BF2 BDay

Post by **MasterTom** » 2006-05-29 07:31

supporting... and spreading the word on german, polish and swedish community sites.

eddie · Post by **eddie** » 2006-05-29 07:58

LOL, Pence, you never fail to impress me with your blunt view of things.

As has been said before: EA are a business, they're out to make money.

And I'm willing to bet EA has a few clever people there that know if people boycott over a patch they will lose precious money with the release of AF and BF:21 and whatever the **** it is.

Post by **Ghostrider** » 2006-05-29 08:46

I hope this turns out in favor of the community. We've been slapped in the face way too frequently with those kinds of "stunts" and empty promises..

-Ghostrider

15th|Arctic · Post by **15th|Arctic** » 2006-05-29 09:08

I don't know why, but EA and DICE seem to want to destroy the modding community, maybe because people would only be playing BF2 mods and not buying 2142 (*cough* HALO *cough*), or maybe not, I don't know.
But one thing we can be sure of. EA are fags!

the.ultimate.maverick · Post by **the.ultimate.maverick** » 2006-05-29 09:22

Quand: Samedi, Juin 3eme, 16h (GMT +2h) - Sunday, June 4th, 16h (GMT +2)
Qui: la societe de Battlefield 2
Comme quoi: lisez desous

Nous acceptons et respectons les efforts et la travaille derrier le production de Bf2. Et d'accord Nous acceptons et respectons les efforts derrier la production et le dessin d'une piece pour un jeux comme BF2. Cependant, une piece devrait ameliorer un jeux pour les joueurs - pas seulement pour representer les idees de l'éditeur.

Et EA et DICE n'ont pas fait ca.

Avec le relachement de piece 1.3, EA et DICE ont frappe les joueurs dans la bouche.

Le piece interdit ABR qui etait developpe par joueurs pour joueurs et il a approuve par DICE.

Et maintenant il y a une petition avec plus de 10.000 joueurs actifs qui ont demande pour l'introduction de "squad hopping" comme une option pour les serveurs mais ca etaient neglige par EA et DICE.

**in process of working through it - my french is not brilliant

Post by **eggman** » 2006-05-29 14:37

Heh .. well .. you can see by my sig that I'm fully in support of this. No idea if it will send any kind of message to EA, or if it will just be a lil blip they don't notice... but.......

It's not about EA bashing, it's about their mismanagement of the franchise from a mod community perspective. IMO EA owes a debt of gratitude to the mod community because DC was a huge contributor to the success of the BF42 series.

With BF2 and the ranked server / booster pack business model, EA has really shut out mods. And it's incredily shortsighted and unfortunate.

Imagine if EA ran a program where mods could become "official" and included on ranked servers. Now they have hundreds of people making content for free, instead of 20 at DICE Canada. Just guess on average salaries of people working on booster packs, and you've got about $1.5 to $2 million in overhead. They are obviously not going to sell 600,000 copies of booster packs (assuming I have their staff overheads correct, add in the same amount again for marketing and infrastructure, then double that to make it profitable).

I'm not saying I understand their financial model. I am saying they have really gone in the reverse of supporting the mod community and I don't think they analyzed what the financial model was. It was pretty long into the life of BF2 that their strategy changed from expansion packs to booster packs.

Here's just a few things that make BF2 a challenging mod platform:
- there have been 2 releases of the editor, last one was in January. Realistically the Editor we have is like a late stage beta.
- modders can't use the unlock system; we don't want to use the unlock weapons, we want to make mroe than 7 classes
---> case in point here: one of our coders has spent weeks trying to develop a workaround to what was about 8 seconds of work before BF2 1.03
- documentation is generally *very* poor and much of what is learned is through trial and error
- Armored Fury introduces 2 new capabilities: weather and a radar scan ability; mod teams will (most likely) not be informed about this; instead we'll have to reverse engineer it. How many other capabilities exist that we don't know about?
- mixed game modes were just in their infancy with PR (and we're not the only mod with alternative game modes). With BF2 1.3, after we spent a bunch of time working around bugs in the BF2 python implementation to get support for mixing game modes in a single map list, the BF2 1.3 server is hardcoded to prevent mixing of game modes. In addition there are bugs in the handling of game modes not officially supported by BF2 that we're still unclear on how to work around. If they cared or were paying attention to the mod community, they would know we are working on mixed game modes. I mean uh... come on..... how much time does it take to check out what is going on in the mod community when there are only 7 or 8 larger mods released (of which DCON, Battleracer and PR all use alternative game modes .. and PR has multiple game modes). Not to mention PoE showing plans for alternative game modes.
- they laid off the original mod co-ordinator; the new one is AWOL afaik
- Mod teams don't get access to patches or schedules for patches any earlier than you guys do... which typically leaves us scrambling to resolve issues
- Y'all know that at PR we don't like squad hopping / cycling. But many folks do... so why not just build it in as a config setting, but require ranked servers to have it so that squad hopping is disabled, but non ranked server can do what they feel like?

I could go on.... and on.....

Yes, technically it's a platform with a lot of potential for modding, but the support has been abysmal imo.

I highly doubt you'll see PR move to the 2142 platform, tho we do plan to keep the team going for as long as we can (which ideally will mean we'll move to another platform at some point in the future).

