EA is for awesome!



  • Explained in one image:

    They "ran out" of pre-order downloads, somehow, so you can pre-order a pre-order!



  • @blakeyrat said:

    Explained in one image:

    They "ran out" of pre-order downloads, somehow, so you can pre-order a pre-order!

     

    Well, you're not waiting in a physical line for a download.  So there is that.  I wouldn't put that past EA though...

     



  • This is why I don't think EA has a rat's chance in hell of launching a viable Steam competitor.



  • They claim not to have charged your card yet, so there's no way they can know whether your attempt to pre-order the game will succeed. I shall not speculate on why they don't carry out these checks within a few seconds of you submitting the request.

    I can't imagine why anyone would try to pay for a pre-order without finding out [url=http://www.swtor.com/preorder]what benefit this brings[/url] and so why the supply of pre-orders is limited, so are you sure you didn't also pre-order a mug?




  • Ahh, there is a good side. You're in a country that has the pre-order.

    I'm not.



  • Not a WTF, more of a "people will complain about EVERYTHING. SHUT UP ALREADY"



    First, you're buying a box copy of the game, but pre-ordering will allow you an early digital download and ability to get into the servers before the non pre-order folk. So your complaint about "unlimited quantities" is just plain wrong.



    Second, the note about the pre-order queue is EA learning from the past (damned if you do, damned if you don't, eh?). EA knows that SWTOR is got a huge following right now, and they are prepared for a massive push of people to hit the pre-order site. Thus, the disconnected pre-order request / pre-order accepted process.



    So quit complaining about something you obviously know nothing about. The only WTF here is the OP.



  • @The_Assimilator said:

    This is why I don't think EA has a rat's chance in hell of launching a viable Steam competitor.

    They'll muscle their way in, since they have something like 70% of a monopoly at this point. Once they pull their content from Steam, they'll get a boost of instant adoption.

    The real problem here is that people still by EA games.

    @JamesKilton said:

    yabba yabba yabba yabba

    I instantly dislike you.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    "While quantities last"
     

    WTF?  Are they going to run out of ones and zeros?


  • Garbage Person

    @__moz said:

    I can't imagine why anyone would try to pay for a pre-order without finding out what benefit this brings and so why the supply of pre-orders is limited, so are you sure you didn't also pre-order a mug?
    Traditionally, the benefit of pre-ordering is "So I don't have to deal with buying it on Day 0."

     

    The benefit of [i]special edition[/i] preorders is stupid trinkets. This is exactly what the link you posted says. Nowhere in the OP does it mention the collector's edition. Furthermore, I find it hard to fucking believe that a modern MMO has any need to come on fucking disks. In fact, the "digital deluxe edition" - which implies a download-only version (which, by the way, they charge extra for) links to a page which has the exact same message in the OP.

     

    So, the WTFs are as follows:

    - An MMO that comes on disks at all (when within mere months, NO data on the disks will be used by the fully patched version)
    - Charging extra for the digital download versus the disks
    - Limited quantities on the digital downloads
    - Limited quantities on a standard-edition preorder. PRINT MORE, YOU ASSHOLES. YOU'VE ALREADY GOT THEIR MONEY.

     Of course, the REAL reason for rate-limiting isn't "limited quantities" it's "Oh fuck, we didn't buy enough servers to handle all you assholes logging on at once the minute the game launches."

     

    Someone once tried to get me to play WoW. I was.... Not amused by the need to download an ISO, install a buttload of game, and then download nine fucking gigs of incremental patches that completely overwrote every single bit written to disk by the original ISO. We didn't get past that stage.



  • @Weng said:

    Someone once tried to get me to play WoW. I was.... Not amused by the need to download an ISO, install a buttload of game, and then download nine fucking gigs of incremental patches that completely overwrote every single bit written to disk by the original ISO. We didn't get past that stage.
     

    I've got some version 3.xx AOL startup floppies if you're interested.



  • @Weng said:

    Someone once tried to get me to play WoW. I was.... Not amused by the need to download an ISO, install a buttload of game, and then download nine fucking gigs of incremental patches that completely overwrote every single bit written to disk by the original ISO. We didn't get past that stage.

    They've fixed that, BTW. Now you can buy the whole shebang online and it'll only download what it needs. (Also, it can stream the download now as you play, but you need several hundred megs before it even lets you attempt to play, and you see a lot of placeholders if it's not very downloaded.) Basically, it's almost like what it should have been when it was first fucking released.


