How’s this for a profound lack of testing? Battlefield 2 comes out and (surprise!) it’s bug ridden and clearly unfinished. Amongst other things, it’s laggy, has a piss-poor server browser which occasionally loses all servers until you quit and restart the game, doesn’t show any names in the post-game stats, and the list goes on. As much as I like the game it’s insulting that EA thinks a game released in this state is worth £30, but all could be forgiven if the more pressing bugs were fixed quickly. When they released the v1.01 patch a few days later I was optimistic.

Not testing a retail game is one thing but not testing a patch is just idiotic. The patch fixed a handful of bugs, but for almost everyone pings went from mostly under 100 to ranging from 100 to 500, and it caused a memory leak on all servers that pretty much necessitated a restart every few hours. Call me naive, but if you’re testing it at all you’re going to notice that when you’re running a server internally. Either way, EA didn’t notice this and much anger ensued throughout the community.

What makes this debacle even more unbelieveable is that they can’t issue a fix right away because DICE have left for a holiday. It’s probably well earned with EA’s slave labour conditions, but you can’t ship a game that clearly has pressing bugs and then vanish. In the meantime they haven’t released a rollback utility or even a v1.02 patch, but want everyone to completely uninstall and reinstall the game.

Now the community is pretty much split down the middle between those who find the bugs in v1.o more bearable and those who prefer to suffer and skip the bother of reinstalling by playing with v1.01. There are around 1,000 BF2 servers showing up in ASE for me, but it’s almost a perfect 500-500 split between versions.

I fucking hate EA…