Everything went smoothly to begin with. Origin accounts created if you didn’t have one, patching (a bugbear of mine that will be covered at another time), and then the server selection screen. At this point, everything promptly fell over. Select a server that stated it was “Available”, attempt to connect and either you got a message saying it wasn’t available or you got nothing. Try again, different server, same result. If you were really unlucky you might actually get connected to a server before everything fell over. Then you were in for a new form of torture.
If you did connect to a server successfully, the next time you ran the launcher it would try to connect to the same server again - and of course it would fail. But you couldn’t select another server until it was finally able to connect to the previous one. So you either had to wait, or as one person found, you could “roll back” by replacing some files which cleared the server setting, but also meant you had to download the patch again.
Now, all of this wouldn’t have been quite so bad if it was only related to authenticating your product. There are plenty of companies (Valve for example) who have required this. But EA had gone down the same path that Ubisoft took with Assassins Creed II, and instead required a constant internet connection. Now, their reasoning I’m sure is because they have implemented a multiplayer component to what has always been a single player product. And now that it’s playable, it is still to a large extent, a single player product. The “multiplayer” component could easily have been done in a way that doesn’t require an “online” connection.
And this is where we come to the DRM, or Digital Rights Management. Plenty of software companies have implemented this sort of thing in the past, from code wheels, to page/line/word questions where you have to find a specific word in the manual, requiring the CD to be in the computer when you start the game is in my estimate, the most well known form. Probably the most diabolic though was Sony’s attempt at DRM that installed a rootkit on the users computer without their knowledge. It was universally recognised as the worst possible blunder any company had made, or would likely ever make in regard to DRM.
Why’s it there? In theory, it’s there to stop people from illegally downloading copies of the games to play. Does it stop them? Not really. Most DRM is broken fairly soon after release. And the funniest part of the whole thing is that DRM broken titles usually have less issues with things like server authentication, because these functions have been disabled by the people who broke the DRM.
It’s a double edged sword for these software companies. They spend millions of dollars to create these triple-A titles, and as such they want to realise as much profit from them as they can. So they put in the DRM, or authentication requirements and have massive issues on release as things don’t work. With SimCity, it got so bad that Amazon pulled the product from sale stating that they couldn’t sell a product they knew didn’t work and didn’t know when it would work.
All up, it took EA and it’s partners about 4 or 5 days to turn around the situation to the point where players could logon successfully, complete tutorials and start to build their cities without fear of servers crashing and wiping out all the work they’d done (which did happen). Will this, and things like Blizzards “Error 37” have any impact on the sale of products that suffer through these things? No, in the long term it won’t. It should, but it won’t. People will complain about it while it’s happening, and the twitters will be a-flood with complaints and vitriol, and then things will go quiet as those same people can logon and immerse themself in whatever world it is. It should be a wake up call to the companies as well, but again, it won’t have an impact as they already have your money and that’s the real crux of it. You paid, you’ll get to play, but it probably won’t be on day 1.
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