  • Garbage Person

    @blakeyrat said:

    @Weng said:
    Someone once tried to get me to play WoW. I was.... Not amused by the need to download an ISO, install a buttload of game, and then download nine fucking gigs of incremental patches that completely overwrote every single bit written to disk by the original ISO. We didn't get past that stage.

    They've fixed that, BTW. Now you can buy the whole shebang online and it'll only download what it needs. (Also, it can stream the download now as you play, but you need several hundred megs before it even lets you attempt to play, and you see a lot of placeholders if it's not very downloaded.) Basically, it's almost like what it should have been when it was first fucking released.

    Well, that's lovely. Too bad I stopped caring and decided I liked not owing my computer any time commitments. I had to get a real hobby instead, and it's WAY more expensive than just sitting on my butt grinding for gear.



  • @Weng said:

    Well, that's lovely. Too bad I stopped caring and decided I liked not owing my computer any time commitments. I had to get a real hobby instead, and it's WAY more expensive than just sitting on my butt grinding for gear.

    Oh sorry, before I posted I should have taken into-account that you're soooo much better than me!



  • @Weng said:

    I had to get a real hobby instead, and it's WAY more expensive than just sitting on my butt grinding for gear.


    Cocaine is a helluva drug.



  • @Weng said:

    Someone once tried to get me to play WoW. I was.... Not amused by the need to download an ISO, install a buttload of game, and then download nine fucking gigs of incremental patches that completely overwrote every single bit written to disk by the original ISO. We didn't get past that stage.

    Blizzard has changed that since the last patch before the new addon. Now you download the launcher client (one Megabyte if I recall correctly), start that and the launcher only downloads the latest version (no more: 1.0 => 1.9 => 2.3 => 2.3a => ...) and it also sports three stages during the download process:

    a) not playable because the game client and essential data has not been downloaded yet.

    b) playable but you may encounter content missing which has not been downloaded yet (content being: zones, mobs and the like). You may also have to wait if you're logging into a zone which has not yet been downloaded.

    c) playable and you'll notice the odd content missing here and there (like a skin texture, the occasional creature, that kind of stuff)

    The game also continues download while you're playing and it also tries to download intelligently - which means that stuff which you'll be needing based on your current position will be downloaded first.



    So, that particular criticism is not actually valid anymore.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @Rhywden said:

    So, that particular criticism (of WoW) is not actually valid anymore.

    So, back to, "waste of time," eh?


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @blakeyrat said:

    @JamesKilton said:
    yabba yabba yabba yabba

    I instantly dislike you.

    Wow, he fits right in! :-D



  • @Rhywden said:

    Blizzard has changed that since the last patch before the new addon. Now you download the launcher client (one Megabyte if I recall correctly), start that and the launcher only downloads the latest version (no more: 1.0 => 1.9 => 2.3 => 2.3a => ...) and it also sports three stages during the download process:

    a) not playable because the game client and essential data has not been downloaded yet.

    b) playable but you may encounter content missing which has not been downloaded yet (content being: zones, mobs and the like). You may also have to wait if you're logging into a zone which has not yet been downloaded.

    c) playable and you'll notice the odd content missing here and there (like a skin texture, the occasional creature, that kind of stuff)

    The game also continues download while you're playing and it also tries to download intelligently - which means that stuff which you'll be needing based on your current position will be downloaded first.



    So, that particular criticism is not actually valid anymore.

    I suddenly have the strangest sense of Deja-IJustPostedThat-Vu.



  • @Weng said:

    @blakeyrat said:

    @Weng said:
    Someone once tried to get me to play WoW. I was.... Not amused by the need to download an ISO, install a buttload of game, and then download nine fucking gigs of incremental patches that completely overwrote every single bit written to disk by the original ISO. We didn't get past that stage.

    They've fixed that, BTW. Now you can buy the whole shebang online and it'll only download what it needs. (Also, it can stream the download now as you play, but you need several hundred megs before it even lets you attempt to play, and you see a lot of placeholders if it's not very downloaded.) Basically, it's almost like what it should have been when it was first fucking released.

    Well, that's lovely. Too bad I stopped caring and decided I liked not owing my computer any time commitments. I had to get a real hobby instead, and it's WAY more expensive than just sitting on my butt grinding for gear.

