PC Gaming...What a farce

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I am so sick of the complications with trying to use games on PC, two new releases both a nightmare.

BC2 - Multiplayer....Fantastic...when it works, which is rare for me, CTD's, massive patches on release day

SC2 - Apart form being crap, waiting forever for steam to update, play for two days and then another massive patch.

Haven't these guys heard of QA?
 
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Yeah i agree. I'd much rather be stuck with a flawed product permanently. Then i could also dump my standard issue broadband connection and go back to 56k.

This.

If you're not used to this by now, then it may be time to invest in a console if you don't have one already.
 
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QA is all well and good for bugs but for balance/server load that can only be done with tens of thousands of players all looking for exploits and overpowered set ups.


As for CTD's there are at least 3 os's hundreds of motherborads gfx cards, cpus, and variying drivers made by 3rd parties constantly changining.

Is it really surprising that it won't work 100% on all of them?

THey can;t really check every configuration of PC and at least the last 5 versions of drivers for every mouse, gfx card, sound card, keyboard everything.

Then there people who overclock parts of thier pc and are shocked and appalled that it's sometimes unstable in certain aplications.
 
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consoles have weekly firmware patches, and monthly game patches now too ^_^

I mean, consoles rarely crash.

If they do, it's a simple restart and you can continue gaming.

If your pc craashes, you're left wondering what's wrong with your system, considering driver updates etc.
 
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I mean, consoles rarely crash.

If they do, it's a simple restart and you can continue gaming.

If your pc craashes, you're left wondering what's wrong with your system, considering driver updates etc.

My pc rarely crashes.

Not had anything other than a CTD in months, not had a bsod since i installed windows 7.

So usually console crash > restart


Pc crash > ctrl+alt+del > end process tree and reload application.


If your pc is put together well and set up properly it will very rarely do anything other than CTD.
 
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I have been playing PC games since the days of MS DOS and the 640k limit, also owned every console built I think.

My point to the rabid fan boys is that the quality of released code has gotten much worse of late, the coders rely upon the fact that you will be beta testing their release for them and they will fix it later.

This rarely happened when PC gaming started.

A beta is pre-production release, what other industry releases products for the consumers to find the flaws in, and then 'maybe' fixes them, obviously Toyota is the exception in that :)
 
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My pc rarely crashes.

Not had anything other than a CTD in months, not had a bsod since i installed windows 7.

So usually console crash > restart


Pc crash > ctrl+alt+del > end process tree and reload application.


If your pc is put together well and set up properly it will very rarely do anything other than CTD.

The only game CTD'ing on me is BC2 right now
 
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My point to the rabid fan boys is that the quality of released code has gotten much worse of late

It really hasn't.

everything is just as buggy but there is more hardware variation, and patches are released quicker (and actually are released rather than not bothering) due to high-speed internet so you notice the patching more.
 
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The is less variation nowdays than you'd think, there only only 2 major graphic card vendors, sound is mostly onboard and only 2 cpu makers.

There were far more of everything a while back
 
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I own all three consoles but do 90% of gaming on my PC. Part of the attraction to PC gaming for me (apart from a mouse and keyboard) is being able to upgrade hardware and tinker with settings to get a better experience. I agree its slightly annoying sometimes when a game you've paid good money for doesn't work straight away but I've very rarely had a situation where, after a quick google search, I haven't been able to tweak a couple of things and get it running. Like Tefal said, there are so many different components out there its no surprise not everything works 100% at the first try.

As far as multiplayer goes consoles have the same problems. At launch Battlefield 1943, Gears of War 2 and Socom 2 (to name the first 3 that popped into my head) didn't work online even though everyone is connecting through a closed network and has exactly the same hardware. Consoles also get game specific patches, difference is they don't get as many because on a console a patch has to go through Microsoft/Sony and the devs/publishers have to pay to send them out.
 
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I can guarentee if I had bought BC2 on PS3 I would be playing right now, not wasting hours on punkbuster support site for what seems an unfixable problem (PB INIT FAILURE), and yes I have done all they suggested
 
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I can guarentee if I had bought BC2 on PS3 I would be playing right now, not wasting hours on punkbuster support site for what seems an unfixable problem (PB INIT FAILURE), and yes I have done all they suggested

Fair point. I've been lucky with PB so far (touch wood) but I know its a pain in the a**e for a lot of people for no good reason.
 
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Consoles are not much better, every major FPS ive played recently has had some form of launch issues rendering it unplayable (except for Red faction: Guerilla)
 
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Add Empire:Total War to the list...quite a few people have been having CTDs on it(luckily not including myself but I still get occassional freezes)

I just gave that as an example for what is really annoting me right now, sure Empire and many more suck, bloody robbery if you ask me releasing broken products
 
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I have been playing PC games since the days of MS DOS and the 640k limit, also owned every console built I think.

My point to the rabid fan boys is that the quality of released code has gotten much worse of late, the coders rely upon the fact that you will be beta testing their release for them and they will fix it later.

This rarely happened when PC gaming started.

A beta is pre-production release, what other industry releases products for the consumers to find the flaws in, and then 'maybe' fixes them, obviously Toyota is the exception in that :)

Been playing games since the Vic 20 days so I know where you're coming from. The last few years have been atrocious when it comes to QA. The game companies will tell you its because PCs are more complicated now, with many diff configs to worry about etc and big money is needed to do a proper QA. But funny how huge companies like Blizz can still screw up with all the resources they have. Plus some companies quite deliberately release games way too early, just to fit it in with their profit schedule. It just smacks of laziness and outright incompetence with wanting to chase the money, expecting consumers to blindly follow anyway.

And there lies part of the problem, people don't vote with their wallets, they just accept it. I've lost count of the times I've read on forums where people shout you down if you complain about buggy games saying its 'a normal part of life' and you should accept it.

Hell, its got so bad that even console games are staring to suffer as well, nearly every console title I bought the last year or so when I inserted the disc it had to update the game before I could play and some have been pretty buggy in their own right. When that starts happening on a closed platform too, well....
 
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Is it not also related to the complexity of the games we're playing nowadays?

Given how much more there is going on in bad company 2 than something like worms, I think devs can be forgiven a few issues. If they tested every little aspect of a game it would never make it to the shops.
 
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