ValuGamer

Good grief did WordPress nag me about updating.

For the past four years I have been working in the social/mobile games industry. There have been many times where I’ve planned to update this blog but I never did. At work today I brought up my experience playing the latest Battlefield game and a coworker asked me if I had a blog. I suppose this is that blog. In any case, I’ve had a lot on my mind and this seems a good a place as any to record my thoughts.

Last night I was playing Battlefield 4 on PS4. I decided to check out the multiplayer mode. Capture the flag is a favorite of mine so I went to that and was greeted with an error message stating that “You are missing one or more DLCs played on this server.” If there’s one thing I have learned from working in social games (or just basic UI/UX in general) it is that you never lead the user into a dead end. This is especially true when monetary transactions are on the table. I am missing one or more DLC components? One or more? Shouldn’t EA know which ones I’m missing? That’s a bummer, gosh, I wonder what I should do next? Shouldn’t they tell me the names of the content packs I am missing so that I can, you know, buy them? Shouldn’t there be a big, fat, full screen popup with a huge banner explaining to me precisely what I need to buy, how much it costs, and a giant “BUY” button next to it? It’s entirely possible that it’s somehow a violation of terms of service with Sony, but I doubt it. Good grief. It’s an error message. A freaking error message saying that my $60 game is missing a component that appears to be available in the game.

Apparently CTF isn’t available until the second DLC pack is released. I had to look this information up on the EA support forums. This is information that would be helpful for players of the game in the game. EA could have easily included a link to the Battlefield Premium page. At the very least they could have included a date telling me when/where the unnamed “DLCs” would be available. Was that too difficult? If EA doesn’t care enough about their product to tell me about it then why should I care enough to sink more money into it? Lesson learned.