     

    If your hobby costs you more than a bad MMO addiction, you need a new hobby.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @Justice said:

    If your hobby costs you more than a bad MMO addiction, you need a new hobby.

    Are you including costs like, "Lost job due to poor attendance?" Otherwise, $20/mo or whatever doesn't sound terribly expensive.



  •  I grew up on 6502 coding, where I was raied to believe that 0xEA was a NOP. A completely useless waste of space and time.

    That wasn't an opcode - that was a bloody prediction!

     



  • Heh. Reminds me of trying to play bowling in the first few weeks of the public beta of Playstation Home.



  • It doesn't even goddamn matter whether you're selling a physical product or if the download servers can handle it. When you're selling little 2$ plastic disks at 60$ a pop, you fucking rent the hardware to meet the demand. And these are preorders.

    It's worse than selling "limited edition" crap in Second Life. And in Second Life, you actually have to jump through hoops in order to not sell infinite copies.



  • @Faxmachinen said:

    And these are preorders.
    The whole concept of "pre-order" makes no sense.  A product is either available to be sold or it isn't.  One or the other.  So when the product is available to be sold, YOU FUCKING SELL IT.  Seriously, how difficult is that? 

    And I can hear the excuse now:  "Oh, but we don't want our servers to get hammered by huge demand when the product is released".

    Well guess what.  Unless you've been living under a rock, there's a really easy solution:@Faxmachinen said:

    you fucking rent the hardware to meet the demand
    Exactly.  Rent some servers from Amazon or one of the other "cloud" companies.  Hell, people are using Amazon servers to distribute malware because it's so cheap.   So there's absolutely no reason for a legitimate company to not use them.

     

     


  • Garbage Person

    @Justice said:

    If your hobby costs you more than a bad MMO addiction, you need a new hobby.
    I race cars. Shitty, cheap cars, but it's still expensive as hell.

    $1000 (on average) in diesel to tow the car, tools and camping gear the round trip.
    $1000 in entry fees.
    Race fuel @ 9 gallons per hour*$5/gallon*24 hours = $1000
    72 hours of generator fuel = $600 max
    $400 in incidentals.

    So that's $4000 a shot - not counting damage and upgrades to the car itself or wear and tear on the support vehicles. Fortunately this only happens every couple of months, and expenses can and do get split between teammates - but it still works out to at least $1000/driver/race.

    Yeah, you can cut this down some by running off RV power at the track instead of the generator (where available - surprisingly enough, the more well known the track, the less likely they are to provide power). Entry fees in this series are practically the lowest that exist anywhere. We could potentially halve our fuel consumption rate by running a different car (or simply a less reliable one - we made out like BANDITS on our last fuel bill because I blew up the engine 60 laps in). Regardless, it's fucking EXPENSIVE. Lets call my personal expenses $1000/race and 1 race every 3 months. Only the dumbest imaginable MMO victim could possibly be blowing more than $333/mo.

     

    ... And writing all of that out just allowed me to quantify just 'how little money' I'm spending on this compared to how much I thought I was. So by examining the problem I've made it worse.

     



  • @Weng said:

    $1000 (on average) in diesel to tow the car, tools and camping gear the round trip.
    @Weng said:
    Race fuel @ 9 gallons per hour*$5/gallon*24 hours = $1000
    @Weng said:
    72 hours of generator fuel = $600 max

    Wow, you're killing the planet.



  • TRWTF is that their region lock system fucked up and let me preorder the game from somewhere i wasn't supposed to, then it gave me my preorder code (that i successfully activated on swtor.com) but didn't charge my credit card (yet). Oh and my order doesn't show up in purchace history. Any bets on whether i'm getting the actual game when it launches and am i going to actually pay for it? :P

     

    Also about WoW launcher... the stupid  thing somehow managed to corrupt it's data while downloading some update to the point that the game would crash when you started it, the repair thingie was crashing too and the fucking downloader was just saying everything is 100% downloaded and fine.

    Not being a big fan of re-downloading 25GB, i wrote a small python program that verified all the files against  their pseudo-torrent file [which had some nonstandart extensions that made real torrent clients choke] then used their web seeds to redownload what's needed [i was too lazy to code in proper p2p download]


  • Garbage Person

    @blakeyrat said:

    @Weng said:
    $1000 (on average) in diesel to tow the car, tools and camping gear the round trip.
    @Weng said:
    Race fuel @ 9 gallons per hour*$5/gallon*24 hours = $1000
    @Weng said:
    72 hours of generator fuel = $600 max

    Wow, you're killing the planet.