So uh... long story short... I am fully in suport of the initiative and I'll play my individual part by not participating in BF2 on the day of the event. Prolly make the wife happy anyways

egg

Post by **Fullforce** » 2006-05-29 14:44

Personally, I Like the idea. But i'd prefer it if it was a "don't play vanilla, play a mod" boycott. But that would be much harder to do. This means only server admins have to really do anything, but a mod one would mean everyone has to download it.

[ZiiP]DarkJester · Post by **[ZiiP]DarkJester** » 2006-05-29 15:03

ZiiP has had a vote between contributors. We'll be boycotting our Ranked Server as part of the protest.

However, We won't be closing our PRMM or BattleRacer servers, obviously.

POWER TO THE MODDERS!!

Post by **Rhino** » 2006-05-29 18:11

'[ZiiP wrote:DarkJester']ZiiP has had a vote between contributors. We'll be boycotting our Ranked Server as part of the protest.

However, We won't be closing our PRMM or BattleRacer servers, obviously.

POWER TO THE MODDERS!!

the more players not playing on that day, and the more servers passworded with that name tag on, will all help to the big total at the end.

Eden · Post by **Eden** » 2006-05-29 18:12

If i am not mistaken anyone logged in be it playing BF2 or a mod is still counted as someone playing BF2. I wont be playing any BF game/mod that day.

Post by **Rhino** » 2006-05-29 18:14

Eden wrote:If i am not mistaken anyone logged in be it playing BF2 or a mod is still counted as someone playing BF2. I wont be playing any BF game/mod that day.

yes the server checkers will count mods as BF2.

Post by **Ghostrider** » 2006-05-29 18:45

Have we not learned anything yet? Didn't BF2 teach us that we are able to successfully solve any problem with C4? Wouldn't we just have to...

.... j/k

-Ghostrider

Hannez · Post by **Hannez** » 2006-05-29 18:58

I think EA wont give a thing about these boycott things or petitions. They just care about money and destroying the mod communities.

I haven't played vBF2 for about two months and moved to different games, like CoD2. Mods are the only things that keep me interested in BF2. One thing is 100% sure that im not going to buy AF (A10 is a freaking joke in that booster pack) and BF2142. EA has shown how terrible game developers they are.

Eggman, i read your topic at bf2editor.com and im really sad to hear all the problems 1.3 patch has caused to Project Reality mod. Best wishes and good luck for developing future releases.

trogdor1289 · Post by **trogdor1289** » 2006-05-29 19:00

Yeah the boycott won't affect EA at all monetairly so they won't care.

Post by **RikiRude** » 2006-05-29 19:50

Anything to help show EA that they really need to get more involved with the community. I don't know anything about coding, but I know how much trouble 1.3 has been giving the coders, it's insane, I really wonder what goes on in EA's mind, to me it makes absolutly no sense to not support the community.

Does everyone remember how excited the community was over reading the April Fools anouncement? Where they said they would stop working on BF2142 and work more on BF2? You think with the feedback they got from that, they would of started taking notice.. guess not.

Post by **Ghostrider** » 2006-05-29 21:17

'[R-DEV wrote:Riki_Rude_BTYC']Anything to help show EA that they really need to get more involved with the community. I don't know anything about coding, but I know how much trouble 1.3 has been giving the coders, it's insane, I really wonder what goes on in EA's mind, to me it makes absolutly no sense to not support the community.

Does everyone remember how excited the community was over reading the April Fools anouncement? Where they said they would stop working on BF2142 and work more on BF2? You think with the feedback they got from that, they would of started taking notice.. guess not.

Too sad it was just an April's fool joke...
I think the onlyones that could've found that to be funny were those at EA/DICE...

I once read a post saying that EA/DICE didn't like the modding community at all, because they always settled down and they refused to 'migrate' from the core game to their expansion packs (and took a big part of the community with them) and it was costly. They made reference to BFVietnam, saying that not many bought it because they would rather play DC, which was a mod.

After I read that, it really made a lot of sense to me...sometimes I do think it's true...and the more patches they release (and break the mod) the more I tend to be convinced about that.

-Ghostrider

PS: And making coding breakthroughs for a mod with this "oh great support" that EA/DICE has provided is really a freaking up-hill battle

I think the problem is that they know that Mods will have better quality than their half-finished broken products...

[T]Terranova7 · Post by **[T]Terranova7** » 2006-05-29 21:53

EA pretty much responsible for hundreads of games. Why not settle with a quality game. BF is a game that people want to mod. The thing is, battlefield in general lacks a single-player storyline. Meaning theres really no sequel to the game, only some new vehicles and the like. The way I see it EA should be adding on to the core game freely. No player should be paying for a few maps and some new vehicles. You support the community, you make a better game that people may be buying for years to come. IMO if BF lost a chunk of the modding community, then they would lose alot of players.

trogdor1289 · Post by **trogdor1289** » 2006-05-29 21:56

what does IMO mean? I keep seeing it and still have no idea what it means.

[T]Terranova7 · Post by **[T]Terranova7** » 2006-05-29 21:58

In my opinion

Post by **RikiRude** » 2006-05-30 04:50

one question what is the point of passwording the servers with that password?