EA's Origin DD service (not that Origin)

TheGameguru wrote:

I'm confused.. one person's problem is systematic of everyone's. No system is perfect.. years later I can go into Valve forums on any given day and there are slews of people with problems..

Forum posts IMO have zero to do with overall functionality of anything. Hardly anyone that isnt experiencing problems will post.. "100% ok today! yeah!"

That message is not just about there being a bug, it's about a bug that erases your whole download, wasting hours of time... I've experienced random bugs in Valve games, but nothing like that.

Scratched wrote:

Another reason why it's good practice to backup your game files once they're downloaded, preferably in an archive format you can open without relying on an external server.

Does that actually work, though? The older games download .cab files, but most of the newer games like BF3 do more Steam like installs, and nothing really usable gets backed up as far as I could tell. So I cut it off.

gregrampage wrote:

Regarding the complaints, I just was trying to say that while we should keep perspective we shouldn't dismiss them outright either. It would be interesting to compare the complaint rates vs Steam. It's probably the case that Steam issues just don't make the news like Origin ones do.

I think Origin is currently new and novel to people, so it is news and new information rather than just someone having problems.

MannishBoy wrote:
Scratched wrote:

Another reason why it's good practice to backup your game files once they're downloaded, preferably in an archive format you can open without relying on an external server.

Does that actually work, though? The older games download .cab files, but most of the newer games like BF3 do more Steam like installs, and nothing really usable gets backed up as far as I could tell. So I cut it off.

I can't say I've experimented with it. I suspect it will work better on newer games that are 'origin aware', that are patched through origin and you can use it to verify the files.

What I do with 'origin unaware' games is to backup the files and the registry entries, so I can put it back, just as though you'd installed it from a disc or origin. Seeing as those are all old games, I've no idea how patching works with them besides the usual manual patches.

It seems like something I can easily experiment with and see what makes it tick.

my SSD died recently.. using a USB case I was able to copy some of my directories from it to my new SSD.. including my Steam and Origin folder.. from there I re-installed both Steam and Origin over the old folders and Origin once I logged in showed all the games as "Ready to Install" rather than "Download" so just clicking that and having it to the install over again worked fine.

With Steam I actually had to delete all the files except the Steam.exe and the Steamapps subdirectory and just run steam.exe for it to redownload all the misc. files over and prompt me again for the security key. I had to verify local game caches for some of my games but that was more because several files on the old SSD wouldnt not read properly when I was copying files across.

Both were way better than having to re-download gigs of game data over again.

Doing those experiments now. First step was to backup the installed files and uninstall.

First up: Amalur:Reckoning.
As Guru says, drop the files in the right place, get origin to "Reload my games" and it recognises it's ready to install. Hit the button and it sorts itself out and gives you a game ready to go. No messing around. I might revisit this with my base v1.0 archive rather than the current version one, to see how it handles restoring an out of date version that needs a patch.

Next up: Mass Effect2, which includes bringing it across from my steam version.

edit: So far ME2 appears to be redownloading itself. I'm noticing pairs of my old files, and *_DiP_STAGED files (which are EA's temp files) with the same size. The redistributables and docs are in a different folder layout, so moving them might help if it does recognise old files.

edit2: After sorting out the __Installer folder, it zooms up the completion to 100%, and changes to a ready to install button. My bandwidth monitor is showing about 242MB used, so it did recognise the old files.

According to the launcher it's put me on v1.02 which is the latest patch, although for an 'old' game I assume it won't be getting any more patches, so I guess that's what they used when they made their image to download from. There's no options to check it's integrity or check for patches.

FYI, for the past 4 days or so EA Origin has been taking purchases and has just now started sending confirmation e-mails with download codes that may or may not work. This was systematic, their entire system was down.

http://forum.ea.com/eaforum/posts/li...

They never posted a notice or notified the customers at any point that they would not receive any form of confirmation. This led to some customers not realizing that their order went through and purchasing again. Their Tech Support was unable to access any order as "their tools were unavailable". Also, if you purchased via Amazon or a boxed copy you may have been unable to redeem your Origin code.

I ran into this trying to purchase Syndicate. They offered me a 5% coupon but it expires at the end of the month and does not apply to pre-orders. They promise me a refund but it will take up to 10 business days for the transaction to complete (though I've already been charged).

This is where a service is only as strong as the weakest link in the chain, in this case the behind the scenes like the policies and servers rather than something visible to the consumer such as the client, web store or pricing.

Five measly percent is hardly much compensation either, on a $60 game that's $3, which is pocket change. That doesn't really give the impression they're really sorry and want to move heaven and earth to make you happy, even if it is just a few edits on a database, customer perception is reality when it comes to return business.

Does Origin have a "gift" option like Steam? I'm trapped with the Japanese overlay despite having everything set to English. I'm thinking of preordering ME3 but can not do it at this time.