    Doing what I can, anyway.



  • @Weng said:

    @blakeyrat said:

    @Weng said:
    $1000 (on average) in diesel to tow the car, tools and camping gear the round trip.
    @Weng said:
    Race fuel @ 9 gallons per hour*$5/gallon*24 hours = $1000
    @Weng said:
    72 hours of generator fuel = $600 max

    Wow, you're killing the planet.

    Doing what I can, anyway.

    That's like smokers saying "I don't want to live long anyway".



  • @boomzilla said:

    @Justice said:
    If your hobby costs you more than a bad MMO addiction, you need a new hobby.

    Are you including costs like, "Lost job due to poor attendance?" Otherwise, $20/mo or whatever doesn't sound terribly expensive.

     

    Yes indeed.  Other costs can include loss of all your friends (including the ones in-game if you're really screwed up) and vitamin D deficiency.


  • Garbage Person

    @derula said:

    @Weng said:

    @blakeyrat said:

    @Weng said:
    $1000 (on average) in diesel to tow the car, tools and camping gear the round trip.
    @Weng said:
    Race fuel @ 9 gallons per hour*$5/gallon*24 hours = $1000
    @Weng said:
    72 hours of generator fuel = $600 max

    Wow, you're killing the planet.

    Doing what I can, anyway.

    That's like smokers saying "I don't want to live long anyway".

    Except that smoking has a tangible effect on one's health - and burning a few thousand bucks in clean, modern fuel, through clean, relatively efficient modern engine designs has no tangible effect on worsening the environmental situation whatsoever - particularly when you realize what passes for fuel and an efficient engine everywhere that isn't North America and Western Europe. To run with your analogy, it's more like someone who eats a hamburger once in awhile saying "I don't want to live long anyway."


    Running an inefficiently tuned racecar is like lighting your wallet on fire. Extracting every possible joule of energy from every drop of gasoline is crucial. Sure, things such as a catalytic converter are absent, but you'll note that the two of the three reactions occuring in a catalytic converter are to convert "hamful to humans" gasses like carbon monoxide into "harmful to the planet" gasses like carbon dioxide and to convert unburnt fuel to other stuff (and remember what I just said about unburnt fuel). The third involves nitrogen oxides - which does lead to ozone - but again, it's like pissing in the damned ocean compared to developing world NOx controls.



  • @Weng said:

    but again, it's like pissing in the damned ocean

    You do that too? Wow. You really, really, really want to kill our environment! Seriously, you're not alone in the world.



  • @derula said:

    @Weng said:
    but again, it's like pissing in the damned ocean

    You do that too? Wow. You really, really, really want to kill our environment! Seriously, you're not alone in the world.

     

    Everyday I shit into the sea
    It's strange but it doesn't mean much to me
    I'm living in a porcelain dream
    Where things ain't quite what they seem...

    Everyday I talk to my machines
    More sense than talking to human beings...


  • Garbage Person

    @derula said:

    Seriously, you're not alone in the world.
    Yes I am. The rest of you are all mindless, inhuman automatons incapable of true love - only a twisted caricature of it.You're trying to enslave the last living human being for your own nefarious purposes - but you need the gasoline to do it. So I burn it. I burn it [i]all[/i] to bring your RAPE of humankind to an end!

     

    The only reason I don't just end it all right now is because I'm not sure I'm the last one - what if there are others? WHAT IF THEY DON'T KNOW WHAT YOU'RE DOING? I NEED TO STOP YOU TO SAVE THEM.



  • @Weng said:

    @derula said:

    Seriously, you're not alone in the world.
    Yes I am. The rest of you are all mindless, inhuman automatons incapable of true love - only a twisted caricature of it.You're trying to enslave the last living human being for your own nefarious purposes - but you need the gasoline to do it. So I burn it. I burn it all to bring your RAPE of humankind to an end!

     

    The only reason I don't just end it all right now is because I'm not sure I'm the last one - what if there are others? WHAT IF THEY DON'T KNOW WHAT YOU'RE DOING? I NEED TO STOP YOU TO SAVE THEM.

    Hmmm, we might have to resort to more force.

     

    Or better drugs.


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