Just finished going through a marathon of pain trying to get my new copy of Mass Effect 3 to work, all because of Origin. 10 reboots and an OS repair later I've finally got that piece of *Censored* *Censored* *Censored* working, so I might be able to play my game.
A note to any EA marketing people out there: If your DRM kills your customers computers, we can't play video games and thus will STOP BUYING YOUR STUFF! Mass Effect 3 is the first game I've ever bought that, post purchase, I've considered trying to find a pirated copy of merely to avoid dealing with Origin.
Rant over, thanks for listening. It was therapeutic.
I was extremely sceptical as well. And that was despite it working flawlessly to install. To be honest, I would gladly have paid half again the price without the DRM/mandatory online play. That's just me, though. Not everyone is worried about rootkits.
That's not half of it. The whole mess with scanning hard drives, and a badly translated and illegal EULA at least in Germany is the reason I haven't bought an EA game since. If I do that (probably once a version of Mass Effect 3 with all DLCs comes out), I will consider buying it for the PS3.
EA mad a bad decision with Origin, considering they already had a bad reputation. But since people will keep buying some of their games they get the leeway to do dumb stuff.
This is part of why I do not buy any products from EA any more.
Not even my beloved Sims... (really, an indie developer could stand to make a fortune off of disgruntled Sims players alone by introducing a new take on a slice of life game. There's lots of room to grow there, and EA doesn't have the sense or creativity to milk the potential, so someone else should).
But they could make a game purported to be the best game ever since the beginning of time and I wouldn't touch it with a standard adventurer's issue 10 foot pole.
This is part of why I do not buy any products from EA any more.
Yeah, I purchased Spore for my Mac and not only did it NOT work or install at all, they did not re3fund my money or provide anything resembling technical support.
I try to avoid anything with an EA logo on it these days.
Happily they tend to stick to sports games which I don't care for much.
My favorite experience regarding EA customer "service":
Me: Hi, I am trying to purchase some items from your store. The store says I have purchased the items, but I keep getting this error message whenever I try to download and install them. ((Followed by paste of error message and relevant system information.)) Is there a way I can manually download and install the item I purchased?
EA: This is a known error. There is no solution at this time. Please accept this coupon for the store which no longer functions for you.
((BTW, I learned later this "known error" had existed for at least 2 years and they had been giving the same response for those 2 years.)
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Well, my uncle is one of the few people I know without access to the internet, he is so by choice. Yet, he wanted to play Dragon Age, which should have been possible, because online access isn't required once the game is activated.
Since he doesn't have an e-mail adress, I activated his game on a new account using my e-mail access.
Following that, EA suspended my origins-account because:
EA customer service: We must assume you are using an illegal copy of that game.
I was a bit stumped - because I activated a second, legally bought copy of a game (hey, more money for EA!) I looked like I was using an illegal copy?
I got this sorted out, my account is usable again...yet I will not use it (except for ME3) - I actually rebought most of the games I was interested in again on steam (yeah, I know, another DRM, but I never had any trouble with them) when they were on sale and that's it, unless hear Origins got way better - which seems unlikely, since a friend of mine still (for abou a year now) tries to get EA customer service to help her get into her Origin account - because the new password they sent her after she lost hers didn't work...
I'm not a fan of Origin, though not because it doesn't work (it does, and has done from the start for me) but because it's expensive and badly laid out. Finding the PC DLCs for ME3 took me half an hour of going through the Origin pages, the Origin launcher and the ME3 website in bafflement before finally locating them. There isn't even a direct link to the DLC download pages from their entries on the main ME3 site, which is ridiculous.
Related: Dead Space cheat undermines in-game micro-transactions
Made me laugh out loud.