Steam allows me to purchase games through a proxy site in Canadian dollars.

Edit: Only the store part is in Japanese. The rest is in English.

Edit 2: Origin isn't a very good service. It might be in a few years, but it isn't right now.

Vector wrote:

Edit 2: Origin isn't a very good service. It might be in a few years, but it isn't right now.

I echo this sentiment. I hope EA doesn't think their massive user numbers vindicate Origin in its current form. At this point I use it because I have to for a few games. Without their exclusives this service wouldn't have the quality to survive with such strong competition in Steam. Hopefully EA can right the ship. They have the basic, buggy core of what they need.

I can't even buy games using the current system. It took me blindly fumbling in a language I don't understand just to download a demo. Customer Support's official help was to give my information to a friend in Canada and have them buy the game for me.

If anything it's kind of funny. As I see it, the push on EADM->Origin is so that Origin works better as a store, customers buy direct from Origin cutting out the middleman, so EA get all the cake.

With this situation because the billing is so screwy it looks to me like it's a much better idea to get your EA key from that third party or retail just to have a layer of separation between your money and EA. Assuming the cd key registration works there's little disadvantage to the customer beyond messing around with multiple sites, and you're probably going to get a better price too. Just registering a cd key would also avoid the "you did a chargeback, so we're locking your account" situation, which has happened with steam.

TheGameguru wrote:

I'm confused.. one person's problem is systematic of everyone's. No system is perfect.. years later I can go into Valve forums on any given day and there are slews of people with problems..

Forum posts IMO have zero to do with overall functionality of anything. Hardly anyone that isnt experiencing problems will post.. "100% ok today! yeah!"

The service isn't 100% unusable by all, sure. But there's quite a few more than "one person's problem." Great example of that would be:

Rexneron wrote:

FYI, for the past 4 days or so EA Origin has been taking purchases and has just now started sending confirmation e-mails with download codes that may or may not work. This was systematic, their entire system was down.

http://forum.ea.com/eaforum/posts/li...

They never posted a notice or notified the customers at any point that they would not receive any form of confirmation. This led to some customers not realizing that their order went through and purchasing again. Their Tech Support was unable to access any order as "their tools were unavailable". Also, if you purchased via Amazon or a boxed copy you may have been unable to redeem your Origin code.

I ran into this trying to purchase Syndicate. They offered me a 5% coupon but it expires at the end of the month and does not apply to pre-orders. They promise me a refund but it will take up to 10 business days for the transaction to complete (though I've already been charged).

Doesn't mean it can't be a great service, but it seems further from that goal now than it should be.

Update

Version 8.5.0
Added the ability to upload custom avatars.
Added captcha verification for increased security.
Improved relevancy of friend search results.
Progress bar now displays when installing games.
Streamlined Origin installation and update processes.
Game Add-Ons (DLC) can now be purchased and installed directly through Origin.
Updated the look and feel of the Origin client.
Users can now invite multiple friends to play at once.
Users can now hide games in their Game Library.

I think/hope the italicised item is probably relevant to Mass Effect 3

Scratched wrote:

I think/hope the italicised item is probably relevant to Mass Effect 3

I hope it means the end of BioWare fun bux too.

So i logged on looking for a Syndicate PC demo (can't find one) and saw they have free demo streaming via gaikai. I loaded up Dead Space 2, and the services works pretty well. That's more than I can say for my interest in the game. I have no idea how I could have spent so little time (quit after 5 mins of gameplay that seemed exactly like the original that I actually beat) with the game and come away so bored.

demonbox wrote:
TheGameguru wrote:

I'm confused.. one person's problem is systematic of everyone's. No system is perfect.. years later I can go into Valve forums on any given day and there are slews of people with problems..

Forum posts IMO have zero to do with overall functionality of anything. Hardly anyone that isnt experiencing problems will post.. "100% ok today! yeah!"

The service isn't 100% unusable by all, sure. But there's quite a few more than "one person's problem." Great example of that would be:

Rexneron wrote:

FYI, for the past 4 days or so EA Origin has been taking purchases and has just now started sending confirmation e-mails with download codes that may or may not work. This was systematic, their entire system was down.

http://forum.ea.com/eaforum/posts/li...

They never posted a notice or notified the customers at any point that they would not receive any form of confirmation. This led to some customers not realizing that their order went through and purchasing again. Their Tech Support was unable to access any order as "their tools were unavailable". Also, if you purchased via Amazon or a boxed copy you may have been unable to redeem your Origin code.

I ran into this trying to purchase Syndicate. They offered me a 5% coupon but it expires at the end of the month and does not apply to pre-orders. They promise me a refund but it will take up to 10 business days for the transaction to complete (though I've already been charged).

Doesn't mean it can't be a great service, but it seems further from that goal now than it should be.

