and you couldn't have a personal server. EA Games had obviously learned the lessons of BF2 and was determined not to let players have fun on their own.
The issue I had with 2142 was that every single patch basically required that I reinstall 2142 from scratch. I did not have a fiber connection at the time, I was on a 10Mbps ADSL line. It took basically all day to update. It was a terrible update system and I hated every moment of it. The final straw came when the online install package asked me for my DVD key. DVD key ?!? What the blazes does an online store ask me for a DVD key ?
So I fired off a rather angry mail to support telling them what I thought of this insane situation. The response : my profile got banned.
You banned me because your shit-for-brains system didn't work and I had the gall to complain ? Fine, EA Games, we're done. You stole my money and you don't know how to make fun games anymore anyway.
EA Games is now banned from my life. I don't regret it.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
