While I am thinking about it and picking lint out of my navel, how about you click the read more link?
So, game servers. I am not talking about those ones that you
choose to go on to. If they’re screwed up, you can just go elsewhere. Or play
offline, which has the added bonus of avoiding all the nitwits that feel the
overwhelming need to insult you at every given moment.
Rather, I am talking about those game servers that you have
to log on to, whether you want to play a single player game or not. The term
for it is “perpetual internet connection required” I believe, although they
should call it “massive pain in the ass”. Right there under system
requirements, in bold type. Massive pain in the ass. Anyone who has ever played
a game like StarCraft 2 or Diablo 3 or SimCity would immediately know what that
means.
I get it. I understand why game publishers do this and, for
all the bitching and moaning that we do as gamers who are inconvenienced by
this type of DRM, we did manage to bring it on ourselves, thanks to rampant,
self-involved pirate behaviour. I am not going to talk about that, about the
fact that pirates have, yet again, messed stuff up for the rest of us because
they are a bunch of selfish morons. Rather, I am going to take on the guise of
a slightly sane, normal gamer who has just installed a game that I have been
eagerly waiting for, only to have it tell me that I cannot play because the
servers are screwed up.
I apportion the blame in these cases in two directions. One,
at the pirates, who don’t seem to realise that the world owes them absolutely
nothing and that they need to toe the line just like everyone else… because
despite what their over-protective, simpering mothers told them, they are not
special. Two, at the game publishers, who seem to be unable to realise that
they are alienating their public.
How is it conceivably possible that a game publisher, after
pouring millions into over-hyping a game and spending months telling us that it
will be the best thing since the discovery of fire, cannot have a service ready
to run smoothly at release? It’s like they’re telling us it will be awesome,
but they don’t really believe it themselves. Surely, when this has happened
time and time again, someone somewhere thinks “hey, maybe we should beef up the
server capacity BEFORE we launch the game.” What’s the worst that could happen?
They might have too much capacity… use that for the next game. It’s not hard.
And I could get all irrational (who am I kidding, I already
am irrational) and say that the server dudes do fix things quite quickly these
days. Problems normally don’t go on for too many days after release. But I am
going to be an idealist instead, and say that, after so many games requiring
“massive pain in the ass”, these problems shouldn’t exist at all. Perhaps the
publishers simply cannot learn from their mistakes. That could be further
supported by the fact that they so often seem to make the same mistakes in
games over and over again, with a sort of self-destructive relentlessness that
simply boggles the mind.
So, instead of having a service ready to go right from the
start, they need to scramble and fix stuff while their public (including some
very vocal game journo types) tear a variety of strips from their hides. It is
quite amazing.
One can only hope that, the next time I get a pain in the
ass game, the people on the other side of the internet have been sensible
enough to get it right the first time. But that hope might just be the same as
hoping to find water in a desert.
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