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