I had a recent non-enjoyable wastage of time trying to get a Sony branded so called 'Free to Play' MMO game
to even install let alone to get started playing.

Online account registration - worked (at least enuf to get into forums and to run an email account confirmation)
Installer downloads and doesnt work
Some new inept program called a 'Sony Station Manager' (the usual run in background channel to advertizements you dont want...)
installed and didnt work
Forums checked and a path to another version of the Station manager installed , installed again after deleting previous one, and still didnt work.
No messages no text showing any progress or what went wrong out of any of those programs.
Their Forums have many postings about similar problems.
I finally gave up and posted forum message telling them how inept they are and how stupid it is to expect people to play (pay) when they cant
even get the damned thing to run.

Steam and WindozeLive had similar problems but eventually worked (I had bought the games in store for those)


How much work went into these 'free to play' mechanisms where they expect to make more money 'nickel and diming' players endlessly bothering them about
sales and specials and sorry you have to purtchase that BS (while you are IN THE GAME) -- which should have gone to making the gameitself better ????

Do they use interns and third string designers to create these inept systems ???


It used to be so simple to just buy the boxed program in the store and stick in the disk and the installer would run and you then used an interface to register a simple paying account


I can understand that the game companies now get the 40% markup that retail stores got and they can patch their product constantly (unfortunately usually breaking
more than they fix) so they can string players along with even lower quality levels. The 'sell sell sell' interfaces/spladh screens/popups trash are there pushing the wheedly game rubbish even to players who are full paying accounys.


Is thsi the way its going to be from now on with even dimmer bottom-liner managements pushing garbage systems like this???

This seems more like a rant than a game design discussion. Moving to the lounge.

[font=arial, verdana, tahoma, sans-serif][size=2]personally I cant wait until we get our gameplay periodically interrupted to watch 2 minutes worth of ford subaru commercials. And more product placements.

"Mike! MIIIIIKE"
*teammate gets shot running up the omaha beach by MG42s"
"Oh god Mike!"
"Just two seconds too slow"
"If only they invented Nike yet..."[/font]