Open email to EA

[Kropotkin]

After having difficulties with Burnout 3 on Xbox live I have been forced to write the following email to Electronic Arts:

I've just been playing Burnout 3 with some friends via XBox live and we've all been having difficulties maintaining a connection via the EA lobby system you have seemed to have spliced onto the side of XBox.

After reading the support FAQ's on this issue you state that players should avoid the use of routers and instead plug the Xbox directly into the broadband modem. This is presumably to avoid port redirection problems that could occur. This has to be the dumbest piece of technical advice I have ever encountered. I know of no one who does this as most people have a broadband connection that is shared with their PC. A router is also more secure as they all act as a hardware firewall! Besides I can't plug my modem directly into my Xbox as it's a USB device!

Another thing. Using a router has never really been an issue for XBox live. I have been on the service for almost 2 years now and I have yet to have any problems with online games with it whilst my XBox was plugged into my router. It is only with your first XBox live game that I have encountered a problem. Which is hardly surprising seeing as I had the same fight with my Playstation 2 whilst trying to play FIFA 2004 which eventually saw me shifting it in front of a DMZ on my router to prevent me from having to open ports for every online game I owned!

From what I can see EA are keen to impose their own lobby system in a similar way it has on the Playstation 2. The trouble is this requirement adds another level of complication and really does not work as advertised.

XBox live has a perfectly adequate lobby system which is maintained without any problems. Every other publisher that has an XBox Live enabled title falls back onto the the built in lobby system. But not EA. Ooooh no. EA are special. EA have to be different. EA want to have absolute control over their customers and, in the very near future, charge them for the privilege. Oh you may deny it now but this whole EA lobby set up stinks of a charged based online system coming to an Xbox near me real soon!

So here's the thing. You are now jumping onto the XBox Live band wagon only once Microsoft rolled over and agreed to let you have this external lobby system which DOES NOT WORK. None of this is a good thing. You're getting customers sending angry emails like this which you'll probably ignore anyway.

So how do you get over this problem? Well I see you have several options open to you. These are:

1) Do nothing and carry on being the same old arrogant company you have always been. Why not? No one likes you anyway.

2) Actually fix the problem server side.

3) Apologise to your customers for being...well...EA!

I suspect you'll go for number 1 on this one. It's worked so far so why change now?

MUST TRY HARDER! See me after class, 3/10.

Yours utterly disgusted

***********

[Shane R. Monroe]

Not that I could care less about any problems an Xbox offers (I hate MS and that will never change - the Xbox is a great extension of that hatred), I do appreciate the smack down on EA.

Enjoy your "we're sorry - have 10% off Madden XXXXX" form letter you should be getting soon.

Thank god I'm using Burnout3 on the PS2.

Oh, and thank god I'm not playing online either ...

If they send you anything but a form letter back, we'd love to see it.

[Kropotkin]

Oh yes they replied and its a corker:

Thank you for contacting me with your concerns. I am sorry about the connection issues you have been experiencing. The online engineers are working on the servers, but we at tech support don't have any official word on server updates. The first thing you should try doing is power-cycling your cable or DSL modem. This means unplugging the modem from the wall, waiting one minute and then plugging it back in. Let the lights on the modem all come back up and try again.

Please let me know if there is anything else I can help you with.

So I have to turn my router on and off and that will fix the problem? Sheesh!

It gets better. Another email arrived from the illustrious halls of EA asking me my opinions of their customer support....lets just say I didn't hold back!

[Bryan 'KidHype' Smith]

Did i miss something here? If you hate EA, why are you supporting them by buying their products and using their online service?

Not trying to be a smartass here but garbage in, garbage out. I am not a big fan of EA either which is why I haven't bought a EA title since triple play 98.

[Kropotkin]

Burnout 3 is a very entertaining game. Its borrows a lot from arcade racers of old and shuns the anal-retentive realisum of games like Project Gotham Racing 2.

My only beef with the game is the way in which EA have screwed up the online play. The game itself is fine up until you try to join up with a few friends online and it all goes pear shaped.

As for boycotting EA games since 1998 I can see you point there but I really rated Battlefield 1942 and Medal of Honour until Call of Duty arrived.

[rolisme]

Oh yes they replied and its a corker:

So I have to turn my router on and off and that will fix the problem? Sheesh!

Why do you sheesh power cycling?
Having done tech support for an extremely large American cable internet provider I have a lot of experience in dealing with connection issues. Personal experience has shown me about 80-85% of connection issues with cable modems is solved by power cycling. It should be the second thing you try with any problems with connecting (the first is check all the cables). All kinds of strange problems are fixed by doing this, you probably won't believe me but I will give you two strange examples anyway:

(1) My customer could not send any emails. Receiving emails worked perfect and so did surfing the internet. I spent 1 hour+ doing all sorts of things such as deleting and remaking the account in the email client (I believe it was Outlook 2000), trying to use the IP address, tried different email clients, ran antivirus program, ran Spybot, disabled all the background programs, reinstalled outlook, reset his email account from our end, etc. Did everything I could think of as I knew the email servers were working fine. As a last resort as I was out of ideas we power cycled the modem. Sure enough the issue was resolved.

(2) Thos customer could not get web pages with Internet Explorer. I tried using IP addresses and sure enough pages came up. The customer WAS able to get web pages with URLs from windows explorer. I checked all the settings, they were fine. I spent over an hour on this call as well, and again did everything I could think of, from remaking the hosts files, deleting cache, reinstalling IE and etc. I power cycled the modem, didn't fix it. Then I found out the customer was on a network and had a router. So we power cycled the router and the modem again and then the pages came up.

Power cycling is the best thing you can do so I think the advice from EA was a valid one. I am not saying that it would fix you issue and that the issue is something on your end, however I do believe that the fix that EA sent you isn't something to *sheesh* about like it is useless. Plus you don't turn on and off the modem; you must drain all the power by unplugging it. I always power cycle the router as well.

Other than this little rant, I have nothing else to say. I hope that the issue gets resolved quickly for you.

[Kropotkin]

Thanks for your response rolisme. I appreciate your concern over my dismissal of power cycling my router but what you should understand is that nothing else on my network has any problems accessing the internet. Everything from my PC's, PS2, GameCube and my Amiga all access the 'net via the same router. Not only that but all other XBox Live games work just fine it's EA's Burnout 3 that has the problems. Plus the fact that it wasn't only me who was getting kicked out of the lobby but many others which led me to believe that it was a server side issue and not a client one.

Having said all of that I did actually power cycle my router to no effect. Ah well, worth a try eh?

[Danny]

Everybody has problems on EA's server's it's a fact of life!

Criteon are a great games producer but EA suck for publishing/servers The reason why I say they suck at publishing is because they always make the producers stick to deadlines no matter what the cost, this time the cost was poor gaming servers but burnout can consider itself lucky compaired to other games published by this company.

The reason why Criteon did not stick with there old puplisher was because they did not have the financal backing to host the servers and puplish a big games as Burnout 3, so they went to EA instead...

[Shane R. Monroe]

Its simply a tragedy that a GREAT game like Burnout 3 has to be tainted with the EA name.

What makes EA the most tragic story of all is that they USED to own way back when. Now they are a greedy borg company whose interest have shifted from the consumer to the stockholders.

[Danny]

Yeah Shane I think you're right!

Video games are big business and it seems all that matters now is the almighty dollar!

Long live freeware programmers who like programming games for programming sake as supposed to making money!

p.s: yes I do make freeware games!