Forum Discussion

M0istGamer's avatar
4 years ago

Constructive Suggestion - Start With an Apology

TLDR:  Sorry goes a long way.  It really does.  Not kidding.

Hello EA,  Please relay to the appropriate parties.  I offer some constructive feedback to ye.  First of all. We've been bad too.  Not all of us, but there's always bad eggs in a crowd.  So on behalf of the more rambunctious customers, we apologize.  No place for threats etc over a video game!

I now suggest you do the same.  In all of your communications, updated roadmaps, plans, I carefully scanned for the word "apologize" or "sorry" or anything of that nature.  Words like that can go a long way, and kindness can silence so many angry mouths and souls.  I've not seen any of it.  "The customer is always right" was a fun old addage that is clearly out of date, but it still rings true in extreme cases.  105k people on Steam 3 months ago, and now there's 1.5k.  People can't find games ladies and gentleman.  Where there's smoke there's fire. 

I understand we get proud of our work as human beings, it makes it tough to say "yeah, what I just did wasnt great" or "yeah... you're right that shouldve been done differently".  That's hard to say.  But 102k people paid up to and over 100$ for this and decided it wasnt worth their time in a matter of three months.  That's just one platform.  The smoke is the players leaving, the fire is ________.  The blank is that the game isnt great guys.

I could never EVER imagine selling someone, something for 100$ of this quality and not apologizing.  Even when I sell mint condition items on Nextdoor, I apologize if they are a bit dusty.  That's just dust.  I'm not going to rehash all of the specific issues with the release in its current state, but a lot of people are still experiencing horrible bugs (revive, presistence, having to play the intro every few days, complete loadout resets), 4 months in, with no promise of fixes until... I think you said March or April but I'm not sure.

The decision to call certain items legacy, or decide they werent required on your own, was a poor choice.  If the roles were reversed, and you were writing this and I were EA, I'd also be apologizing for presuming after all these years, I knew you wanted to lose so many features in the core game.  Was there any survey work done around that, no I sense not.  Did anny of the customers say "take away scores, voip, good squad commands"?  I sense not!  I sense this decision was made FOR us, BY you.  All in the "love letter to fans".

I know its not easy to do but a "sorry, we messed up," can go a pretty long way.  That hasnt been said once.  Instead we've had a mix of bravado, sarcasm, downtrodden comments from community managers and developers.  It went from upsetting to agitating at that point.  In customer relations we are supposed to pick the good, true, constructive feedback from the crowd of angry customers or employees... we do not simply bash an entire audience or group, nor write them off entirely, because we are getting flustered at work.  You've really gotta reiterate your social media policy with the employees or contractors or unpaid folks.  As the end user/consumer we have no idea if said policy exists nor what it is, but it doesn't look great when you have these randos claiming to be associated with you making angry red faced tweet videos.  Control that!!! Serious suggestion from me to you.

We all wish you would stop reacting to the Lowest Common Denominators, (the angry people that will hate you no matter what), and instead simply apologize, start working with real fans or "influencers" (I hate to say that and cringe too trust me, but it might work), and get this thing on the right track.

There is no sense in pretending the game is in a good state, there is no sense in pretending the customer is happy, and there is no sense in pretending you are happy with any of it.  So lets fix it and start off right.  Please forward this to the correct parties.

Sorry gives me hope, sorry gives me a light at the end of the tunnel.  The first step is acknowledging it, only then can we take the next steps.

Thanks.

15 Replies

  • At least every game ends with an apology:

    "Don't be sad, this is just how it works out sometimes"

    Plus nothing says we love our customers more than a tactical beanie!!!

  • ATFGunr's avatar
    ATFGunr
    Legend
    4 years ago

    You don’t have to be Canadian to apologize, but it doesn’t hurt. Pretending the room isn’t on fire won’t prevent your house burning down around you. (So sad image won’t show, sorry folks. Gee see how easy that is?)

  • CPU_UK's avatar
    CPU_UK
    Seasoned Ace
    4 years ago
    @M0istGamer Well if you read Tom Hendersons new article (15th Feb Xfire.com) you will see that EA acknowledge the problem of BF2042 failure as being... "the surprise release of Halo: Infinite multiplayer"- I kid not.
  • NiCeDiCe90's avatar
    NiCeDiCe90
    4 years ago

    @Tank2042Man wrote:

    We apologise for daring to innovate instead of giving you BF4 2.0.

    We apologise for creating fun characters.

    We apologise for not catering to milsim larpers.

    We apologise for giving players more freedom.

    We apologise for introducing new soldier abilities with specialists.

    We apologise for giving old fans large classic maps.

    We apologise for our in game maps matching the pre-rendered images.

    We apologise for our innovative dynamic weather model.

    We apologise for giving you portal to create your own games on fan favourite maps.

    We apologise for making a fun game.

    Alternative version.

    We apologise, we will do better, we will treat this as a learning experience and grow from here. 

    To show our commitment to helping the community through this difficult time we have all changed our Facebook and Instagram profile pics to  r/battlefield2042. 

    We feel your pain, we feel your injustice, and we stand with you as we progress towards a new battlefield 4 utopia together as comrades.


    - making everything worse and removing features that became the default standard because it just works is not innovation. It's resetting all knowledge to zero... You can do a factory reset for a new IP and call it innovation, but not in Battlefield.

    - fun characters would be fine in a spin off with a not so dark theme. But the tone of 2042 want to be dark and apocalyptic. "fun characters" don't fit + they are not fun. They are just cringe and not likeable at all.

    - ? xD

    - "more freedom" is a very poor excuse for "we did not test balancing at all and didn't know what we want so just do whatever..."

    - doing specialists is not the problem. It's more HOW they did it.

    - thx for old maps that are worse than the originals (at least in case of BF3 and BC2) and for new maps were nobody took  a single minute thinking about gameflow

    - they don't

    - dynamic weather isn't new and has been better in BF1 and BFV. Even the more scripted weather from BF4 (Paracel storm, gulf of oman) and Hardline (Dust bowl) had way more impact and way better visuals.

    - Portal is a nice tool in theory but it's not an excuse to not implement the old maps properly and not doing fan fav gamemodes just because they could do it by themself.

    - "fun game"

About Battlefield 2042 General Discussion

Discuss the latest news and game information around Battlefield 2042 in the community forums.15,966 PostsLatest Activity: 2 hours ago