T w e n t y S i d e d
So, I have a Sims 4 Overthinking post written and ready for screenshots and posting, but EA has chosen now to force me to ‘upgrade’ to their new EA App (and politely uninstall Origin for me in the process.) I can’t help but picture the purchase screen for a new appliance, like a washing machine, where they offer to haul your old one away if you give them $80. But, instead of charging me $80, they’re just breaking into my house and taking it by force. Gee, thanks.
I’ve known this was coming for awhile, but I had bypassed it in the program files hoping I could put it off. It seems EA is onto this, however, because the bypass I did, and the one many other Sims players were using is no longer functional.
This would usually be a pretty quick thing. I’d be angry for half an hour and try to bypass it, then, once I realized I couldn’t, I’d just sigh and accept my fate, download it and move on. The problem is, my install is a bit special. Most of it is totally fine, but some of my files are a cracked version that it’s going to take me and my husband a week to figure out how to make work with the new launcher.
If I’m not very, very careful, and go slow, I could end up breaking my save games, including, you know, the one I’m working on for this funky thing I get to tell people I do for a ‘job’ now. Thank you guys for sticking around and reading this trash, it’s super cool to be able to tell people I do anything for work. So many years of doctors appointments and going to the bank where I just had to go ‘Uhhh…’ when asked what I do for work, but, no longer! Now I write for the internet! Ha! Huh. Maybe that’s more a ‘gotcha’ in my head.
Anyway, I guess I have a week of shaking my fist angrily at the corporate overlords to look forward to. Oh goody.
Footnotes:
[1] Thank you guys for sticking around and reading this trash, it’s super cool to be able to tell people I do anything for work. So many years of doctors appointments and going to the bank where I just had to go ‘Uhhh…’ when asked what I do for work, but, no longer! Now I write for the internet! Ha! Huh. Maybe that’s more a ‘gotcha’ in my head.
The Best of 2017
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2017.
Video Compression Gone Wrong
How does image compression work, and why does it create those ugly spots all over some videos and not others?
Could Have Been Great
Here are four games that could have been much better with just a little more work.
Project Octant
A programming project where I set out to make a Minecraft-style world so I can experiment with Octree data.
Free Radical
The product of fandom run unchecked, this novel began as a short story and grew into something of a cult hit.
This is all Michael’s fault. I knew that guy was a problem.
The EA app has some issues. For instance my desktop had Sims 4 installed twice, once via Steam (used by the kids) on my hard drive, once via the EA app (used by myself and my wife) on my SSD. We did this to keep the two entirely seperate. With Origin it worked fine, with the new EA app only the Steam one works – the EA app recognises the account as owning the game, but won’t start it because the installed copy is from another user (even though the copy it installed is still present).
That’s with entirely vanilla installs, no mods or DLC. So with a custom one I think you’re right to be careful!
I recomend backing up your save files in a Git repository
This is a domain where consumer regulations really need to catch up by now. It’s really not acceptable that you can buy a product, and then the company that sells you the product can sabotage it to force you to use a service that’s slightly more convenient to them and will (barely) improve their ability to sell more crap to you that you didn’t want.
One of the issues with that sort of thing is what has been commented on before while talking about loot boxes: you have a bunch of people who don’t understand video games trying to make these laws. For example, blocking a change to the EA app might mean that an MMO can’t update their launcher under the same rules as well, but it’s much more reasonable that they might enhance that than this case. But lawmakers are unlikely to be able to write laws that take those differences into account. So it ends up being tricky, because badly written laws will cause unintended consequences, and especially in this field most of the laws will be badly written.
Which is why you don’t write those details into law. You appoint a group of experts and give them authority to figure out what the right rules are, then approve those.
And that’s how a new regulatory group is formed – it’s always in response to a problem.
Which is why broadly bashing regulations and regulators is purely lazy non-thought. They are a necessary part of any system. None of us want the octogenarian narcissists in Congress anywhere near the details of anything.
The issue with that is that in order to get a new regulatory group, you’d need it to be kicked off by the politicians. And if they publicly push for it, they’re going to have an interest in what regulations it turns out. And those regulations have to fit what the voters who pushed them to do it want to see. Which means that if the regulations don’t limit the things they wanted limited, the politicians are going to gripe that it doesn’t and push that group to change the regulations, which means that if the origin comes from the political side the regulatory group is going to have to satisfy the politicians, which gets us back to them deciding, in some sense, what makes sense.
Now, most countries have some sort of group whose sole purpose is consumer protection, and so if it came from them directly it might work, but then again figuring out the right approach to deal with these issues is more of an issue. They’d work better to oppose the “you buy a license to use the protect” model than specific regulations to deal with specific app requests.
But another problem with a full-on regulator group is that once one is formed they will make a LOT of regulations because they have to justify their existence. And then the question is if that many regulations are needed or make sense for this field or area. While sometimes regulations are needed, too many nitpicky regulations isn’t very good.
Ultimately, a ruling from an existing consumer protection board that this practice is too far out of line would be good, but it’s hard to see how they could do that without making things political and inviting the influence of politicians who don’t understand the issues or without introducing rulings and protections that might have unintended consequences. So it’s much more difficult than it might seem at first glance, given how new this stuff is and how few people with the authority to make these decisions — and, heck, even the people who are asking for it — know enough about all the consequences to make good regulations about it.