I just don't get it... I mean I'm completely dumbfounded anymore these days by these threads..

Further from the goal compared to what? What are we really talking about here? Is Origin perfect? NO. is Origin as good as Steam? NO. Is Steam perfect? NO... if our only measure is apparently customer service and back end issues.. since if I go to the Steam Forums there's a "ton" of people having various issues with Steam.

Last I checked, Steam's never had a problem where they've taken people's money and not even acknowledged that the purchase was made for days on end and on top of that, never bothered to tell anyone about it or stop taking orders until their system was fixed. And on top of that, not being able to fix it because of broken tools and offering basically nothing for your trouble. I'm sorry that's outrageously bad service, I don't care whether it's EA or not. If you find that acceptable, well I don't know what else to say about it.

Parallax Abstraction wrote:

Last I checked, Steam's never had a problem where they've taken people's money and not even acknowledged that the purchase was made for days on end and on top of that, never bothered to tell anyone about it or stop taking orders until their system was fixed. And on top of that, not being able to fix it because of broken tools and offering basically nothing for your trouble. I'm sorry that's outrageously bad service, I don't care whether it's EA or not. If you find that acceptable, well I don't know what else to say about it.

No, but they've disabled people's accounts with thousands of dollars spent without giving any reason. One of the games blogs had the long story about a guy that that happened to not long ago, and that wasn't the first time I'd read a similar story.

None are perfect. All of these places screw up.

You're completely right there and Steam's policy on that is very bad. Don't get me wrong, I'm not defending Steam here but I don't think the case cited with Origin (which is only one of several major customer service related issues they've had) is something that's worth being dismissed into the "angry Internet men" file. I wasn't even affected by that but a company EA's size who wants to compete in the digital space should have better systems in place than that. It's perfectly fair to point out bad customer service from anyone when it's existence is properly demonstrated.

Parallax Abstraction wrote:

You're completely right there and Steam's policy on that is very bad. Don't get me wrong, I'm not defending Steam here but I don't think the case cited with Origin (which is only one of several major customer service related issues they've had) is something that's worth being dismissed into the "angry Internet men" file. I wasn't even affected by that but a company EA's size who wants to compete in the digital space should have better systems in place than that. It's perfectly fair to point out bad customer service from anyone when it's existence is properly demonstrated.

I must be explaining things wrong somehow.. when did I say that Origin was in the "right" or "doing things properly". I'm only pointing out that isolating specific customer cases isn't indicative of the whole situation. Why discuss one particular incident at all? Do we have a Valve thread where we find forum threads where someone had an issue and then post it and say.. See VALVE and STEAM sucks!!!

We've shut down threads that were simply about Female Doggoing about a particular company (see the Sony thread) if this thread is soley to find incidents where a customer has had an issue and point at it and say OMGZ Origin sucks.. then whats the point?

TheGameguru wrote:
Parallax Abstraction wrote:

You're completely right there and Steam's policy on that is very bad. Don't get me wrong, I'm not defending Steam here but I don't think the case cited with Origin (which is only one of several major customer service related issues they've had) is something that's worth being dismissed into the "angry Internet men" file. I wasn't even affected by that but a company EA's size who wants to compete in the digital space should have better systems in place than that. It's perfectly fair to point out bad customer service from anyone when it's existence is properly demonstrated.

I must be explaining things wrong somehow.. when did I say that Origin was in the "right" or "doing things properly". I'm only pointing out that isolating specific customer cases isn't indicative of the whole situation. Why discuss one particular incident at all? Do we have a Valve thread where we find forum threads where someone had an issue and then post it and say.. See VALVE and STEAM sucks!!!

We've shut down threads that were simply about Female Doggoing about a particular company (see the Sony thread) if this thread is soley to find incidents where a customer has had an issue and point at it and say OMGZ Origin sucks.. then whats the point?

That's pretty fair. There is, however, some context. There were many posts saying "Based off EA's past, I except this to be ..." and a lot of these new posts validate those predictions. It's not entirely just an EA Female Doggo fest. Establishing a pattern of customer service from EA is pretty valuable. Steam's pattern of customer service is usually much better, even if they do make some catastrophic mistakes.

Is it just that this is a dedicated thread that's the problem?

SixteenBlue wrote:

That's pretty fair. There is, however, some context. There were many posts saying "Based off EA's past, I except this to be ..." and a lot of these new posts validate those predictions. It's not entirely just an EA Female Doggo fest. Establishing a pattern of customer service from EA is pretty valuable. Steam's pattern of customer service is usually much better, even if they do make some catastrophic mistakes.

Is it just that this is a dedicated thread that's the problem?

I think EA have a bit of reputation baggage they bring with them, even though it might be from totally unrelated areas of the business and relatively ancient history. EA have people looking for problems to criticise them.

