Crashes. Empty server lists. Disconnections. We’re about to enter the fourth week of serious issues with Battlefield 1‘s local servers, bad enough to make multiplayer unplayable, with very little in the way of fixes, compensation or communication from EA. Even our own enquiries were met with silence. Can we safely concluded EA doesn’t give a crap about its Australian customers?
April 4. That’s when the problems were first reported. It became clear, rather quickly, they weren’t isolated to a few users. There’s a thread on the official forums with 40 pages of reports. There’s another thread on EA’s Answers HQ with 24 pages of reports.
The Australian servers are basically unusable. People can’t play. This would be a big deal if the outage had lasted a few days.
It’s been almost a month.
Look, if it was an indie company struggling with unexpected success, we might be able to cut it some slack, but the game was released a year and a half ago. This is EA we’re talking about. It has the resources to throw around — surely it shouldn’t take three (almost four) weeks to track down the issue, plug it up and move on?
OK, let’s say it’s a difficult, multi-faceted problem with no simple fix. Why hasn’t this been communicated better? Why haven’t there been daily updates on progress with detailed information?
It’s the least EA can do, given the length and severity.
And while EA has provided a few updates via the Battlefield 1 Announcements forum, it is in no way enough. Other than parroting the sentiment of “we are on it full-time”, current results would suggest otherwise.
What about compensation? Players did receive 10 Battlepacks, but this was for all players globally and had “nothing to do with this issue”, according to EA representative Jeff Braddock. Some free games via Origin wouldn’t hurt.
Sadly, none of this has happened. Instead, EA has handled the situation with such stunning incompetence, one has to wonder if anyone’s taking the problem seriously. It can’t even muster a proper, public apology or official statement to media.
I’d say anyone affected is well within their rights to request a refund. Alternatively, you can make a complaint to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, which has recently shown it has teeth when it comes to dealing with big, overseas companies in the business of making and selling games.
We’ll be keeping a close eye on this. One has to imagine it’ll be resolved eventually, but anyone care to guess how long it’ll take?
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