I think regulators will find they’re too late to this party without an extremely heavy handed approach.
Publishers have changed their terms of what you’re buying from a “game” to a “license to play a game” for some time. It’s legal to offer a product for rent and not sale. And the market has moved in this direction for a lot of software, not just games.
Also, the ability to modify the product to make what they believe are improvements is pretty well established at this point. Sometimes this is good, like patching out a bug that crashes the game. Sometimes this is less good, like when they patch a game for “balance” that nerfs your favorite play style. It’s hard to ban one without banning the other.
You could in theory allow customers to choose to accept/reject patches. That’s tricky because some patches will depend on others. Also, you quickly get to a combinatorically large number of possible patch combinations to support. Also, you really do want the true “bug” patches to be guaranteed to deliver.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think publishers’ motives are always pure here. They’ve definitely patched in launchers mainly because they want you to enter through the gift shop. It’s just hard from a practical perspective to regulate “intent,” when the tools are not different. Especially when there’s an argument to be made like “having a consistent back end allows us to have lower costs and greater security across titles”.
See also:
https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=55274
The problem with accepting/rejecting patches is essentially any game you can/always are playing online with others. Allowing one person to reject a “balance” patch would end up meaning they couldn’t play with anyone that hadn’t also rejected that patch. And those people would very likely complain about that “restriction”, because they don’t understand the logistical problems involved in trying to allow it, not to mention it being unfair to any players with them who did accept that patch.
Games that have patched themselves after I purchased them include the sokoban puzzle game Baba Is You, and the RPGMaker game Jimmy and the Pulsating Mass. JatPM has no multiplayer or online components, and if BIY does it’s very minimal.
One of the problems is that you don’t buy the product. You don’t own it, you just rented it until the provider decides to cut the service. It’s in the EULA. It’s the same thing Peter talked about when Blizzard decided to obliterate the original Overwatch.
It’s a beautiful coincidence, but today also happens to be World Backup Day!
But it just takes an eternity to create a backup of the world.
I am not against restoring one from a few years back. :D
Yeesh. I had enough issues with Origin just trying to hook up to the Dragon Age Vault for Inquisition, and everything I was doing was standard. Working with a lot of non-standard things clearly makes things worse.
and thus TwentySidedTale returned to complaining about invasive DRM and corporate overlords. The more things change, the more things stay the same.
At least some traditions will never die, it seems
Stupid DRM and internet-bound games. At least on GOG my only internet-tethering is that they provide the service of Cloud-saves on some games.
Plus, you don’t actually have to even use that; using the offline installers works perfectly fine, which is what I always do. Having the entirely DRM-free offline installers is why I generally look there first or second for a PC game (itch.io, then GOG, then I might resort to Steam; for any big-developer game I know it won’t be on itch.io so I skip that).
I really must download the offline installers. The cloud saves on Galaxy are nice when switching between my handheld PC and my desktop. When they upload properly that is…
There are a lot of things I don’t completely love about Macs, especially for gaming. But man, the ability to use out of the box Apple provided tools to make a completely bootable clone of my hard drive (to a USB drive) to let me monkey around with stuff like this feels like witchcraft.
Without trying to sound like this is the only reason I come here, because it’s not: I had genuine deja vu reading this post, and if not for it being about The Sims might have assumed it was an archived Shamus article.
I suppose I should update to the new app NOW, since I am not currently playing any of my Origin games.
Was this always green?
No! I was working on a possible April Fool’s setup for the site when a series of mishaps went down.
1. I hit ‘publish’ instead of ‘save draft’.
2. High winds took our power out!
April fools?
Evidently, nature played us for fools this year.
That’s actually pretty funny (assuming that was the extent of the zephyr-induced damage).
I am actually relieved that my memory is not that bad yet!
Huh. You know, I haven’t used Origin for so long that I never even got the “upgrade” sign. I completely forgot this thing existed. I do most of my gaming in consoles these days but when I use the PC it’s either Steam or GOG. Origin is forgotten and UPlay… I don’t think I even have it installed.
It irks me to no end when companies insist in forcing you to use their own service but they refuse not to make it absolute trash. Steam is #1 for a reason.
“They’re just breaking into my house and taking it by force.”
And still charging for it.
Which is pretty much what we can expect to be the norm from now on in the “games/apps/programs as service” model.
“For this funky thing I get to tell people I do for a ‘job’ now.”
Know the feeling. Got a bachelors degree in Portuguese then spent 10 years (failing at) looking for jobs, alternating between extreme depression, semi-open internment, and curling into the fetal position in a corner, taking whatever free time I had from all this busy schedule getting professionalizing courses certificates that helped me precisely zilch in the endeavor.
At least I could say “well, I write a Let’s Play on the internet.”
Except I really have not worked on it for the past 4 years because we had a demented monster as president that makes Trump look sane and I could barely cope existing day after day.
Good Gods, my wife saved my life because I have no idea how I’d survive these 4 years. Without her, I’d be devastated I survived a car accident last year.
And your father got me through a lot before meeting her.
I haven’t tested either yet myself, but https://www.reddit.com/r/origin/comments/116ymqi/solution_to_keep_using_origin/ and https://twitter.com/p0358/status/1626811868412010497 both appear to offer a potential workaround to continue using origin.
Things have gotten really bad when, “Oh no, I get to uninstall Origin,” is seen as a bad thing.