Scratched wrote:
SixteenBlue wrote:

That's pretty fair. There is, however, some context. There were many posts saying "Based off EA's past, I except this to be ..." and a lot of these new posts validate those predictions. It's not entirely just an EA Female Doggo fest. Establishing a pattern of customer service from EA is pretty valuable. Steam's pattern of customer service is usually much better, even if they do make some catastrophic mistakes.

Is it just that this is a dedicated thread that's the problem?

I think EA have a bit of reputation baggage they bring with them, even though it might be from totally unrelated areas of the business and relatively ancient history. EA have people looking for problems to criticise them.

That's probably true but on the other hand I've seen a ton of customer support/experience related baggage that they rightfully deserve. In fact that's my only real concern with them. They make good games.

SixteenBlue wrote:
Scratched wrote:
SixteenBlue wrote:

That's pretty fair. There is, however, some context. There were many posts saying "Based off EA's past, I except this to be ..." and a lot of these new posts validate those predictions. It's not entirely just an EA Female Doggo fest. Establishing a pattern of customer service from EA is pretty valuable. Steam's pattern of customer service is usually much better, even if they do make some catastrophic mistakes.

Is it just that this is a dedicated thread that's the problem?

I think EA have a bit of reputation baggage they bring with them, even though it might be from totally unrelated areas of the business and relatively ancient history. EA have people looking for problems to criticise them.

That's probably true but on the other hand I've seen a ton of customer support/experience related baggage that they rightfully deserve. In fact that's my only real concern with them. They make good games.

I've also seen some very good customer support from them. Even reported from cranky people on reddit.

They fixed some stuff for me awhile back, too, and their chat rep was very efficient.

Definitely not perfect, but also not the Store of the Antichrist, either.

MannishBoy wrote:

Store of the Antichrist

I think that label's reserved for when Activision ultimately reveals their downloadable store

SixteenBlue wrote:
TheGameguru wrote:
Parallax Abstraction wrote:

You're completely right there and Steam's policy on that is very bad. Don't get me wrong, I'm not defending Steam here but I don't think the case cited with Origin (which is only one of several major customer service related issues they've had) is something that's worth being dismissed into the "angry Internet men" file. I wasn't even affected by that but a company EA's size who wants to compete in the digital space should have better systems in place than that. It's perfectly fair to point out bad customer service from anyone when it's existence is properly demonstrated.

I must be explaining things wrong somehow.. when did I say that Origin was in the "right" or "doing things properly". I'm only pointing out that isolating specific customer cases isn't indicative of the whole situation. Why discuss one particular incident at all? Do we have a Valve thread where we find forum threads where someone had an issue and then post it and say.. See VALVE and STEAM sucks!!!

We've shut down threads that were simply about Female Doggoing about a particular company (see the Sony thread) if this thread is soley to find incidents where a customer has had an issue and point at it and say OMGZ Origin sucks.. then whats the point?

That's pretty fair. There is, however, some context. There were many posts saying "Based off EA's past, I except this to be ..." and a lot of these new posts validate those predictions. It's not entirely just an EA Female Doggo fest. Establishing a pattern of customer service from EA is pretty valuable. Steam's pattern of customer service is usually much better, even if they do make some catastrophic mistakes.

Is it just that this is a dedicated thread that's the problem?

Low hanging fruit though.. honestly what service these days doesnt have issues?? nothing is 100% perfect (as was pointed out previously).

4 years from now Origin could match Valve feature for feature and possibly even surpass it.. and I would bet everything I own that you would go into the Origin forums and it would be FILLED with complaints and customers having all sorts of issues.

If we all refuse to let go of the past then we all have no future. Someone smarter than me told me that one day.

Wow, way to stay classy, EA!

The offer of a free download code for Battlefield 3 was supposed to last until March 5. However, we received the following from Origin.

Due to the overwhelming response, Origin Store is discontinuing the below offer as of 2/16: Pre-order Mass Effect 3 for PC and get a free copy of Battlefield 3 for PC for free.

People really liked something so you decide to stop doing it? That sounds like a great way to do business.

Well, they got publicity for it, which is almost as good

mrtomaytohead wrote:

People really liked something so you decide to stop doing it? That sounds like a great way to do business.

I'm guessing they looked at the numbers on the buy DA2 get ME2 free promotion and figured they weren't in any financial danger

mrtomaytohead wrote:

People really liked something so you decide to stop doing it? That sounds like a great way to do business.

It happens all the time with giveaways like this. Not just with gaming but with all kinds of business. If demand is significantly higher than expected, companies will pull the plug on the deal rather than keep handing out freebies that cost them money.

I'm not sure about the exact financial mechanisms in place with something like this, but even if there isn't a cost to physically produce a new PC download of Battlefield 3, they're not free. There's probably a cost per license, or even just the cost of lost sales due to copies being given away.